Traveling Salesman: Astronomgonist

Chapter 11

 Jezromiah sat at Dorothey's bedside with his back turned to her. He had changed his armor and donned his denim shirt over a t-shirt with wide-legged trousers and low-cut boots with Cuban heels and zipped sides.

He stared out of the window. He remembered his best friend, and their falling out. He imagined his face in the reflection of his in the window. Jezromiah spent only eight months in the Vietnam War. "You're an idiot, Jez, letting a chick save you. Your fellow men need you here. You're going to abandon us for a chick? Any other day, I'd probably say right on, man. But not today, not when we don't know if we're ever going to make it out of this alive." Very shortly after, he was dying after he said those words to Jezromiah.

Jezromiah remembered the sound of enemy fire and the firing back of his allies. He flinched at the sound ringing in his skull and ears, reliving it as if it were happening in that moment. His heart beat so fast he felt like it was ripping through his chest to get out. To be free of the madness inside him.

Jezromiah had mistaken Dorothey for a Valkyrie. He had seen many of them on the battlefield. So despite his delirium and closeness to death, it was understandable. It was her wings that held him tight. Her body that gave him comfort when he believed there was no longer any. Her voice chased the insanity away, if only for those moments between rage and serenity.

Dorothey pulled the oxygen mask from her face. She put her hand on Jezromiah's shoulder. She weakly sat up supporting herself by her hand on his shoulder. He still stared out of the window still stuck in the portal in his mind, in the place never absent from even his most quiet or busiest of thoughts. She laid her forehead on his neck. Her wings had folded behind her. She brushed her lips there on the skin making it blush there. "Kiss me. Kiss me like we're the only thing that's happening." She whispered. He turned and looked at her. His lips met hers with one soft kiss after another.

"How are you feeling, sugar?" Jezromiah asked, helping her to lie back down.

"I feel weak. My joints still hurt a lot. My stomach's a little swollen and tender." She pressed her hands to her abdomen. She grimaced. "But I don't want western medicine too many side effects wipe out my powers. The nurses and doctors refuse to let me pick my own kind of medicine."

"What kind do you want?" Jezromiah asked.

"It's who. Get me Eltchie Waberson. She was once a high-priestess in the medicine world," Dorothey said looking at both Jezromiah and Sailil studying their faces for confirmation of resolution.

"Dorothey, she's a High-General. I don't have that kind of power," Jezromiah said with a brooding look on his face.

"But I know who does. Apatt," Sailil interjected Jezromiah's mutual train of thought when she entered Dorothey's hospital room and went to her opposite bedside. She wore a Mary Quant miniskirt with a red, blue and green vertical stripe on the left side and white Go-Go boots. She wore bold-colored drop earrings. She drank her bottle of water with salt in it. Her fishtail retracted as she drank it all. She crushed the plastic bottle in her hand and tossed it in the trash can in the corner of the room. "But he has fire coming out of his ears right now, since our last rap. He might rip you apart Jezromiah if you ask him for a favor. I'll go. You stay here with Dorothey." She smiled at Dorothey and brushed her cheek with the base of her knuckles.

Dorothey smiled back weakly. She swallowed hard. "The creature is not a creature. It's a child, a child who's been cursed."

"That thing's a kid?" Jezromiah said his brows furrowed almost knitting together.

"The creature's mother gave birth to it in the cryptozoology sanctuary, in captivity. There's no way unless the mother had been cursed," Sailil said her eyes widened.