"Before you know it __________. Fill in the blank." Eleanor Moss leaned on her walking stick, her thick white hair bundled onto her substantial head. "It was all I could do to get from the front yard here." Dumpling strained to hear but nodded blinking to clear her eyes from sleep still sticking her lashes together. Apples lay on the orchard floor, Today was a day for gathering the fallen apples, that was what she'd been doing before her friend and neighbor surprised her. Dumpling set the fruit down on the old picnic table and walked over to the woman seated outside in front of the Praying Virgin.
"I was thinking about the Molina girl," it was difficult for Eleanor Moss to say more than a few words at a time. There was no rush. Dumpling stood and waited her own thoughts of Shine softening her. "There's another chair around the side there," Eleanor pointed behind her.
Seated now, Dumpling considered. "I think of Shine every day." These two women were friends, close neighbors but there were differences in what made their everyday. A cautious or respectful hedge kept them from deepening the intimacy. Still, both of them were well into their eighties and they were on the subject of a Being that had disappeared from their community.
"How could something like that really happen?" Eleanor Moss was a registered nurse and scientist with degrees that bridged caregiving from many angles. It was her earliest of beliefs as a Catholic that just couldn't quite swallow some of Dumpling's explanations. Esoteric? Probably the word for it. As the conversation waited as all good conversation will, Dumpling knew the nurse referred to the unsuccessful search for their young friend off the bow of a Washington State Ferry in the waters of Puget Sound.
"Lots of strange things happen, and the reasons aren't clear. Those ferry workers never got the blame. They did everything they do on any other work day." Dumpling was hedging. "Explanations are sometimes not what matters." There was a potential portal. Dumpling blinked. Her Familiar appeared in the corner of her eye, the small black cat wavy in the light of the orchard in late morning. Dumpling wondered whether Eleanor Moss could see Spirit Cat, she wondered how Familiars were allowed to make themselves known to others.
"But, I bet they have nightmares all the same. Thousands of ferry crossings happen in a month, a hundred thousand in a decade. There had never been a lost passenger, ever." The scientist and care-giver seated beside her was pulling on the stops she suspected held Dumpling in check. Eleanor Moss didn't probe, waiting instead for more oxygen to return to her heart.
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