Free Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds by Kris Austen Radcliffe Page A

“we’d hire you…” and the daily drives to work and the monthly paying of rent, they hold me to the world. But where I am on the board is anybody’s guess.
    Well, not anybody’s. I suspect Willa could make some sense of this for me, if I asked her. But she’d ask me all sorts of questions. Stuff like “What, exactly, do you see when you look at me?” and “Does your sense of ‘no change’ ever change?” Stuff college kids ask. Which she might be, honestly. I never did ask why she was in here. Why she couldn’t live on her own. Or why her rich family didn’t want her around.
    Usually, families warehoused their old people, so I went with that assumption and figured the old lady hands I saw and not the smooth supple dancer’s hands were more likely the current hands of this woman.
    Yeah, dancer. She used to dance. I see it mixed in because the change from being able to dance to missing it the way she missed her lover or husband or whoever it was who haunted her life— that change huddles in my blind spot, just like all the others.
    Maybe she would dance, sometime in the future. Maybe she did it now, when no one was watching.
    Not that I care all that much.
    I look at the two blobs of polymer clay sitting on wax paper in the center of her card table. They’re both this off-white, semi-dirty pearlescent color underneath an overlay of process tint. Which one changed to red and which to blue when the tint was added, I couldn’t tell.
    So I did what I always do—took a pinch of each, sniffed them, and held them to my lips as if I kissed the most precious thing in the world.
    Willa thought it was funny. And stupid. And boring. My guess is her reactions flowed through the surprise of “Isn’t that quaint!” to “Why the fuck do you keep doing that?” I shrug it off. Nothing else I can do.
    Not that Willa would report me or anything. But still, my unchanging volunteer world was all I really had. Sure, I’ve tasted my car—I do it often enough I can tell you it’s a low-end recent model American hatchback. It tastes like beer and boredom and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But it’s a fucking car . It doesn’t talk to me.
    The polymer tastes more bitter than plastic. It’s fresh enough it doesn’t have a long swath of stale warehouse sitting, which is nice. And there’s a distinct past to product colors. It has something to do with batch processing and dye manufacture. I can’t even begin to understand.
    I’ve learned to recognize it. Lucky for me, it’s surprisingly similar across multiple industries.
    The left blob tastes red. But the right one tastes green .
    “Willa,” I say, “it’s not blue.” Then I smile, because it seems to be the best thing to do.
    She’s a dancer with blotchy hands again. An old woman in a warehouse with equipment in a metal closet old people don’t have. But rich people do.
    My Willa, the enigma.
    “Oh.” She holds the blob of polymer up to the light streaming in through the big window. At least I think it’s streaming in. The time overlay of day-night-cloudy-sunny-snow-thunder makes the vault overhead this flat, colorless thing that isn’t gray but is.
    Sometimes I wish I could lick the clouds. Then, at least, I could anchor something other than the mishmash of haze I see every goddamned time I open my door or roll down my car window or glance out Willa’s giant pane of warehouse glass. The closest I get to knowing the weather is the taste the air leaves in the back of my throat, but that doesn’t change fast enough for me to get anything other than one season or another.
    Everyone has a decade they paid the most attention to, and that’s what I taste. For Rhonda, it’s the stale plastic 80s. For a couple of the nurses, it’s the “I should have known better” ironic 90s. For a few, it’s the tight-assed 00s and their inability to give a fuck. Those nurses leave a faint hint of decay on my tongue and I try to stay away from them.
    But for Willa, it’s not an