Household Gods

She wasn’t going to find out by staying cooped up here. Under Julia’s eye, she unlocked the cash box and chose a selection of coins, picking them out with care, as if she knew to the as how much she was leaving behind. Julia’s glance didn’t flicker; her brow didn’t wrinkle. Nicole drew in a breath of relief, and escaped out the door.

She turned left more or less at random. She’d gone several steps before she realized: she didn’t know where to buy any of the things on her mental list. Nothing in sight looked like a supermarket, or even like the corner grocery stores the supermarkets had forced out of business. A vague memory of her honeymoon brought to mind tiny shops, boucheries and boulangeries and something with a horse’s head out front that she’d found very pretty till she learned it was a horsemeat butcher. She didn’t see anything like that, either.

A voice called out behind her. She stopped and turned, expecting it to be Julia, calling out that she’d gone the wrong way. But it was someone from the next house down, a little bony bird of a woman with an extraordinary crown of curled and frizzed hair, waving and calling, “Umma! Oh, Umma! Good morning!”

Nicole almost didn’t respond. But the woman was looking straight at her, looking so delighted that Nicole wondered if Umma and she were long-lost sisters. She raised her hand and waved back, trying to put a little enthusiasm in it, so as not to seem suspicious.

“Off to market then?” the woman asked. “And isn’t it a lovely morning? Do come over later, will you please, dear? It’s been ages since we had a good gossip!”

Nicole hoped her expression didn’t betray what she felt, which was a kind of horror. Neighbors in West Hills didn’t lean out of upstairs windows – if they had any – and yodel at passersby. This neighbor obviously thought she was a friend, too. Or else she really was a relative.

“Later,” Nicole managed to say. “Yes, I’ll come over later.” In about ten years. She put on a bright company smile, and wished she had a watch to glance at significantly. “Well. I’m off, then. Good morning.”

“Good morning!” the stranger caroled, and mercifully ducked back inside.

She hadn’t said Nicole was going in the wrong direction, either. Nicole decided to take that as an omen. She strode on out, feeling better already, though she had to be careful where she stepped; and she kept a wary eye on the windows above. Some of her original sense of adventure was coming back. She felt like a brave explorer – Montezuma’s Revenge and all.

Pigeons strutted in the streets of Carnuntum, arrogant and brainless and half tame, just as they did in Los Angeles. Life here was riskier for them, however. A fellow tossed a fine-meshed net over a couple, scooped them up before they could let out more than one startled coo, and ran back inside his house, shouting, “I’ve got supper for today, Claudia!”

Nicole wouldn’t have wanted to eat them. Living in Los Angeles, she’d come to despise the automobile for the pollution it caused, even while she worshipped at its shrine. No cars in Carnuntum. But that didn’t mean no pollution, as she’d thought it would. The streets were packed deep with ox droppings, horse droppings, donkey droppings. The pigeons mined them for any number of treasures: seeds, insects, the unmistakable and nauseating pale wriggle of a worm.

One good look at what they were pulling out of the heaps of ordure, and Nicole knew she wouldn’t touch one of those birds if a waiter from Le Bistro brought it.

She’d hated the air she’d had to breathe in the San Fernando Valley, back in the twentieth century: thick, stinking, and the color of filthy old chinos. It had stung her eyes and caught at her lungs with every breath she took. The air in Carnuntum stank worse than the air in the Valley ever had. It was clogged with smoke. It stung her eyes and caught at her lungs with every breath she took.

It was also full of flies. Every time someone walked past, they rose in buzzing clouds from the dung that beasts of burden had left behind, and from the occasional dog turds in the street. At least, Nicole hoped that was what those were. Some of them seemed on the large side for that.

The flies didn’t all go back to their suppers, either. Some decided to take the long way home, pausing to snack on passing animals or, better yet, people. Slapping while walking looked to be as automatic as breathing.

It wasn’t so easy or mindless for Nicole, or apparently so effective, either. In the first few minutes after she’d left the restaurant, she took at least three powerfully annoying bites. These weren’t little itching mosquitoes, either, like the ones that had made the summer evenings miserable in Indiana. These were horseflies – B-52s, people had called them when she was little. Their bites stabbed like a red-hot needle.