“Hi. Need help with anything?” The clerk was chipper and cheery. Just the kind to annoy me. But, whatever. She’s doing her job, no need for me to make it hard on her.
“Yea, I’m looking at these odd sized mesh pieces. Are they cut-offs?”
“Yea, you’re one of the few that recognize that. Sometimes we get custom cut orders and have these cut-offs that the customer doesn’t want. So we sell them at scrap metal prices here. But if we get enough cut-offs to make a bundle for the recycler, then we bin the whole lot.”
“I wandered through at the right time then. Some of these look like they could make little pockets.” I picked up a few and noted some were aluminum, some were plain steel, and some were zinc-coated steel.
“Oh yea. One thing you could do with them …” She picks a small square off the board, and with a quick snip of her clippers, makes a tea-bag shaped pocket. “… is fill the space with herbs, pieces of paper, trimmings, and such.” She mimics putting the mentioned items in the mesh. “Then fold it over, and use a metal twist-tie to hold it in place.” She closes it, and uses a hanging twist-tie to demonstrate. “Then you can toss it in a fire, throw it in a river, bury it under ground, or hang it from a tree!”
“But, why metal as the holding mesh? When there are paper bags and cloth bags to do just that?”
“Because you don’t want whatever you’ve put in the mesh to escape. Fire destroys the paper bag before the contents are completely consumed. If you’ve trapped something in there, it can escape. A cloth bag in water protects the contents of the bag from degrading. By the time the water has weakened the cloth to the point of breaking, the contents may be still as intact as when it was thrown in. Same with burial, and with exposure to air.” She hangs the empty metal mesh pocket on the display rack. “But with a metal container, the contents are exposed to whatever environment you want to subject them to, but the mesh will take longer to be destroyed than the contents. Throw this into the fire, and what is trapped within will be destroyed with no chance of escape. Same with water. If you pick a metal that has been rust-proofed, most likely the contents will have been water-worn and eaten away before the mesh rusts and falls apart.”
I suddenly realize, I’m having a talk in a national chain home improvement store with one of the clerks (in a brightly colored apron, of course), and we’re talking about magical uses of mundane objects.
“Tell me, do you always talk about esoterica with the customers that come in here?”
She looks at me and laughs. “No, Weaver. Just the ones that listen.”
“How do you know I’m Weaver? I’m in street clothes, and I have no identifying marks on me.”
“My mother tells me about you and your stories. She reads your blogs everyday. You just… fit… how I thought Weaver would look, so I took a chance. Can’t wait to tell her I talked to you. In fact, if you were to visit her and say ‘Hi.’, it would really cheer her up. She doesn’t get out much and don’t have many people to talk to.”
Well, sure. Why the hell not. I decline to get some metal mesh today. I don’t have the spare room for it at my home. But I file the information away as “Will Likely Need Soon”. I follow the directions the clerk gave me, and find a home tucked beside a large hill. Her mother has a live-in assistant, and was phoned by her daughter letting her know “a friend” was stopping by. The assistant, a male nurse, opened the door and let me in. To be an assistant, he looks a lot like the clerk, almost as if they are related.
The assistant led me through the house to the back, where I find what appeared to be a mere shed from the street’s view, is actually the opening of a tunnel that goes INTO the hill. Without pausing, he continued on with me following, until the tunnel opened into a large cavern.
“Madame, your daughter’s friend has arrived.” Lights were turned on, and I find myself looking at an enormous black dragon. I gasped. The dragon gasped. The attendant was confused.
“You’re a dragon!”
“You’re Weaver!”
~much fangirl squealing involved~
“Girl, wait until I post this. NO ONE is going to believe that Weaver came to visit me!”
“You? Who is going to believe I saw a black dragon in Southern California?”
We both laughed with mirth.
I felt the pull that meant I was going to wake up soon. “Dammit. I just got here. No fair.”
“You have to go?” I nodded. “Then, please, if it is not much bother, do visit me again another time!”
I bowed to the dragon. “I shall, Madame.”
The dragon giggled. “Weaver called me ‘Madame’! Oh, I’m still a hatchling!”
The assistant led me back to the street, where the process of waking up took me away at once.
Sleeping. Never a dull moment, I tell you.