|5|

"God gave us this cursory glance. 'Turn on the light', and we grew on our own. Any idea that this all-powerful entity attends to each and every soul is laughable. What gardener attends to every seed? Make the garden, and let it grow. Done. There's your garden."

Casnar touched his nose with the tip of his fingers, tapping patiently away, waiting for Beca to finish.

"Anything else?"

"That's it."

"No wonder you've stopped writing. You're depressed."

"I thought you knew that, and I'm not depressed. Just brewing."

"Stewing in mega pessimisity."

"That's not a word!"

"It is now," he chuckled, "…what does it matter anyways…I'm creating, you're not."

"Then get back in my head—"

"Technically, a part of me is still there. Think of our connection as an invisible umbilical cord. I feed you ideas, you feed me life, thus here I am."

"Yeah, you're proof I'm a phone call away from the happy home with a soft, cushioned wall made of white leather and pads."

"I can see it in your head and I don't like the imagery." He frowned. "But let us not digress. You need a changeup."

"Yeah? Like as in?"

"What could you do differently."

They were sitting inside the apartment. Beca on the couch, across from her manifested story character, Casnar, who was playing with a globe statue she used as a makeshift weapon against possible burglars—not that she'd had any, but leave her imagination alone—and for staring at when she encountered a writer's block.

It also served as a decent doorstop when she was moving into the place originally.

"Well, I can't take you with me on this 'change of scenery' idea you have—"

"Not change of scenery. Something different. What have you been avoiding?"

"I don't know. Nothing seeing I'm talking to an evidently made-up person who happens to be sitting on my couch and playing with my doorstop."

Casnar flexed his eyeridges at her. "This is a doorstop?" He held up the globe.

"And my handy robber cudgel."

"Cute."

She took it from his hand and set it back down on its table.

"You personify objects as people sometimes in your writing. I think you should establish the fact they are real."

"Doesn't that go without saying? You're supposed to be my alter ego."

He gave her a funny look.

"Right. We need to work on that."

Beca went to work and did not come back for eight hours. Casnar busied himself with cleaning up the squalor she called her "nest".

"This place is disgusting," he mentioned, knowing it would connect with her through their umbilical of mindway, and he smiled when she thought back her rude comprehension of what he was cleaning and remarking on…Casnar put away her dirty laundry in the hamper, folded all of her fresh linens, changed her bed, started ordering her loose papers and compiling what she had for several books that would be nowhere near to finished.

He sat down for a while to read over some of the stuff, transmitting it back and forth with her until she screamed in her head—and his—to knock it off for she was at work and couldn't be doing that. So he closed off the connection and rested his head in his hands, reclining on the couch to fall asleep.

Beca returned home in the evening, looking tired and defeated, but when she opened the door she saw him standing there amid an apartment she scarcely recognized.

"What happened to my place?"

"It's clean…and you needed the change. Thank me. Cleanliness makes a difference."

Beca scratched her head and sat down with a puff of air from her chair, which she had not seen the bottom of in a while since it had been used as a storage pile of sorts for her clothes, books, papers, pencils, various other unmentionables…and food.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome. Let's have dinner. What did you bring home?"

"I'm fasting."

Casnar blinked slowly at her, smothering her with his incredulity.

"That's right…..The writer who refuses to sustain the engine with fuel…How ever did you give birth to me?"

"I guess if it's an engine, it chugged out something."

Casnar smiled, "…I think I saw some bread in the fridge. Let's go to the store, get some meat and produce, make a sandwich."

"I'm not…how do you expect me—we—to go to the store without causing a scene?"

"I can disguise myself, and it's nighttime. Everyone knows the crazies come out at night."

"Great…..That's your idea of a disguise?" He was pulling on a sweater and a hood that Kra had left over one evening and forgotten about ever since. He sniffed it.

"It'll do, but it smells like cigarettes."

"You like cigarettes."

"I like bedis."

"True. I stand corrected." And she did stand, jamming her hands into her pockets. "Okay….corner store it is. I think my credit card bill is kind of ugly right now, but what's the credit card company going to complain about if I spend a little more of what they're loaning me?"

"We'll fix that…in time."

She went to the door and looked back at him. Here was a drell over six feet tall, standing in Kra's old sweater hoodie with the bottom of Casnar's own shirt sticking out over his pants. She could see his face, plain as day.

"Maybe I should just go to the store alone."

"We'll be okay."