the building (through the first exit), the office on my left belonged to a Werewolf with her own family-law business. She worked weekday mornings, and the only guests she ever had were groups of squabbling offspring fighting over the meager finances of their passed-on parents.
The office on the right had been empty since Janice died. She was an elderly Satyr who’d trained warriors back in the Hallowed War, when her species attempted to retake their land from the Centaurs. Her post-Coda business was a kind of physiotherapy, helping ex-magic creatures adjust to their new bodies.
Most of her work was house calls. When she passed away last summer, I was away on a job and she wasn’t found for weeks. When the wind blows from the south, I can still smell her through the walls. Reggie tried to clean it up, hoping he could rent the room out again. We ripped up the carpet, washed the walls, fumigated the whole floor and burned a forest of sage but that stubborn old gal wasn’t going anywhere.
I lugged myself from the creaking bed to the telephone and made another appointment with the Principal. He was eager to receive me when the school closed that day. In the meantime, I’d see if I could find him something more than a handful of sand.
The sole of my left boot was hanging open like a panting dog. It was no surprise. I’d scraped myself over too many miles of this city. There was nothing to do but tape it up and make a mental note to spend some of my new money on a cobbler before I pissed it all away.
Fully dressed, I splashed some water on my face and made my way downstairs.
Oh no. It’s Tuesday.
The silver-haired fellow had spent all week clearing out the laundromat at the base of my building. He would have been close to seven feet tall without the painful-looking hunch in his back. He’d had little help from his easily distracted grandson who groaned every time he was given an instruction. The aspiring cafe opened on to the street right by the entrance to the building, so the old man managed to catch my eye every single day.
“Opening Tuesday!” he would call.
“I’ll be there,” I’d reply, skirting inside with fabricated haste to wait for clients that never came.
Despite my usual aversion to social interaction, the old fellow had spiked my curiosity. Most people were still trying to patch their former lives together – Goblins out in Aaron Valley were attempting to run old inventions with electricity instead of magic, the Gnomish crime organizations had brought their underground activities to the surface, and I’d heard that a whole tribe of Giants had teamed up with Mortales, hoping that the Human engineers would find a way to reinforce their bodies with machinery. All over Archetellos, folks were doing their best to go back to their old ways. This was the first guy I’d seen who had the balls to start something new.
There he was, standing outside his empty restaurant with a five-year-old’s smile on a thousand-year-old face.
“Just the man I was looking for,” I said.
He directed me inside with a practiced gesture, and I slid on to a creaking seat to peruse the handwritten menu.
“Breakfast special. Soft boiled eggs.”
The silver-haired man checked his watch.
“Sir, it is one in the afternoon.”
I checked my watch as well.
“You’re quite right. I’ll also have a whiskey. Neat and double.”
The elderly face kept the broad smile as I handed him back the menu. With a graceful nod, he made his way back to the kitchen.
The floor of the restaurant was bare cement, mostly. Three tiles had been laid in the corner but it was impossible to tell whether they were a new addition waiting to be completed or a remnant of its past life. A dozen small tables had each been assigned two chairs, a white tablecloth and a fresh, unlit candle. Years of chemical burns and flooding had painted the red bricks in a distinctive pattern as if an orgy of sick rainbows were climbing up the wall. Still, he’d set the tables nicely, and it looked clean.
The old fellow got me thinking about Edmund Rye, who had turned his hand to teaching after three hundred years of life. While others were wallowing in what was lost or crawling back towards their past, he was hoping to pass things on.
How was Rye so happy to accept what had happened? Maybe it was just his nature. If