Running With Scissors Pt. 7

Original photo by Steve

RWS is a serial fantasy story that posts every Monday following Danielle, a regular girl stuck in an irregular world where unicorns serve as judge and jury, gnomes have infested the south district, and a minor god reports the weather on the nightly news. 

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Part 7

I skirted the corner and despite my curiosity, focused on my interview. A job was more important than a green-slime invasion. I needed to pay rent.

The address was a squat, homey cottage sandwiched between two high-rise glass buildings. Not exactly what I expected. I rang the doorbell. A witch answered.

She was shorter than me by a good foot, had barbed wire tattooed where her eyebrows should have been, and had an honest-to-goodness pointy purple hat. "Whattup?" She asked.

"Uh. I'm here for an interview with Sam? My name i-"

"She's out there dealing with the gnomes." The witch pointed at the chaos of the intersection. "We think they've been breeding in the storm drains again. You can't miss her, looks like a tomcat."

"I... I'm sorry a tomcat?"

"Yeah, 'bout this big." The witch made a ball with her hands in the general size of a domestic cat. "Silver. Black stripes. Go on, you'll find her." The witch shut the door. I turned back to the intersection, because what else was I going to do? At least now I'd figure out what was going on. Gnomes, she'd said. I'd never seen a gnome.

People were getting out of their cars to look. I pushed between them and stood on tip-toes over someone's shoulder. What I saw didn't make much sense. A swarm of something was flowing up out of the storm drain and was running in circles. Little pieces- individuals, I realized- were breaking off from the whole and spinning until they fell over. There was a cacophany of high-pitched giggling.

I pushed my way to the front of the pack and found, as I'd been told, a silver striped cat running around catching gnomes. She was covered in green slime. I saw her pounce on a gnome and it popped into greenness. She worried the little red cap for a second, then pounced on the next one. There were thousands of them and they were running everywhere. Like bugs. Small little green bodies with red hats and high voices. They didn't seem to have any direction.

The cat pounced on a gnome right at my feet and I said, "Sam?"

The cat was a person. In a single blink she morphed from one to the other so fast I stumbled backward in surprise. She caught my arm. "Easy there, sorry. You're looking for me?"

"Oh, yuck." I'd stepped on a gnome. I really hoped this gunk came off. I tried to scrape it off my black flats. "Yeah, I'm Danielle, we have an interview at seven thirty?"

"That's right!" Sam smiled and she was beautiful. Her silver hair fell over her shoulder. "You're human, right?"

"Yes."

"No super powers, no glowing in the dark, can't morph, nothing?"

"None of the above."

"Perfect. You're hired. We need someone on the team that can magnify and direct our power but that means you can't have any of your own interfering."

The gnomes at our feet stuck their little green hands in the air and yelled all together, "Interfering!" in their tiny voices.

Sam kicked a knot of them away. "Let's deal with this first."

Part 8 or All chapters

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