Banana Slugs*

With a huff, Powder turned from Miss Spink and Miss Forcible's stairs to the basement, and took a few steps toward the front porch, wading through the fog. Her boots squish-squashed over the soaked grass, when she thought she heard a whirr and a click behind her.

She stopped in her tracks and listened again.

There was something shifting in the mist.

But the sound seemed familiar. After thinking for a moment, Powder wasn't scared. She cocked an eyebrow and a tiny smirk spread on her lips.

She knew what it was.

Sticking her nose up in the air, Powder turned on her heel and jauntily walked back the way she came, pretending not to hear anything. She passed the big oak tree that had fallen across the driveway, cut in half.

She put her hands behind her back as she nonchalantly hopped down a ledge in the lawn, landing on her feet in the driveway. The mist swirled around her waist by now, thick as dragon smoke.

The whirring and clicking was directly behind her.

With a twist, Powder sharply turned and grabbed at the welder's mask of the boy crouching on the ground, following her. She pulled it off his head, showing off his platinum blonde hair.

"Great, the village stalker!" she exclaimed, punching him in the arm.

"Ow!" Ekko complained, rubbing his arm in his firefighter jacket. "I wasn't stalking you! We're hunting banana slugs," he said with a smile.

"What do you mean 'we'?" she asked.

As though on cue, the hairless cat crawled out from the inside of Ekko's jacket and perched high on his shoulder.

"Ha!" Powder laughed, "Your cat's not wild. He's a wuss puss!"

The cat flattened his ears and hissed at her, green eyes glaring.

"What? He hates to get his feet wet! Jeez!" Ekko snapped, taking back his helmet from her.

"Wuss puss," Powder sang to herself, smirking as she crossed her arms.

Frowning, Ekko flipped back on his mask and took out a pair of tongs from his coat. He crouched over again, looking around on the ground. As natural as balancing on a boat, the cat nonchalantly sat on Ekko's crouched back. Ekko acted like he couldn't feel its weight on him at all.

Powder waited a bit, then pouted her lip. "So, that doll… Did you make it look like me?" she asked.

Ekko answered while he worked, following a slug trail of ooze on the ground, his voice muffled behind the mask, "Oh no! I found it that way. It's older than Grandma! Old as this house, probably..."

The cat perched on his back until Ekko came close enough to the fallen oak tree to jump onto one of its gnarled branches. Neither Ekko nor Powder paid the cat much attention as it wandered higher and higher in the tree, hopping onto the roof of the porch.

Powder frowned, incredulously. "Seriously? Come on. Blue hair, my swampers, and raincoat? Even my dragonfly pin?" she gestured to herself.

But Ekko didn't seem to be listening. He shot up, holding aloft his pair of tongs. "Dang! Check out Slugzilla!" he cried in triumph as he held up a large – indeed, banana-like – slug as though a spotlight should be on it.

Powder pushed the slug aside with her finger. "You're just like them," she retorted, crossing her arms over her chest.

Ekko side-eyed the slug and looked confused. "Huh?"

"I mean my family!" Powder growled, throwing her arms, "They don't listen to me either!"

Ekko shrugged, pouting his lip. "I don't know. Your brother seems pretty cool."

Powder's eyes went wide. "You met my – Which one?!"

"Mylo," he casually replied, holding out a tape measure from his jacket to measure the slug. "He was out by the garage, all angry and throwing a tennis ball at the wall over and over. We just talked and I showed him where the tennis court was."

Powder stared, then shook her head and scoffed, "Of course you two would get along."

"Uh-huh, right... Hey, would you mind?" Ekko said, still distracted by the slug, holding out a polaroid camera from his jacket to her.

Rolling her eyes at first, Powder simply aimed the camera and waited for Ekko to pose. He pretended to shriek in fright from the creature, putting the slug close to the camera for perspective. He posed for another picture, holding the slug under his nose, pretending it was a booger. Then he held his arm in front of his face like Dracula, then dropped his arm away to show the slug above his upper lip, like a mustache.

"Ew!" Powder couldn't help but laugh as she helped him take more pictures with the slug.

When Ekko was done, he put the banana slug back where he found it, pushing it slightly under the big oak tree, so it wouldn't be stepped on in the fog. Powder handed the camera back to him, and he rubbed his gloved hands against his pockets, looking rather sheepish.

"You know… I've never been inside the Pink Palace," he said slowly.

Powder blinked. "You're kidding."

He tucked his mask under his arm, his brown eyes serious. "Grandma would kill me. Thinks it's dangerous or something."

Powder looked at the house, quizzical. "Dangerous?"

That was the third time today she had heard that word. To her, the house looked the same, but its gray windows almost seemed like eyeballs staring down at them. Or rather, like dark, empty eye sockets from which someone could be watching them, hidden.

She tried to push that chill in her spine away as part of the chilly, damp fog.

Ekko picked up his bike, retracing his steps to remember where it was in the fog, and pushed it along the gravel driveway. The wheel spokes clicked, and the gravel crunched under their feet as he hesitated to continue.

"Well… she had a twin sister," he admitted.

"So?" Powder shrugged, walking side by side with him toward the main road.

"When they were kids, Grandma's sister disappeared," Ekko lowered his voice like it was a secret. "She says she was… stolen…"

"Stolen?" Powder pursed her lips in a frown at the wording.

Not kidnapped. Stolen.

"Well, what do you think?" she asked, curious.

"I-I don't know." He shrugged, clearly nervous and unsure.

Powder arched an eyebrow at him, and he crumpled under the pressure.

"Maybe she just ran away," he stated as though convincing himself.

There was the padding of tiny feet, and the cat daintily leapt down from the roof, onto the porch railing, darting quickly across the wet lawn, and onto Ekko's shoulder again.

"Ekko!" a voice called in the distance, making both Ekko and the cat tense up. It sounded marginally more annoyed than before.

"Look, I-I gotta go," Ekko mumbled, quickly hopping onto his bike, and kicking his kickstand free.

"But – Wait a minute!" Powder called, but he pedaled past her, down the foggy driveway, turning onto the road.

A headlight flicked on in front of his handlebars and he hugged the side of the road in case any cars came. Power watched him disappear without a word into the fog.

And Powder was alone in the ocean of white, with her house as the island.

…

Shaking off her boots and raincoat, Powder entered the side door of the house, walking into the kitchen. She closed the door on the white world outside the house and faced the normal world inside. Vi was standing in front of the oven, stirring a cooking pot.

"Lunch is almost ready," she said, confidently, hearing Powder come in. Then she tasted the soup in the pot with a spoon and grimaced a bit. "Well, almost…"

She turned the temperature down and added a bit of this and that into the pot. As it simmered, she took a break and stood by the sink, drying some dishes.

"You two seemed to be having fun," Vi said with a smirk, "I'm glad."

Powder didn't reply at first, which made Vi look at her sister again.

"Something wrong?" she asked.

Powder frowned at the floor but shook her head. "It's nothing."

Then she left the kitchen as quietly as she came in, leaving Vi a little confused.