Kay Hudson Excerpt: Jinn on the Rocks
Here’s a scene from the first chapter of my work in (very slow) progress, Jinn on the Rocks.
Set up: Zee, a jinn changeling who has lived all her long life in the mortal world, has been recruited by a goblin named (something that sounds roughly like) Grackle to help him find a missing jinn (our hero, of course) who has been thrown into the mortal world. Zee has a few demands of her own before she sets off on a new adventure.
Zee held the goblin’s clothing at arm’s length and dropped the shirt and shorts into her washing machine. Both pieces were sturdier than she had expected, neither damaged nor badly worn, but definitely filthy. So was the goblin.“This water’s too hot,” Grackle whined through the partially open bathroom door.
“No, it’s not.” Zee poured more detergent into the washer. “It’s tepid at most.”
“The soap is, is . . .”
“What?” Zee leaned against the bathroom door frame. “Too soapy?”
“It smells like flowers!”
“It’s just ordinary soap, Grackle. I could go upstairs and get you some that smells like gardenias, but that costs five bucks a bar, and I’m not going to waste any of it on you.”
“What’s that noise?” the goblin shouted as the wash cycle began with a thud and a loud slosh. “What are you doing to my clothes?”
Zee gazed at the ceiling and shook her head. “Washing them, Grackle. You don’t want to put them back on dirty, do you?”
“I didn’t want to take them off. Wait until I tell the Elders you made me strip. Pervert.”
“Yeah, goblin, like I believe you talk to the Elders.”
“I do jobs for them. Now and then. Little ones.” The sloshing of the water in the bathtub was almost as loud as the washing machine.
“If you do,” Zee said, “they probably send you instructions on a scrap of paper wrapped round a rock and tossed into your dumpster. And you’d better be washing in there, not just playing in the water.”
“Madam,” Grackle said, “I never play in water.”
“That I can believe. You haven’t touched water in months. I handled your clothes with salad tongs. Held my nose while I dropped them in the washer.”
“My pockets!” Grackle screeched. “There’s valuable swag in my pockets.”
Zee laughed, shifting to look at the pile of odds and ends on the top of the dryer. “Oh, relax. I emptied your pockets.” Green plastic lighter, two and a half cigars, twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents in singles and change. A paperback Mickey Spillane reprint with a remarkably lurid cover, one that had definitely not been stripped and tossed into Grackle’s dumpster. One energy bar, probably shoplifted with the book. “It’s all here.”
“You do realize, madam, you’re wrecking my cover. You make me clean up like this, people might see me. Then what are you going to do? ‘Oh, don’t mind him,’ she says, ‘he’s just my pet goblin. Isn’t he cute?’ Next thing you know I got little kids messing with me and old ladies pinching my cheeks.”
“Cute?” Zee dropped the Hard Case Crime reprint on the dryer and picked up a nearly-empty matchbook. “I don’t think so, Grackle. Even clean, you’d look like a midget with a bad attitude. Elderly ladies would ignore you and small children would run and hide.”
Grackle snorted. “I hope you’re right about the old ladies, but kids are pretty ornery at eye level. Poke me with sticks, they will.”
The goblin was probably right. Any adult who managed to see him clearly would take him for someone who should not be stared at, and look away. Children had no such inhibitions. “I’ll protect you,” Zee said, surprised to realize that she meant it. Maybe she really did want a pet goblin. She’d long ago given up cats and dogs. She loved them but their lives were so heart-breakingly short. Even normal people knew that, but for someone like Zee, someone who never aged, who kept moving, who had buried her ninety-six-year-old baby sister, a dozen years was no time at all.
She hadn’t fared much better with people.
No, she’d learned long ago, when she was truly young, that she couldn’t trust anyone with the truth. She tried, once or twice, and it hadn’t ended well, not well at all. Marianne had been the only mortal who had accepted and loved Zee for what she was, and even Marianne had grown old and died. To Marianne’s nieces and nephews and their children, Zee was just an eccentric distant cousin, minding the old family home that no one else wanted.
Now Zee’s last anchor in the mortal world was gone. The gnomes whose magic had protected Marianne for so long could no longer threaten to withdraw it. Maybe it was time to demand an accounting, to find her way to the other dimension, where she didn’t have to hide what she was. Where she might live among her own kind at last.
A splash and a curse from the bathroom brought her back to the present.
“Where are my clothes?” Grackle demanded. “You expect me to walk around like this?”
Zee peeked into the bathroom through half-closed eyes, not eager for the spectacle of a naked goblin, but Grackle had wrapped himself in a towel, the hem trailing through puddles on the floor like a water-logged toga.
“Your clothes are in the washing machine for another ten minutes, and then they go into the dryer,
“We don’t have time.” Grackle hitched up his towel and joined her, staring distrustfully at the vibrating washer. “We gotta get on the road, track this guy down.”
