Dreamwalker

1- Ink and Mud

"Get that hellish cat out of here!" Soutine called over his shoulder. "He's tracking mud on my notes again!"

Bell sprinted into the study. She avoided the study most of the time, as Soutine liked to be alone when he experimented, so she didn't even notice that the cat had gotten inside in the first place. It wasn't as though Soutine didn't like Bell but he was always working on something or another that Bell never understood. That is, when he wasn't working downstairs at the shop. "Sorry," she said, scooping the scrawny black cat Bijoux into her arms.

"God's bones, Bell, do we really have to keep this cat in here? He's wreaking havoc on the house," Soutine added, returning to his studying at the desk by the window. The entire room was covered from ceiling to floor with stacks of books, piles of scrolls, and loose papers bearing mysterious symbols. His desk was a complete mess too. Broken quills littered the ground around him and sooty ink dripped from a leaking glass jar. Even Soutine's blue tunic was stained with ink at the sleeves and around the torso.

"Soutine?" Bell remarked.

"Yes?"

Bell freed one of her hands from Bijoux's stomach so she could point into Soutine's face. "You have ink on your nose," she said.

Soutine blinked a few times at her, then chuckled and rubbed his nose so the splatter of black ink stuck to his hand. The ink was the same color as his hair, tied haphazardly up over his shoulder with a shoelace. One stripe of hair down his chin made it seem like he ate ink for lunch too. "Thank you, Bell. I'll be down in an hour or two so you can have a break for the afternoon."

"Thanks."

"By the way, did Madame Adelaine pick up her slippers yet?"

"This morning."

"Good, good. Carry on." He returned to his scribbling, brow furrowed and shoulders hunched over the desk.

Bell carried Bijoux out of the room and closed the door behind her with her foot. She dropped Bijoux on the stone floor with a scolding, "go kill some mice or something!"

Bijoux meowed at her, then trotted off down the hall. Bell ran back down the stairs to the cobbler's shop.

Whenever she ran, her long uncut hair always got even more tangled than usual, and it didn't help that her hair was an unusual dirty blonde. She had not inherited Soutine's dark and handsome looks. Bell's eyes were a dazzling hazel and her skin was dotted with orange freckles all over. Her face was too round, her legs were too thin for her torso, and her feet were too big to be allowed. To hide a few of these unfortunate features, she wore a long red dress that sagged around her shoulders and always got caught around her heels. She couldn't help it. Bell wasn't perfect, but she didn't care. Her mind was occupied with repairing and selling shoes.

After all, the shoe business was booming in Terre Pur, the small town where Bell and Soutine lived, on account of the mud problem. The streets of Terre Pur had never been paved like typical city streets. With all the foot and horse traffic on the road, and all the daily rain, the ground around each stable structure churned into thick smelly mud. Bell and Soutine were working on a new kind of shoe that worked simultaneously as a shoe and a stilt, so as to avoid sinking ankle-deep in the mud with each step. They had no luck so far.

Bell repaired shoes, Soutine made shoes. They were a good team. Bell was more than used to scraping dried mud off shoe leather without harming the material underneath. Soutine said it was good practice for her, since she would one day take over the store and would need to make the shoes they sold instead of just repairing them. "Why?" Bell unknowingly asked him when she was about seven years old. "I don't want the store."