Tandy's tepid meeting.

Even as the words were out of her mouth Tandy had to glance around still, half expecting the arguing pair to jump at her while the others watched. But no mater what her imagination told her it didn’t happen.

The two that had been watching the red faced pair glanced up to look at Tandy. She catches the eye of a woman. To call her a church mouse in her ankle length skirt, cardigan, and neatly collected hair would, Tandy gathered, be about the same as calling her a wild child in this woman’s world view. Her gaze flashed over to the man. With his heavy work clothes and neon yellow panels crisscrossing his body, she half expected to see a reversible yield-stop sign laying on the ground somewhere near by.

Even as the two looked between Tandy and the pair that had been arguing she somehow found the force of will to walk on the dirt road so she was standing with them under the lone orange street lamp at seemingly forgotten dirt T-intersection.

“Where are we?” Was all that her brain could think to spit out as she stood there. For her trouble of asking the red faced pair turned their glares to her. One was a man who looked to be a couple years her junior. His outfit screamed euro trash who should be wasting his time working for a pittance at a hot dog stand just inside some rundown theme park, only to find that he didn’t earn enough to ever go in it himself for an afternoon of fun.

As for the one he was arguing with, it was a girl, and Tandy nearly choked when her eyes saw her. While the flesh coloured flip-flops and green headband with a ceramic or plastic rose were nothing to be made much out of. It was what she was wearing, a single sea foam-green towel that looked ready to flutter off of her slender frame with a single wrong move. On the bottom edge was a small badge that Tandy couldn’t make out. With the fact that she wore only a badge and a towel Tandy’s mind went wild with speculation on just what this, in her mind, child did.

“Oh you brought another girl here!” The red-faced girl accused the man, only using her presence as further ammunition in the argument that had started before Tandy’s arrival.

Without out missing a beat the man shot back at her. “I keep telling that I have no idea how I or any of you got here!”

Sensing that these two would never let the other take any ground in this empty argument, Tandy broke in, snatching the ball of the conversation from the two. “Where the hell are we?” She asked, exasperation clear in her voice. The two frowned at her, and she had to wonder if they’d been enjoying it. Were they flirting at a time like this?! The thought echoed in her mind as the girl pointed up. Tandy’s gaze followed the finger and saw a crossed pair of street signs sticking out of the side of the lamp post. “Servant King’s Parkway and Five hundred forty-three nanometre drive?” She asked having never seen such names for streets in her life. Both were almost normal, but failed spectacularly at the last step.

Tandy looked back to them. “No, really where are we?” She asked. “Is this some kind of joke?” The girl frowned. “That’s what I was asking him, he was here first, so he has to know how we got here.” The man gave out a over the top groan. “I’ve told you a dozen times already, when I got here, you were already here with your legs all-” He can’t get another word in before being cut off. “My legs are a national treasure!” She shouts at him. If Tandy had been closer to age of this girl maybe she would have agreed, but as it was she had a hard time seeing those any more than two years younger than her as anything but children. These two hot heads were most certainly in that category, unlike the two quiet ones who had chosen just to watch.

“Listen,” She says feeling like the smallest child as she speaks. “I’m Tandy, what are your names?” She asks them, pretending to feel like an adult and hoping that they some how agree to her act. The towel girl isn’t haven’t it, and she shuts her grey eyes and looks away from Tandy with a sour look on her face. If nothing else at least Tandy can be proud in knowning she got her to stop arguing for the moment.

“Uh, I’m-” The proper girl starts to speak in a quiet voice before stumbling to a stop.

“Folks! Friends!” Tandy can feel her skin crawl like someone has licked her as those words come from behind her. She jumps forward out of surprise and spins around, now standing between the pair that had been arguing, the light directly overhead as a man stands there, on a red and white picnic cooler. He’s dressed like a cowboy but it seems like he has stolen his shirt from one of the rodeo clowns.

“Why I’m so glad all my friends have met one another!” He says hopping off of the cooler. Tandy looks to the others as they look between them. Between each of them there is no sign of recognition of old acquaintances.

“Who in the hell are you?” The man shouts at him. “Are you the ass that brought us here?” The towel girl joins in.

Bending down to extract some content from the cooler. The way his body moved made it clear that what he was hunting for was of much more importance to him than some silly little questions. “Oh why I am your dearest friend here.” He finally answered standing up while holding a stake that was larger than any Tandy had ever seen before, one that she had trouble imagining the beast it had come from.

“And this.” He shook the stake in his hand. “Is my dear...” He let the words trail off, and for a moment Tandy wondered if she was being introduced to his dinner, only to then hear the sounds of heavy paws on wet dirt. She looked and saw the outline of a dog in the dark coming towards them, when it came into the light of the lamp it snatched the steak from the man’s hand, and one of its three heads started to eat. “Cerb-” Tandy started to say. “Spots!” The man cut her off and loudly proclaimed like a proud father of the large three headed dog who now that Tandy could see in the light was in fact black with a speckling of white spots over it’s entire body.

“I am Syl.” The man finally introduced himself. “Your dearest of friends, and as such I would make a suggestion.” He pointed down the Servant King’s Parkway. “That you travel this way, and not leave the road as my dear Spots has been trained to protect the fields from poachers, and only one of his heads has been fed tonight.” Syl looked at the group with a thin smile on his lips. “Or you can take your 60 percent chance and hope that he hasn’t picked up any tricks from the family cat.”

No sooner had he said that than the light above them gave a loud pop that made Tandy and the others jump, to look up to where it had been. Without it, the T intersection was dark now, when she looked back Syl, Spots, and the cooler were gone even as she squinted in the dark.

Tandy's Troubles

Sitting at a cafe’s patio Tandy just wanted to scream. On the table she’d thrown a folder full of resumes. It had been a complete waste of a day in her mind and most people weren’t even thinking of lunch yet. With a deep breath she buried her head into her arms. This day, the week, and even the month, she was just ready to have it all be done with, or even better to have a redo at it. She scratched the back of her leg and could hear what had been a small run in her stocking growing even larger, not that she cared at this point.

Taking a deep breath she finally pulled herself up, she had needed that just the moment to regroup. When she looked in front of her she was surprised to be greeted with a woman a couple of years her elder, a scar on her left ear that makes it look like during some childhood game she’d lost a fight with a pair of rusty hedge clippers. Climbing on this woman was a toddler who looked like she wasn’t quite ready to start kindergarten. While another who she ventured was her cousin or maybe brother thanks to the brilliant green eyes the children and the woman across from her all had behind a set of thick rimmed glasses.

On top of her folder was a leaking bottle of milk that she could be certain had already left a coffee ring. “Uh, excuse me.” She has to say a bit exasperated at this woman’s actions. If she’d just sat down there was no way should would have done anything more than felt annoyed, but she didn’t have time to run to a print shop and get new prints done, no matter how much they used the term ‘instant’ in their advertising.

She smiled a mother’s smile at her, one that would be given when a child lost a silly little game. “Oh dear.” She said. At first Tandy felt a bit of vindication with those words until she realized the dear referred to her rather than the ladies action. Tandy could feel her flushing red. She wasn’t going to land a job with those resumes but it should have been through either her own incompetence or the egos of the jackasses rejecting her, not some mother.

She opens her mouth to tell this woman off, she doesn’t care any more if it is bad form, bitchy, or boyish, nor any of the other things she’d been chided to avoid her entire life. As she could feel the first syllable forming in her throat the shrill screeching of a phone’s alarm set to its highest setting cut her off.

“Oh dear oh dear!” The green eyed woman says as she hunts around in her purse and finally pulls out a phone to shut off the ringer. She she does a broach with a large cat’s eye set in the centre. She watched as it fell in the air, seeming to hang here for an impossibly long time, only to clatter on a metal rib of the table, causing the gem to crack as it bounced towards her.

Once again the woman spoke the only two words that Tandy had ever heard her speak, while she with a skill that had come from the time as a mother managed to hold onto her child in a way that seemed to defy gravity. “Oh dear.” This time to Tandy’s ear though it was a very different thing, a delight that should have been saved for greeting an old friend was in it as her eyes remained locked on the brooch, that only as Tandy stood up to yell something at her, did they start to drift upwards.

She could hear the clattering of the chair behind her as she stood with enough force to knock it over when she felt a bite in the back of her leg where the chair of all things had gotten the last laugh and caused her knee to buckle. Out of instinct she grabbed frantically in front of her but her fingers could only find that dropped brooch as she fell, with a thud on her back.

Tandy didn’t want to get up, she felt stupid and embarrassed from her actions causing her to mess up her clothes. As she lay there she wondered when it had gotten so over cast, and where the sounds of the street had gone.

She pushed herself into a sitting position and didn’t find the table with all her papers in front of her, she looked around confused as she wondered what had just happened. Had she hit her head? She pressed the back and side with her palm and didn’t feel any pain, but couldn’t remember what any other signs of a concussion were, maybe that had been it.

She looked in her other hand, the brooch still in it, the only sign of where she had been just moments before. With the broken cat’s eye in the centre and the entire thing made of silver or maybe platinum in the shape of a calendar where the rings for months and days could be slid to align with an arrow made of gold.

Picking herself up and onto shaky lags she looked around only to spot a group that had been behind her, too wrapped up in their own argument to even notice her. “H-hello?” She said with a shaky voice trying to get their attention, just hoping to end her confusion on where she was.