The dream came on as if on cue when Sarah fell asleep. Music, dancers. Suggestive leers, wiggling eyebrows, wink wink, nudge nudge, tra la la. She could not be bothered, she just couldn't. She went straight to one of the drapes that sheltered various less than ballroom activities in the pillow pit from view, and tore it down. Then she wrapped it around herself like a makeshift blanket, sat on the chair, and went to sleep in her sleep.
"I'm not racist," Will was telling David the intern as Sarah walked into the office in the morning. "I don't mind a black president. All I'm saying is, he shouldn't be elected because he's black. He should be elected because of what he stands for. Oh, Sarah, I wanted to talk to you, could we – "
"Not if you're going to talk politics at me we can't," she replied.
He chuckled. "We're just discussing the candidates."
"My money's on McCain," David said firmly.
"And mine aren't," Will said. "Anyhow, I need to tell you that the elf prints got approved. They're requesting a few minor changes, nothing that will keep you up at night. Any chance you can have that wrapped up this week?"
"Sure thing."
A phone rang. David went to answer it.
"How are you today?" Will asked.
Sarah returned his gaze evenly. "I'm okay. All healthy. I ate all the chicken soup and now I'm fit for fight. All rearing to go, send me in, coach. I feel great. I've slept like a baby. Best sleep I've had in weeks."
He smiled. "Glad to hear it. Did you change your hair?"
"No. Why do you ask?"
Her editor looked her up and down. "I don't know," he said finally. "There's something changed about you. My ex-wife always got angry I didn't notice when she went to the hair dresser. I thought I might be doing it again."
Sarah chuckled and shook her head. "Nope. My hair's the same mess it's always been. Will, about that."
"About my ex-wife?"
"No. About, you know."
He nodded, and offered a sheepish smile. "Yeah, I know. I'm not as over her as I thought I was. Maybe all those bad things on our date happened for a reason. A sign from above, if you will."
Relief washed over her. "Well, I wouldn't aim that high, but yeah. I guess it just wasn't meant to be."
"No hard feelings, right?"
"No hard feelings," she agreed. "Hey, we can still go out for a beer sometime. Amanda can join, then it's definitely not a date."
"That'd be great. Really great." He took a deep breath. "So, want to come and look at the changes? It's mostly about the water wheel, the client thinks the elves riding it are overkill. Wants you to remove the one with the big nose." He practically radiated relief.
She probably did too.
When lunch break rolled around Sarah went to the usual place with Amanda. They chatted inanely on the way there but once they were seated Amanda got straight to the point. "You and Will. Spill."
Sarah laughed. "He broke up with me, you know. If you can even say breakup after one date."
"Well, there's something I didn't see coming." Amanda nodded. "All right. Okay. Chocolate and chick flicks time?"
She shook her head. "I'm fine. I'm actually relieved. I thought about it a lot. I love having Will for a boss but I don't love the idea of waking up next to him. I was thinking of how to wiggle out of any second dates without hurting his feelings."
"Scratch the chick flicks, then. The chocolate stays. It's always chocolate time."
"How's your pet squirrel?"
Amanda blinked. "I'm worried about your heartbreak and you want to know about my squirrel." She giggled. "He's fine. I'm calling him Nutso. I know, I know. Stupid name but hey, I'm not the artist here."
Sarah giggled too. "Nutso."
"He eats nuts. That's what squirrels do. He also leaves dirty paw prints on my window. You wouldn't believe how dirty squirrel paws can get. It's driving me insane." Amanda rolled her eyes with mock exasperation. "How's Gareth?"
"Well, that was out of left field."
"You started it. Besides, he's the reason you're not sad about Will, so it's pretty midfield if you ask me."
Sarah stretched her legs. "Well, we did have a talk. I laid down some ground rules. He wasn't happy. He pouted a lot."
Amanda tilted her head and looked like she was trying to imagine that. "Cute pout or man-baby pout?"
"Icy stare and stony silence."
"Okay. Does this guy have any redeeming qualities at all, besides being hot as hell?"
She laughed. "Actually, yes. There's one thing I really do like about him. He looks out for my kid brother. Toby's crushing hard on a girl and Jareth is trying to help him sort things out. I appreciate that. And that's Jareth with a jay, not with a jee. We actually call him Jay, not Gary."
"Isn't Toby a little old for the bees and the birds talk? How old is he? Twenty?"
"She's hardly his first girlfriend but she's the first he ever came over to my place to talk about."
Amanda whistled. "Must be serious. You sure Ga-Jay is the right role model for your brother, though?"
Sarah shook her head. "Hell no. Toby knows he can be a prick at times, though. I just appreciate that he's trying. Give a man credit where credit is due, and all that."
"Whatever you say," Amanda ceded and turned her attention to the salad on her plate, picking the olives out.
She thinks I'm in love with the Goblin King, Sarah realized. Well, with Jay Not Gareth. Jay who strutted around and pretended he was named after some Irish murder-fairy. Jay who ripped his wardrobe from the eighties' glam rock scene and hair metal bands. Stalker Jay. Jay the prick. He had made a bad impression on Amanda, all right. Well, that could be fixed -
Oh boy.
She tried to tune back in to reality. Amanda had isolated all the olives and put them in detention at the far edge of her plate. She was talking and Sarah hoped that her failure to pay attention would go unnoticed. Life ought to come with convenient cut scenes and camera pans, she thought. Seasonal cliffhangers. Great for giving you three months of time in which to think.
"So the little prick mailed me back this morning and told me that the only reason I am rejecting his manuscript is that I'm a feminist, what gives?" Amanda rolled her eyes dramatically. "Excuse me? Don't you hate it when some entitled idiot thinks the only reason a woman can disagree with him is because she's a lesbian or a feminist, or both?"
"This is the one who was essentially rewriting Lord of the Rings in young adult?"
"Bingo. He's got a man crush on Orlando Bloom the size of Massachusetts."
"Maybe he just needs to come out of the closet," Sarah suggested with a smile.
"Ha. Maybe. It still pisses me the hell off to be called feminist as an insult, though."
Sarah was more than happy to engage her brain with issues that did not involve otherworldly nobility. "Well, people use that word differently. It used to mean women who want equal rights and equal pay – "
"Which we still don't have, by the way."
"- and I guess it's been changed to mean women who want to be more powerful or have more rights than men. At least it has to some people. I mean, to me, it means someone who wants gender equality."
Amanda scoffed. "Comparing me to a crazed matriarchy militant because I don't like a writer's proposal is not fair."
Sarah shrugged. "It's not fair but it's how it is. Sometimes, all you can do about someone is to sit and imagine them receiving cruel and unusual punishment involving sporks and spikes, and then get on with your life."
"Sometimes, writing rejection slips is -fun-," Amanda said with the sincerity of someone who was already mentally composing the letter of all letters to end somebody's writer dreams. "I'm going to play rejection bingo with this guy. Within a week he'll be calling me a feminazi."
"If you don't get called a bitch you're not trying hard enough?"
"Do I sound petty? That's because I'm feeling petty."
They both laughed.
The Labyrinth's vast junk yard was a quiet place. Most of the Underground's residents avoided the area if possible, and hurried through if they had to visit. It was not because of the smell. There were places in the Labyrinth that smelled a lot worse. One of them smelled so bad it had become infamous for smelling bad. It was not that you might bang your foot on something and to find that it was some relic of a long forgotten memory that you just ruined your shoe on. No, it was the junk ladies that made even the laid back Fireys take a detour.
They were not malicious. They were not kind, either. They were compulsive hoarders, carrying all their possessions on their backs in bundles that defied gravity. Granted, gravity was one of those laws of physics that the Labyrinth often neglected to pay its subscription to. Talk to one, and you might end up having to admire her collection of memorabilia and bric-a-brac for days. Or she might pick up the nearest object and use it as a club or broom to chase you off her lawn, figuratively speaking. They were unpredictable and chaotic, and they saw jewels where other people saw trash. Even the goblins thought the junk ladies were obsessed with trash.
In some form, they always existed. As long as humans had sported the capacity to grow fond of inanimate objects and then forget about them later, the Underground had sported junk ladies in some form or other. If one was to dig deep enough in their piles, one might find little granite statues of naked, obese women.
The Goblin King was actually rather proud of them. He threw a smile to the one that was looking up at him from under its – her – immense load of thrown-away mementos. "I've brought you a gift."
"What is it? More of your enchanted fruit, pet?" The crooked creature, vaguely reminiscent of an old lady, held out her clawed hands eagerly all the same.
"Something much better," the Goblin King promised, still smiling. He opened his palm. A sixty watts light bulb materialized on it, coming to rest on the black leather of his glove.
Her mouth formed an 'o' shape. "What is it?"
He tilted his head and looked at the object on his hand. "It's a light bulb, nothing more. When used in the right way, it sheds light on things."
The Junk Lady snatched it from his hand. "I want it. What do I have to do in return?"
The King gracefully folded his arms behind his back. His frock coat rustled as he took a step backwards. "It has a magical counterpart Aboveground. Just keep this one with you, and the other one will do its work up there."
She gave him a suspicious look. "All I have to do is keep it?"
"You have to give it the best spot on your hoard," he said solemnly. "It is very valuable."
The junk lady looked up at him as if she thought him slightly slow on the uptake. "It's all valuable, poppet. All of it."
He offered her no answer, unless one counted a soft laugh that dissipated on the wind as the realm's enigmatic ruler faded away from sight. You can't put sound or wind on a mantelpiece, so she didn't.
"Casual Friday is fine," Robert Williams said while helping himself to more potatoes. "But some of those young people would find it easier to land a job if they made a little bit more effort. It's no use turning up looking like you spent all weekend out partying when you're trying to sell people insurance, that's all I'm saying."
"Unless you're trying to look like people should take out insurance against you?" Sarah quipped. The Williams Sunday family dinner was well under way. As usual, her stepmother's cooking was out of this world. Somewhere in poultry Heaven, the chicken was thanking its maker that it got to play the lead role.
"Ha ha," her father replied drily. "I sell safety. Comfort. I sell freedom from worries. If I want people to buy, I need to look safe, dependable, and reliable. Turning up with those things in the nose or eyebrow just isn't going to work. Looking like I spent the night in a dumpster wouldn't make a sale."
"Times change, dear." Sarah's stepmother smiled at her husband. "I'm sure the kids put a lot of effort into looking like they didn't these days. I can't begin to imagine how many bottles of hair spray I used when I was that age."
"Plateau boots. Face paint," Robert said darkly.
"Wild drug addictions," his wife supplied.
"Knitted men's underwear," Robert added with great conviction and an undertone of personal suffering.
"Seasons in the Sun."
"What's wrong with sunshine?" Toby asked.
His mother laughed. "It's a song, dear. A very, very sappy song. It's about a man who is dying and saying goodbye to all his friends."
"Well," Sarah said with a sideways glance at her brother. "The eighties had Rick Astley."
"You did not just rick roll us at the dinner table," Toby groaned.
"Wake me Up Before You Go-Go."
"The Final Countdown," her brother countered.
Their parents exchanged glances. "The kids should still consider what job they are applying for when it comes to appearance, at least if they hope for me to hire them," Robert said at length.
"We do," Toby pointed out. "Mom's not wrong. Some of the guys in my classes obsess about their piercings and stuff. Some of the girls I study with run around in fruit print yoga tights and black lipstick."
"I did not realize you were into fashion," his father said and reached for the milk.
"Of course I am," the youth said with a wink to his sister. "A wise man once told me that one should always choose one's appearance and the stage upon which to appear. Can't leave important things like that to chance."
She managed to not choke on her chicken.