Marbles: The Hawk Who Refused to Die a Virgin

Chapter 4. Enter Marbles

"Dudes seriously. I am dying out here," said Opal. He had been raptor baiting for almost four hours without a break. Why hadn't his sister Clementine given him a better job, like an accountant or something? Or like, a brand manager? That job seemed simple enough. Maybe even a god-wrangler, at least then he'd get some exercise, maybe become more mechanically inclined, more competent. Work his way up. But to be bait was pure, grade A, triple distilled, ribbed for her pleasure pariah fuel.

It was one of those jobs that was talked about as being "essential to the business" and "not for the faint of heart" when in reality it was given to only the most lazy, disliked, or incompetent gnomes. Opal knew that he was thought of as having all three of these qualities in abundance, but didn't know which one he had the most of, and didn't know which one had triggered his sister into staking him here in the middle of a freshly threshed field.

Here's a cold hard fact: gnomes are terrified by birds of prey. Companion fact: gnome children are a delicacy non pareil to raptors--soft, squeaky, sweaty confections with tender, smooth, apricot pit scrubbed skin, and fat widdle legs that loved to just kick kick kick kick kick as they died, and no natural defenses.

Fangless. Clawless. Clueless.

In school gnome children had raptor attack drills, with rote procedures for how to deal with an active raptor on campus. One year Opal and his friends had gotten suspended for flying a hawk shaped kite over the playground, its shadow causing at least two kids to seize.

Even while he was holding the string, Opal had been deeply unsettled by the shadow as well-- he and his friends had been cackling only in the way teenage males do when they're trying to hide how scared they are of the dare they're doing.

And now here he was, tied to a stake in the middle of a harvested field so that he couldn't run when the bird (or birds!) first appeared. Because the Owl God couldn't be handled by anyone but gnomes, and because gnomes would FREAK OUT at even a hint of a hunting bird, job site regulations required a raptor baiter. It was the only job Opal was qualified for. He had majored in Common in college.

Really though, sometimes he almost liked the job. He had done it for two years, his sister paid him well--even though he only worked during the fall she paid him year round. And he didn't even have to move around. It did get boring though. In the beginning he had tried to read, but he couldn't do it standing up. So he just drank. In the beginning it had been just one shot of vodka, at dawn when they started hooking the god up to its truss. Now he had at least three mini bottles in his satchel.

These were minibottles for humans, so for Opal this was a good bit of vodka. He drank more and more each week. He was drunk right now. Nobody cared, raptor baiters were expected to be soused. It was only bad today because it was hot. Otherwise, in all honesty, a pretty sweet gig.

Except for the hat he had to wear. Gnomes love their hats. They've been wearing them since all the humanoid races split off from a common ancestor. Their hats were tall cones, almost half the height of a gnome, and came in every shade. Anything that kept a gnome from getting stepped on, they loved.

Unless a gnome was actively making love to someone they trusted, they were wearing a hat. To take off your hat was an exceedingly intimate gesture for a gnome. They never did it in front of other kinds of humanoids. When gnomes went streaking, they wore their hats. Gnomes were proud of their bodies, except for the top of their heads.

And hats were not just the de facto symbols of gnomekind as a whole--gnomes loved to personalize them. Trick them out. Clementine had custom ordered a tall boy (a hat with a extra three inches topping it off) of scarlet satin last year for Opal's 133rd, its insides braced with a curlicued web of fine copper wire and razor thin slats of lacquered cedar that made your head smell good when you sweated. It was pretty baller.