08/13/2025 Snippet, BANSHEE BEACH.

Decided to route around the blockage and keep going. Have the chapter otherwise finished, so go me.

…

If Anda-Lee had wanted to keep Catalina away to make more room in that shack, she needn’t have bothered. She, me, and Lisa-Jo were joined by a guy who called himself “Big Pixuna.” The four of us had barely enough chairs for everybody to sit, and it was close enough in there that I was glad we weren’t having this talk at noon. The dude didn’t care, though. Judging from his intermittent eyeballing, he was there just in case I wanted to get fresh with Las Hermanas. Which bugged me, but I decided to let it go. I was pretty far from Cin City, after all. You have to make allowances.

I allowed myself a measure of petty revenge by acting like Big Pixuna wasn’t even there. “You hear about the sea monster problem?” I asked Anda-Lee. “The one you don’t have?”

Lisa-Jo sighed, like you do when somebody is here to talk about the thing after all. She stood up, started rummaging through the tumbledown shelves covering the walls until she found a bottle full enough to slosh. She put it and a few chipped mugs on the low table more or less in front of us. “Maybe,” she said as she poured herself a snort of whatever-it-was.

“Maybe?” I cleverly retorted. “Sea monsters are pretty, you know, physical. Either you have them, or you don’t.”

“Only if you see them,” Lisa-Jo replied. “And since nobody saw them, we can’t say we do.”

“It’s not that bad,” Anda-Lee added as she took her own knock. “We can say we do, sure. Nobody will listen, but we can say.”

“You can say,” Big Pixuna added. I expected a rumble, but he talked with a smooth rhythm. “Boarders, they drift. They like different sand under their toes.”

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