* * *
Ingrid Williams proved impossible to avoid. Queenie had hoped she was like most social workers, overworked and uninterested. But the woman called back, twice, insistent while remaining calm and full of fake understanding. Monday afternoon, Queenie was home, so she couldn’t avoid her anymore. She arranged for a home visit on Tuesday.
She sat in the shower a long time, letting the hot water run over her. She knew she should be out reading to the kids or interacting with them, but she was so tired and the heat felt like heaven. She curled thin arms around her legs and let her mind drift to the Veldt.
The shower filled with the scent of oranges. Oranges were Tabby’s favorite fruit, while Angel always loved pears. The two had decided that a special fruit called the mego grew in the Veldt on vines along the ground like melons. The mego had the flesh of pears, only bright purple (everything was purple if Tabby had her way about it) and the outside was the skin of an orange. They grew on dark green vines and ripened in the sunlight.
Queenie forced herself back. She didn’t know what was happening. It seemed easier and easier to slip away into that other, happier world. The world that was now invading even her waking hours. She idly wondered if she could conjure a king. She sighed and turned off the water.
The kids had the TV on to some news program but were playing on the floor with Wudget, making him a little maze of empty paper towel rolls. The whole apartment smelled like oranges.
Queenie cried out in surprise as she saw the couch. It was overgrown with dark vines. Head sized mego fruit, the skins orange and purple striped, rested on the faded yellow cushions.
“Where did that come from?” Queenie asked.
Both kids looked up at her and shrugged in a painfully similar gesture.
“Dunno. It just started growing,” Angel said.
“Will you peel one for us, mommy?” Tabby beamed up at her. “I bet Wudget wants some too.”
Queenie hesitated. She didn’t know what was going on, but her children accepted it in stride. I want something different for them. No one is getting hurt. Why not?
They had a tiny feast of fresh fruit. Even Wudget, who curled up and fell asleep in Tabby’s lap afterward, much to the four year old’s delight.
On the news there was a couple minutes of coverage about a shooting that had happened last night only a few blocks from where they lived. Then the news cut away to breaking coverage of a fireman getting a tiny Siamese kitten out of a tree somewhere uptown.
“You know, ma’am,” said the handsome, young, white, fireman to the pretty, young, and white news reporter after she told him he was a huge hero, “most kittens get themselves out of trees.”
Queenie chuckled. True that. Most kittens had no choice. You could stay and cry about things, or just climb down and get on with life. She got up to clean the apartment for the Child and Family Services visit.