Devil's Soul

Chapter 26 (a Halloween special: part ii)

Let’s skip ahead to when I was back in my apartment, alone with Geo, and spooning mac and cheese shaped like lumpy yellow dinosaurs onto her plate. Her mom had dropped her off half an hour ago with the box of uncooked pasta and an apology that she hadn’t had time to feed her daughter dinner. Apparently Geo had insisted that dinosaur mac and cheese was the only thing she would eat for dinner tonight. Geo was a strong willed child, and it was a force that her mom too often didn’t have the energy to reckon with.

I set a spoon by her plate before carrying the pot back to the stovetop, and Geo promptly stuck her fingers into the pile of gooey pasta. She removed a single dinosaur and held it up for me to see, causing the cheesy substance to run down her wrist.

“What’s this one?” she asked.

I returned to where she was sitting and squatted so I could examine the noodle up close. “A pterodactyl,” I said in a tone of absolute certainly, which I absolutely did not feel.

But Geo was too smart to be placated by this. “Noooo,” she drawled. “Pterodactyls have wings.”

I pointed at one end of the noodle. “Isn’t that a wing?”

She giggled in delight. “No! That’s a tail!”

“Oh! I see it now!” I said. Geo clearly spent a lot more time than I did examining dinosaur pasta.

“Maybe it’s a t-rex,” I suggested.

“Maybe,” she said, but apparently the issue was no longer important because she popped it into her mouth and swallowed.  

I ruffled her afro before moving to sit across from her. “Does it taste like a t-rex?” I asked.

She held up her pointer finger as a signal for me to wait, grabbed her spoon, and shoveled an entire herd of dinosaurs into her mouth. She chewed with exaggerated movement and scrunched up her nose like she was deliberating something. “Tastes like chicken!” she finally announced, not bothering to swallow before she spoke.

“Oh, really,” I said.

She nodded seriously.

There was a knock at my door and Geo happily continued eating her mac and cheese while I answered it. I found No-Face from Spirited Away standing on my doorstep, much too tall to just be a kid in a costume. I only had a moment to feel freaked out by the ominous, cloaked figure before a ninja shoved passed him, flailing his limbs in chopping motions and uttering strange battle cry’s.

“I am a ninja!” Abhinav announced dramatically, posing on one foot with his arms bent like he was going to use them to fly away.

“I see that,” I said, shifting my gaze back to No-Face, who was still standing in the doorway. If the ninja was Abhinav, then No-Face was Chung, but I still found him to be a bit unnerving. “Are you going to come in?” I asked.

He wordlessly entered, almost seeming to glide over the threshold. I shut the door behind him.

“No-Face!” Geo shouted in delight, clearly not receiving the same ominous vibes that I was.

“And a ninja,” Abhinav reminded her, karate chopping an invisible foe.

“You’re not a very good ninja,” she giggled.

Abhinav grabbed at his chest in mock offense. “How could you say such a thing?!” he asked dramatically.

“Ninjas are supposed to be sneaky,” Geo told him.

“I can be sneaky,” Abhinav argued. Then he tip toed behind her and attacked her with tickles.

She shrieked with laughter.