Ancilla: SOUNDBITE EDITION. (SERIALIZED, MATURE SECTIONS MARKED)

Tiphareth (PART 2, has 1982 words)

It's hard for two people to work simultaneously in the small kitchen, but that's all right, because he's insisting on making food for me while I rest. I can't object to it strenuously. I'm still so tired that the very act of walking from the bedroom to the living room is a chore. It's all I can do to sit on the couch.

Besides, he's cooking.

In the background, I can hear his stereo, which he has tuned to the local public radio station. They're playing some kind of instrumental Baroque-era piece, something in which violin strings predominate. It's not mathematical enough to be Bach, at least not Johann Sebastian. It's not brutal enough to be Leclair, and it's definitely not Vivaldi. Odds would indicate Telemann, who seems to have never stopped composing even for sleep or food, going by his output. My instincts want to go with either Geminiani or Corelli, though. I flip a mental coin, heads for Geminiani, tails for Corelli, and get heads. Geminiani it is. It's a very wild guess, though, because I'm shaky when it comes to Baroque composers, outside of Bach and Vivaldi, who I imagine being, respectively, to the Baroque era what Led Zeppelin and Rush were to seventies album rock. Their styles are too distinctive to be mistakenly attributed to anyone else; and people not particularly interested in the genre would be tempted, not without reason, to say that every single song by its respective artist sounded like all the others written by the same artist.

At any rate, given that the radio is playing actual music rather than NPR news reports, it must be somewhat late in the morning.

I look out the window. The trees have lost their leaves.

"Um. Magister? What day is it?"

He comes into the room and hands me a plate with an omelet on it. "Tuesday."

Tuesday. The last day I remember clearly, without hallucination, was Thursday - the last day of October. Trick-or-treaters. Falling leaves. Pomegranate seeds. Descent.

I look around. I am not in the Underworld. The living room is only the living room. I must remember that.

"You've been with me this whole time, haven't you? Don't you have to go to work?"

"Leave you? Like that? Eromene..." He stops and composes himself. It seems to take some effort for him to do so, I notice. "My ancilla, quite aside from the dubious ethics of abandoning one's submissive when she is falling to pieces, I don't think I could have left you. You needed me. I was there." He frowns. "I had several vacation days saved up, so I used them. I still have a few left. That, at least, is something that doesn't need worrying about."

I probably don't have a job anymore, though. I don't have a salaried, stable, full-time career as a librarian. I'm a part-time telemarketer with no clout, and even though I am reasonably good at what I do, I am expendable. Finding a similar position somewhere else won't pose too many problems - this is one field that's always hiring, because the vast majority of people either quit in disgust, or they get fired within days because they can't make quota. I'm looking at a hiatus no matter what, though. I will probably need several days to job hunt unless I get lucky on my first day of pounding the pavement, and then there will be a dry spell while I wait for my first paycheck. I think gloomily about paying bills. If I'm going to make next month's rent, I'll have to skimp on groceries. I was already skimping on groceries before this. I'm not sure how much more I can skimp. I suppose I could simply not buy groceries for a few weeks... Oh, hell. November's rent. I still have to pay this month's rent. It's overdue now, so I'm going to have to pay an extra fifty dollars. I hadn't planned on being gone for longer than the weekend. I hope my landlord doesn't think I've just skipped out on him. Really, if I'd handled this like the responsible adult I'm supposed to be, I would have written my landlord the rent check and given it to him before leaving the apartment on Friday. This crisis was preventable. I'm going to have to call him to make arrangements as soon as I've finished breakfast.