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

obvious decade. I breathe in the air around her and I taste something that doesn’t make sense: Clarity and freshness. It’s like her decade tastes like oranges. Fresh, organic, just-picked real oranges, off a real tree that’s been lovingly cared for by a real farmer in a real place somewhere in a state with fresh air and mountains at your back.
    Willa, for some reason, bursts on the tongue as if she was some one-of-a-kind, artisan foodie’s dream.
    Like she’s a fucking movie star.
    She holds up the “blue” glob and twists it side to side in what I could only assume is the sunlight pouring in through her huge window. “Well now, how did I miss that?”
    In the light, she probably can tell its true color. Me, I just see a blob. She sets it down and it makes a sucking sound when it hits the card table. She mumbles something about Christmas and holiday cheer but I don’t catch it. I’m too busy staring at the locked metal cabinet full of buzzing systems.
    The door’s open.
    I’m pretty goddamned sure it is open—wide open, right now. And I didn’t even lick it.
    It wouldn’t have a taste, anyway. I’m pretty goddamned sure of that, too. Why, I don’t know. Time changes everything, so everything has a taste. Except the metal door.
    And the card table.
    And Willa’s shiny, sun-filled, movie-star decade.
    “What’s in the cabinet?” I ask. I’m supposed to be helping with arts and crafts, but I don’t think Willa cares about beads right now. She’s watching me. Or will be.
    “Honey, are you okay?” Willa asks me in return, instead of answering my question. Then she mumbles something else I don’t understand.
    I swear the air is buzzing so much it’s got a smell, like electricity. It’s got that “oh shit” scary flavor, the one that sits in that place between the back of the tongue and the underside of where your nose smells things when there’s a big storm moving in. The kind that makes so much lightning the dark sheets of rain shimmer like you’re inside a glow tube.
    That flavor that says you’re inside of something dangerous.
    Willa drapes her old lady dancer hand over mine. I feel her touches, or will. Or maybe this is another repeated pushpin in my life—Willa comforting me. Making me feel special.
    “Would you like something to drink? Water or orange juice?” She’s fiddling with the polymer clay, forming exquisite little round balls so fast I wonder if she’s that talented or if I’m not following because my brain’s screaming that I need to crawl into a bathtub and pull a mattress over my head.
    “Willa, I gotta go.” The electrical taste is so strong now I’m gagging and I know I’m gagging right now, sitting on Willa’s folding chair in front of her card table, in her magically huge and bright room.
    It hadn’t really dawned on me just how big it is. Lots of rooms overlap for me—where I am, where I was, where I might go all make a “room” so I stopped paying attention a long time ago. Can’t tell them apart unless I lick the walls, which I’ve tried. But paint is paint is paint.
    Distance, spread, even steps to a goal, all wash out unless I make an effort to anchor, but mostly I don’t bother. It’s not worth the time.
    I knock the card table when I stand up and it jerks away from me, its legs scratching along the room’s old people warehouse carpeting. Loud, halting ping-bongs resonate up through its hollow legs and into the fiberboard top. It’s like the table’s a speaker or something, and its tightly stapled vinyl cover only makes vibrations moving through it louder.
    I can’t tell if I see this change. The table did change—I heard it. I smell the faint dusty plastic smell of disturbed industrial carpeting and I swish the air around on my tongue desperate to lock onto some sense of time, hoping I’ll taste something.
    But no. The table stays the same—timelessly positioned just so in Willa’s remarkable room.
    “Will you come back?” Willa asks. Not