what you did on your Earth. As an occupation.”
I blink at him for a beat. “Uhh… I’m a set designer and stage carpenter.” My mouth twists, and my shoulder pops up around my ear before sinking down again. “Was. I was a set designer and stage carpenter.”
Bash’s head tilts, the light catching the dark green in his eyes and firing them up prettily. “You miss it.”
“Well yeah. I love my job.” I huff a sad laugh. “Loved. Sheesh, I know my life’s gone, but… yeah, I’ll always miss it.” I concentrate on speeding the steel brush over the anvil top.
Until the brush is plucked out of my hand.
“Hey,” I protest with no conviction. “You taking over?”
Bash’s tail nudges me until I scoot over enough for him to take my place. “I am. I don’t want your shoulder sore tomorrow. How does your back feel?”
“Fine.” I eye him. “You’re being awfully nice.”
Bash curls his lip at me.
“Awww, you’re being thoughtful and downright sweet.”
Bash growls at me, and his tail shoves me further aside with some force.
I laugh uproariously. When I can calm myself down, I manage to answer him about my back. “Doing loads better,” I tell him with a smile.
“Good. Not that I care about the state of your wellbeing any longer.”
“Big liar.”
He snorts, and his tail thwaps me on my thigh. “Your whole race delights in driving me mad. And at the moment you’re the worst of them all.”
“Thanks?” I watch him scrub with more elbow grease than I could manage in a lifetime. “Sounds like quite the achievement.”
His grunt is noncommittal. His return to the subject is not unexpected. “What does a set designer do?”
“We play with a lot of paper. But really it’s about making a blank wooden stage look like whatever world the story is meant to portray. In smaller productions, I constructed the sets.”
Bash frowns. “Whatever world? I was under the impression that your people were not aware of life outside of your own.”
“You mean like aliens?” I eye him from horn tip to his tri-toes. “We didn’t know jack about you people, but I meant worlds as in fictional ones or other-time places in our own history. Like for Swan Lake—it was a ballet production, where a story is told through instrumental music and complicated dance—”
“Hm.”
“—I had done all these sketches for the set. It was the biggest production that I’d worked on, that any of us had worked on. Huge. It was a lot of pressure. One of my sketches, this woodland-marsh scene, got approved, which was great, but it was like… here I’ve got this eight-by-eleven sheet of paper, and it needs to be transferred on a massive and I mean massive stage backdrop. It’s this cloth that—”
“I know what a backdrop is.”
“Oh yeah?” I shrug. “Your translator seems so shitty that I never know what you’re picking up.”
“Thank you.”
“Welcome. Anyway, you’d think in this day and age that you could just screen-print something, but in a way, it’s neat that all of that detail is still done by hand. I had to do the math to break the approved sketch into squares so that I could then apply those squares to the blank backdrop, which allowed me to paint this marsh scene identically, just blowing up the pieces so that it turned out to be the perfect size. It felt like it took forever but really, it was done in like a week and a half. It was insane. Most fun I’d ever had to that point, I’d realize much later. I didn’t know it then because when you’re in the middle of the chaos you rarely enjoy it. Or realize that you do. But boy I did. It was wild, but it was a blast.” I swallow, my throat very suddenly tight. “I… miss it.”
Bash shifts uncomfortably beside me. “You could,” he clears his throat, a little puff of smoke escaping from his mouth, “you could sketch for your enjoyment. I will procure you sketching materials. If you would like that.”
“Aww, Bash, wow.” I look up at him in wonder, trying to catch his eye, but he’s studiously avoiding my appreciation, like he could break out in hives or some other type of allergic reaction. “I would! And if you have something like balsa wood—it’s a super thin, super light type of wood—I can make theater model boxes for fun. I had a blast making set models.” I sigh wistfully. “A serious blast.”
“We have many types of wood that should