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Chapter 3
Arriving at Nancy’s house, she knocked stiffly at the door. A cheerful, smiling, perky Nancy opened the door. A wide-eyed pale one shut it.
Miam examined herself in the brass doorknob while Nancy examined the crazy lady from the safety of her window. Eventually, she timidly called out from behind the glass pane, “Miam?”
Miam raised her head and nodded. She thought about smiling, but decided that it would hurt more than help.
Nancy creeped to the door, opened it, and screamed, “No, Chewbacca! Stop it! Those are my daffodils!” She bustled past Miam to a goat eating bright yellow flowers that had been growing against the side of the cottage. Nancy gave the goat a smart whap! and it looked up at her with baleful eyes. She grabbed Chewbacca’s collar and towed him inside, apologizing all the way to Miam. “Sorry, sorry, Chewbacca is very high maintenance, only been here three weeks, poor thing. He was so little, inside that box on the side of the highway- “FREE GOAT TO GOOD HOME”. We just had to take him in!”
Unfortunately, that was the highlight of Miam’s trip. Other things happened, though, of course. For instance, Nancy had handed Herbert to her (he was tightly gripping his mother’s egg whisk) as Nancy flipped the omelettes she was making. Herbert, not caring for Miam, whacked her repeatedly with the egg whisk, yelling out “Ack! Ack!” with each strike.
Loki also called once, at one in the morning, asking how to make fishsticks in the microwave. Miam, using her assassin voice, said, “Ask a ninja student”, and hung up on him. Loki, at the other end, looked at the silent telephone. A strangled cry of “Fishstick!” echoed through the manor. He went to bed.
All in all, Miam did not altogether enjoy that trip to Nancy’s. There were too many perky things at Nancy’s house. The goat was creepy, too- the way that Nancy would stick styrofoam packing peanuts onto its nubs of horns to protect Herbert when Chewbacca came in the house somewhat freaked her out.
Miam shuddered involuntarily. It was now a week and a half since she had returned from Montana. She was currently busying herself with preparing a Cordon Bleu meal for herself.
A sound reached her ear.
She cocked her head to one side. Low tenor strains of beautiful music wafted loudly throughout the large manor/training school.
She grimaced. He was at it again. Words now could be distinguished from the overall melody.
“SAKURA! SAKURA! DEE DA DOO DEEDA DOO, I LOVE FISHSTICKS!” With that, she could hear joyful munching of, presumably, fishsticks.
Miam was not the only one to be assaulted with this beautiful melody. The little ninjalings were sitting in the training center, doing their meditations with one ear lifted to the ceiling to capture the song in all its glory.
After Loki had finished, their teacher, Miam’s father, got up and whacked the ninjalings with the rolled up newspaper that he had been reading.
Loki was satisfied. He had sung his song, eaten his fishsticks (taken his shower, but that’s not important), and his mind was wandering towards his next concert.
Heavy metal, he thought. Sakura would be a very good heavy metal song.
Or rap. He grinned.
He bounced, intent on his mission, on every third tile of the floor. When he reached the spiral staircase, it became every third step. The hem of his robe strained under this pressure.
As he hop-skip-bounced through the training center, the black-masked ninjalings stared. And stared. Intimidated, he picked up his pace to every seventh tile. “What?” He deftly fielded quizzical stares with the ease of a bullfighter.
After Loki had come and gone, Miam’s father went through the ranks and felt the urge to whack everyone with his newspaper again.
Miam grinned as she ate her lunch.
It was several days later when Miam’s father poked his head into her bedroom. “Miam?”
The woman in question glanced up briefly from staring, deep in thought, at the floor. Her father walked in, taking a seat next to her on the floor. “I’ve been thinking… you should have a talk with Loki about his staying here.”
Miam raised her eyebrows. “Why?”
“He’s a… a charming man, but he doesn’t really do much of anything useful.”
Miam had realized this long ago, but her hackles still went up at the thought that her friend’s (she actually thought of him as something closer to a brother- a little brother, at any rate) honor was being attacked so blatantly.
“Of course he does things! Just not the sort of things that you or I would consider useful! He fixes clothes- I suppose that even you would have to say that that’s useful- he acts as a lifeguard for when your ninja students are swimming- well, we do that at the same time, but he helps- and just because he gave up on being a ninja to become a poet doesn’t mean that he’s a failure!” Miam took a breath, out of arguments for the moment.
Her father nodded his head contemplatively, standing up and walking silently out of the room, leaving Miam alone once again.
Chapter 4
Miam reflected on her father’s words, mentioning their conversation briefly, in passing, to Loki.
Shortly after that, Loki got serious about being a poet.
The first time, Miam was walking into her bedroom to get ready to go to sleep. She noticed a piece of paper jammed securely under the door. Instinctively crouching low to the ground, she wormed the paper out from its haven. She took it into her room, closing the door behind her.
She thought that she heard the slightest shnick of someone else’s door closing- across the hall from her- Loki. A coincidence, surely.
Unfolding the paper, she read:
Your hair so long; black
Lemmings leaping off a cliff;
Shiny and flowy.
Miam blinked. Apparently whomever wrote the poem was in favor of haiku, even if it pained the reader.
She dismissed it. But as she lay awake that night, one word lingered in her amused mind- lemmings?
At breakfast the next day, she was eating a light meal of octopus sushi and raspberry iced tea when Loki padded into the kitchen to prepare a bowl of cereal for himself. As he sat down across from her, his eyes darted to meet hers.
“Did you like my poem?”
Miam coughed hard to avoid choking on her iced tea. Loki placidly chased garishly colored marshmallows around his bowl with a spoon, awaiting an answer.
“It was… informative,” Miam said when she had recovered, choosing her words carefully.
Loki grinned, pleased with himself.