Kani’s story, part 1

Note: I originally planned to put two scenes together for the first post, but each one is pretty big, so I'm going to follow this post up in a few days with the next scene.

The nicest thing about Mensura, in the whole three hours Kani had been there so far, was the way no one gave the coyote a strange surreptitious—or open—glance. It was like being back home in Port Clarita. Well, former home.

Kani had booked a hotel sight unseen—like they had throughout this ridiculous trip—that had turned out to be smack downtown, because it had been a great deal. if strange. Older, small rooms, just on the edge of what looked like a pretty dilapidated area of town, but run like a luxury hotel. It was simultaneously the tiniest and nicest place the coyote had stayed in since starting the walkabout. Driveabout? Whatever.

This was not, however, weather they wanted to be walking about in: drizzly and windy. The clouds looked like they might be breaking up soon, but they hadn’t yet.

That looked like a coffee shop up ahead. A local, indie one, too. “Higher Grounds.” Religious? Hopefully not overtly, at least. A joke about the giants? Maybe. Kani hurried in, shaking off the mist just before stepping inside. Their fur didn’t look too mussed.

Inside, the shop had a particular look Kani had come to think of as performatively hipster. Coffee shops, craft breweries and cafés back in Port Clarita shared a common vibe: mostly natural wood furniture, a few plush couches along the sides, industrial chic walls and ceiling, spare but eclectic decoration, odd art on the walls. Their equivalents in other metros turned that look up to eleven: consciously mismatched furnishings, bare tungsten bulbs, sofas salvaged from thrift stores, walls plastered with weird art and leftist political flyers. Higher Grounds wasn’t quite hitting the pinnacle of the stereotype, but college towns were gonna college town. Maybe the little liberal arts college the coyote had dropped out of umpteen years ago had one of these nearby now; back when they’d been attending there hadn’t been anything better than a chain donut shop.

Kani paused at one of the flyers. MIXED SIZE SINGLE MIXER, it read in black block letters, giving a date of tomorrow evening at some place called “The Beanstalk.” A simple white silhouette against a red background depicted a—hmm, squirrel, judging by the tail and ears—with a feminine build, holding a drink and leaning over a table. On that table stood a canine silhouette, drink in paw, head tilted up. The canine might have been the length of one of the squirrel’s fingers.

Woof.

Kani knew giants were real. Everyone did, except for the conspiracy nuts who believed they were an elaborate hoax. (Distinct from the conspiracy nuts who believed giants secretly ran the world.) But the coyote hadn’t seen any in real life, ever. Even though Port Clarita, where they’d lived for the last decade, lay just a day’s travel from here—not even a full day if you took high-speed rail instead of car—they’d just never thought about visiting before. Mensura had seemed remote. Maybe unreal. Implausible.

Here, though, magic and giants were… normal, weren’t they? Kani hadn’t seen either here yet, though. But they’d seen the signs. They’d seen the campus’s shockingly massive entrance archway in the distance, seen a sidewalk wider than the four-lane highway it ran along. And now seen this crazy poster.

The barista, a twenty-something goat girl with a dark blue mohawk, had an amused I can see what you’re thinking look in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything when Kani walked up to the counter other than the expected. “Hey. What can I get you?”

“Hi. Uh…” Kani scanned the menu board behind the goat briefly, brushing long hair away from their eyes. Maybe they should go back to wearing it in a ponytail, especially with it falling near to the small of their back like this. “A lavender latte. Double.”

“For here?” Her tone made it sound like that was the only correct choice.

“Yes.”

She nodded, tapping on the register’s flat screen. “Five even.”

The register didn’t have the tap-to-pay symbol on it. Kani handed her a credit card.

The goat tapped a blunt nail against the card’s metal surface. “Ooh, fancy. I’ve heard about the Orchard cards, but this is the first one I’ve seen.”

“Oh.” They’d only come out a half-year ago, but they were all over Port Clarita. That wasn’t the first time the coyote had heard that on this trip, though. At least this time it hadn’t earned them a tacitly dirty look, which—actually might be more likely to happen in Port Clarita. Presumed tech bros got blamed for a lot of the metro area’s ills.

Kani smiled self-consciously as the goat slid the card into the register’s side and rotated the screen around to present the tip selection. They tapped the $2 button and rotated it back.

“Thanks—” There was a split-second pause as the goat’s gaze flicked between the coyote and the card as she handed it back. “—Kani. It’ll be up in just a couple minutes.”

That was one of the better recoveries from the are you a girl or a guy conundrum Kani knew they presented. Usually it was a tossup between a “sir” or nothing at all. And a “ma’am” every once in a while, which they’d quickly decided not to correct.

Kani smiled. “Thanks.” The place was big but almost empty right now, only two occupied tables; the coyote headed to an empty one close to the counter. While they waited, they unslung their shoulder bag and took out a tablet computer, pulling up a local rental search.

Hmm. One-bedroom places under nine hundred a month? Not the cheapest they’d seen since leaving Port Clarita, but if the apartments weren’t dumps, they were a bargain for a city this big. Rio Sagrado had been magnificent, one of the most beautiful cities they’d seen in the country, and it’d be a great place to move to if the coyote planned to open an art gallery or a bed and breakfast. But it was expensive, a touch isolated, and had much colder winters than they’d expected. Other smaller towns had been beautiful in their own way, cheaper, but even more isolated.

Of course, Kani didn’t know what was here, other than a pretty but so far nondescript downtown and a promising hipster coffee shops. And giants. Maybe they should pull up Yowl and do a restaurant search—

The clop of hoof-steps announced the goat’s approach, but she’d already reached the table before Kani turned. “Here you go.” She set the latte down, a big ceramic bowl-shaped cup, with foam art in the rough shape of a fern leaf.

“Thanks.” The coyote glanced down at the tablet and then back to the goat as she started to walk away. “Hey, what’s a good restaurant around here for a late lunch?”

She turned back. “What are you in the mood for?”

“I don’t know. Something that isn’t too fancy but still interesting.” They sipped the latte. “Oh, that’s good.”

“Glad you like it.” She rubbed her chin. “Do you like burgers?”

“Sure.”

“Try Burger Stand, a block up and over at Second and Lawrence. Not too expensive, some kinda cool crazy burgers. And it’s a good bar, too.”

“Sounds good. Thanks.”

She walked back toward the counter. “So what are you in town for?”

Kani perked their ears, not having expected the conversation to continue. “That’s a good question.” They laughed. “The short version is just sightseeing. The long version is wandering around while I figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

“Must be nice to be able to do that.” The goat started cleaning up behind the counter.

“Yeah.” Nice, or maybe flaunting they had the time and money to do it, or maybe not because anyone could technically do it, or maybe it’s just a foolish flight of fancy they leapt for in a depressive fit after the best job they’d ever had folded—

“But?”

Kani tilted their head. “But…?”

She looked back up and grinned. “Just something in your tone.”

“Huh.” The coyote rubbed their ear. “I…I mean, yeah, I’ve been enjoying the adventure, and I’m fortunate to be able to take it. But when I think about it too much I realize ‘wanderer’ is another word for ‘homeless’ and I don’t honestly know if I should have started it and I don’t have any idea where it ends.” They looked down at the latte, ears lowering. “Sorry. I’m oversharing.”

“It’s cool. Baristas are like bartenders sometimes.”

“Is that really true?”

“Maybe not at a big coffee chain, but here? Yeah.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it sounds like you’re just self-conscious about having enough saved up to travel while you get your sh… while you figure out what you wanna do.”

“Maybe. Yeah.” They sighed. “It’s easy to lose track of how weird life in Port Clarita can get when you’re, well, living it. When I was doing better, I barely saw the money because I knew it was feast or famine—a year, year and a half of what felt like a high-paying job, then suddenly back to living on savings because unemployment checks, if I even got them, barely covered rent. My last decade was swinging back and forth between great money—at least to me—and barely keeping my head above water.”

“I guess you did well enough in the end, though.”

Kani took another sip of the latte. The lavender flavor was stronger than they’d expected, but not too sweet. It was really good. “Yeah, but mostly just due to the very last job. Before that, when I could save, it was going into either my unemployment safety net or retirement accounts I couldn’t touch. But for those last couple of years, I was doing really well. Then it ended, too, and I did what I always do. I scrambled for something. I got an offer as a contractor on a soul-sucking project. Pay that sounded great, but no benefits, no security, not even tax withholding. And…” They shook their head after a moment. “I just… couldn’t keep doing it unless I had to. And I realized that at least for a while, I didn’t.”

“So you just threw everything in your car and headed up to Mensura?” She took two cookies out of the pastry display as she talked.

Kani shook their head again, grinning faintly. “I sold most of the furniture, threw too much other stuff in a storage locker, and headed around the Southwest. It’s supposed to be coyote territory and all, right? I didn’t even think about Mensura.”

The goat poured a cup of coffee into a ceramic mug. “Yeah, it’s the glamour.”

“Wouldn’t being glamorous make me more likely to think of the place?”

She walked around the counter with the plate of cookies, sitting down at Kani’s table. “Not that kind of glamour. Magic glamour.” She nudged the plate. “Have a cookie.”

Kani blinked. “Are you saying there’s some kind of magic that makes everywhere else in the world forget about Mensura? And, uh, thanks.” They took one of the cookies.

“They don’t forget, they just don’t think about it.” She sipped her coffee, then waved her free hand around. “I mean, a couple hundred miles north of here there’s a chasm that folk tales always said separates the normal world from the magic one, and even when we stopped believing in stories like that, we just wrote it off as an impenetrable wasteland. And when a generation ago people from the other side came over and said, ‘Yeah, that’s all real, and we should set up a place where the littles and the giants should meet’…” She tilted her head, brows lifting. “The world nodded and then just went on like there wasn’t anything at all weird about it, like it didn’t change everything.”

The coyote rubbed the back of their head and laughed uneasily. “Well, when you put it like that. That seems pretty…fantastic, though.”

The goat crossed her arms. “Been on campus yet?”

“No.”

“Why not? You came here to see giants, right?”

“No. I mean, I didn’t come here for anything. Like I said—”

“You’re wandering, yeah.” She grinned, munching on her cookie, then stabbed a finger toward the coyote. “But you wandered here. This isn’t the kind of place people just end up in. They come on purpose.”

“I swear I didn’t.”

She got up with her coffee, still grinning. “Maybe it’s not your purpose.”

“Thanks. That’s not creepy and ominous at all.”

“If you come back when I’m here, let me know how the burgers were.”