An Eighty Percent Solution - By Thomas Gondolfi Page 0,5
over her right shoulder in direct contrast to the bare skin on the left side of her head. Buttoned only in one place, her white lab coat, bearing numerous random stains, fell loosely over her legs, partially hiding the glyphs tattooed directly into her caramel-colored skin.
From the outside of the room’s only door came the tiniest of scratches. Her breathing increased and her body languidly unwound from itself as she stood, showing even more of the ebon symbols against her evenly tanned skin. Her knees locked, and with legs clamped together she bent in half at the waist, placing her palms flat on the floor. Without moving from this position, her long aristocratic fingers lifted a lid and placed it over the smoldering pot. A quick exhalation doused the tiny flame beneath.
Unrolling back to her full height, her gaunt form rose over 180 centimeters. Only the barest crest in the upper part of her smock gave any indication of sex. The black runes covered every visible centimeter of her skin below her neckline. She walked with a gliding grace toward a small mechanism in the far corner. A spring-wound conveyor lifted a trail of sand, pouring it over a series of wooden and metal plates. Turning off the motion, she silenced the ocean's simple cadence. Opening the door, she repatriated the sounds of Portland's bustling city into her sanctuary.
"Good morning, Plutonia," Sonya said in a soft soprano to the tiniest wisp of gray fur that wound around her ankles. A large orange and white tomcat joined Plutonia in praising their human companion. The mewing chorus of seventeen other felines, plus the shrill barks of one small Pomeranian, joined the admiration. Live pets, banned everywhere on Earth for the last fifty years, were her only roommates.
Sonya started a pot of boiling water over a simple gas grill, yet another of her illegal activities. As she waited, she spread five kilos of homemade pet food into a wooden trough on the floor. Plucking three broad leaves from a mint plant in a window box, she laid them into the top of a tall wooden drying box and took a similar number of dried leaves from a slit in the bottom. Between her palms she ground the brittle leaves to a near powder into a tiny metal bulb. The old-fashioned teapot worked hard to develop its shrill, piercing cry after starting from a low, lonely note.
As Sonya dipped the tea bulb into a petite porcelain cup, Plutonia jumped up to the beaten and scratched white polymer tabletop. The cat stepped over and around bags of nitrogen compounds and detonators, and a stack of incomplete pipe bombs to sit unconcerned amongst the potential destruction and clean her fur.
Sonya pushed aside a plastic bag of gunpowder, set down her teacup, and eased herself into a patio chair whose green color clashed with just about everything nearby. Sonya took a moment to stroke her tiny friend and croon encouragingly at her in a low, raspy voice. She knew a customer waited in her living room. She sensed him arrive during her meditations, but her morning tea took precedence. Her customers often suffered much longer waits than this man would endure, especially as his tabby only had a minor chest cold.
She sipped her hot tea with both hands firmly around her cup. It brought back fond recollections of her mother. Sonya could see her sitting in the kitchen brewing some potion or another—this one for wart remover, that one as an AIDS cure, the other one as a love potion. Her mother, an aging woman even in Sonya’s earliest memories, lived in a one-bedroom slum apartment. The reek of cooked cabbage and raw salmon pervaded all of Sonya’s recollections. They were the smells of home, however revolting to most. She could remember helping her mother simmer sauerkraut for use as a poultice against baldness. The day before the Metros murdered her, she said to her daughter, "Girl, you are equal parts empathy, knowledge, and magic. You’ll be a formidable witch one day."
* * *
The dreary little man swayed back and forth from one foot to another in front of the big obsidian desk. He held his hands together so tightly that his skin broke into a pattern of blanched white and angry red.
“So we discovered the books didn’t balance if we did them on independent machines. They did balance when we did it on the network,” he said, trying hard not to back away.