Generations

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Anna Marie Bee

Bion Rathorwn gobbled while he ate, and if he was in fact as ancient as he claimed- just over six thousand years old, his manners showed the savagery of those impossible times. He touched on the subject of his childhood, but the words were foreign sounding on his tongue, and stranger even to Anna Marie's ears, which somehow comprehended the language with a bizarre clarity. He knew she understood him, speaking to Anna Marie with ease, a playful grin recalling how he and his sister once hunted and killed a creature he called 'the two toothed dog', a prehistoric, dinosaur-like reptile as big as a house. He bounced over the subject of a family member's skin, telling Anna Marie, without batting an eye, that she had skin as tough as metal and malleable as rubber, and a mind capable of impossible feats he refused to go into detail at present. He was too hungry for that.

The urchin licked his bowl clean, leaning down to suck up a small spill he'd dropped on the countertop. Using his spoon clutched in one hand like a hammer to scratch his armpit, he ate directly from the pot, like he'd spent a century or more starving in some cave. Which was perfectly possible and positively primitive.

He seasoned nothing, added no broth flavoring to the stew and neglected to peel the carrots, which Anna was pleased to learn he'd thought to cut in half. The rabbit was poultry, a little less flavorful than chicken, but not far off in taste. Anna Marie ate every drop out of politeness -something instinct demanded of her. A man like Bion, food etiquette demanded it, none of that 'a lady always leaves a little something on her plate' nonsense her mother spewed. Meals meant something else to this man, a more primal outlook on the gorging of substance.

"Family of the Wane? What's that mean anyways...like the moon."

Across the table, Bion snarled, the wrinkles in his forehead falling over his eyes. "What is it with you kids and that damn moon? Tides and water, is all. A ball of rock."

"That sounds like something my grandpa would say." Anna Marie dropped her spoon with a start, collapsing back in her chair, patting her stomach twice. "It's giant, it's shiny and it shows up pretty much every night."

The Urchin observed her, ate a few more spoonfuls and, running his hand across his arm, sniffed in deep, smelling himself. He coughed into his elbow, hocked a logy and spit at the sink, settling for the cabinet below, leaving the wood panel sticky with his flem.

"Wane has got nothing to do with the moon, young lady –girl. Wane means what it once did; it means death and destruction. It means darkness and decay."

Anna knew Bion had given that speech at least a thousand times and every inch of her understood he could deliver on the claims, but there was something so disorientate about an urchin weighing in at one hundred and a half pounds frowning and snarling, threatening terror to the human race, that had Anna Marie on the verge of laughing. To keep it from bubbling out, she bit her spoon.

Twelve dishes, broken and cracked littered the floor and Anna Marie was forced to dance through the minefield of jagged porcelain before taking a seat on the wooden stool Bion had presented like a trophy of the finest gold. The urchin sat on two four by fours balanced over three dozen spent milk cartons. He ignored the broken china altogether.

"That's an awful lot of D's..." She said after a minute.

Bion fervidly nodded. "It's a lot of waning, that's what it is."

The urchin gobbled the remaining stew, letting it dribble down his chin and over the front of his shirt. Anna Marie watched in peace, silent until she could no longer stand the quietness of the small loft space, until the boiling water grew as loud as bullets and Bion's tapping foot like a drumming orchestra of trash cans and shrieking cats.

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