Seacouver Community College

In humans, taste and smell are closely interconnected. Brain slugs tend to focus strongly on these senses during early development. Part of the cultural acclimation is getting brain slug hosts to stop licking people to find out more about that.
—How To Talk To Brain Slugs, Chapter 3: Taste

Rachel was cooking ramen on the stove when Mel came in. Jordan and Soong were on the couch, watching a documentary on the evolution of feathers in dinosaurs. The brain slug hosts were naked, and there was a folding chair by his side of the couch that Mel hadn't seen before. Rachel was wearing pajama pants and a t-shirt with comic characters Mel wasn't familiar with; two foxes, teal and purple, in a kind of yin-yang symbol.

"Here," she said, as she indicated the pot and a spoon. "Breakfast. How was work?"

It was the first time Mel had been asked how his work went. He sat down in his spot, and Rachel sat on the chair next to him. Between sips of soup, he told her about the feral brain slug host, the rush, the teens trying to steal beer, and Detective MacElroy. At last, as he gave a soft slurp and let the warm broth settle in his stomach, he fetched the box from his pocket.

"Mission accomplished," he said.

Soong pulled the box out of his hand. Together, the two naked young women rose and walked to their bedroom, taking the condoms with them.

"Maybe should have saved that for later," he said, as the door closed, the condoms vanishing into the same inviolable realm that held two copies of Slug Fucker Monthly, Mel's underwear, and that mysterious box.

"Maybe," Rachel agreed.

"Where did the chair come from?" Mel said, glancing at the folding chair. Standard gunmetal gray, no cushion. It didn't look very comfortable.

"Across the hall. Anastasia and I are both working on moving in. She needs to get stuff from a friend's place, where she was staying, and I need to clear out my place. But I wanted somewhere to sit when I was over here," Rachel explained.

"Let me know if I can help. I can carry things. When did they take their clothes off?" Mel asked.

"They never put them," Rachel said. "After you left, they just slept for a while. When they started moving around, they didn't bother with clothes. I didn't fuss about it. It is their place, after all. I'm just a guess. It's weird seeing my sister just wander around naked, but if I think of it like visiting a nudist resort where I don't have to participate, it's fine."

Mel nodded. "I think that means they're comfortable around you. At least, they didn't start to do that with me until they'd known me for a while. It's kind of a signal of acceptance."

"Or maybe they just want to show who's boss by saying 'this is my space, and I'll be butt-naked if I want to,'" Rachel countered. She paused. "They clean when you're not here, did you know that? Swept the floor, wiped down the bathroom, replaced the empty toilet paper roll, bagged up the trash to go out, and replaced the bag in the bin."

Mel rose and carried the pot to the sink. It was time he washed it.

"I figured they must. I try to do my part in the household chores, but we never talked about a formal system—probably I should have," he said, as he splashed water around the pan. "Thanks for cooking, by the way."

"You're welcome. Don't expect it often, and ramen's about the limit of my cooking skills," Rachel said. When he set the pot to dry, she added. "You should get a few hours of sleep. We've got stuff to do this evening."

"Stuff?" Mel said, then remembered. "The ASL Society meeting!"

"That's right. I'll wake you up," she said. "Because I want to be able to talk to my sister too."

Mel crawled along the floor, his transparent body undulating. Three sensory tentacles extended, the dark world a collage of sights and smells. The dust on the floor was mostly shed human skin, gritty and dead. That strange, warm musk that meant human, woman. Time lost meaning; there was only the single-minded purpose of his journey. To the edge of the couch. Up, up, his sticky foot finding purchase against the fabric that covered the couch. Onto that warm, quivering wall of flesh.

With single-minded determination, the Mel-slug followed the ridges of her spine, leaving a faintly phosphorescent trail behind it. Until at last he arrived at the base of her neck. For a moment, the orphaned slug hesitated, as if in contemplation. Then the tough foot dissolved. There was an almost-silent sizzle as the acid dissolved through the skin. Internal tentacles burst forth as the membrane gave way, seeking out veins, arteries, the spinal cord itself.

Her breathing never faltered, her autonomic systems undisturbed as the Mel-slug's tentacles extended into her brain. When her eyes opened, Rachel's face was as placid as her sister's, and the Mel-slug tasted a new world.

Rachel had mapped the bus routes. He followed her on board, held his palm above the payment slate, and the dollars were transferred from his account. There was a pass you could buy that was cheaper, but Mel hadn't needed to use the bus before. Something else for the future.

Seacouver Community College looked like post-war construction, but Mel wasn't sure which war. Lots of bare concrete, some of it rain-streaked in ways that suggested faces, or Rorschach blots. One particularly elaborate stain on a long, low section of wall was so complicated that it was either a deliberate mural or some sort of aftermath of trying to clean off a large amount of meticulously crafted spray-painted graffiti. Mel wasn't sure which.

The ASL Society meeting was held in a small building half-swallowed by a kind of vine with small buds, not even flowers yet, that Rachel called Old Man's Beard.

"When they get ripe, they puff out, like dandelions," she said. "Too early in the season to flower. But I'll bet it's a sight in summer."

The Society was two people in a small conference room: an older woman with a long braid of grey hair that hung over her left shoulder, and a young man with smartglasses, a beard, and a receding hairline.

"Hello," the woman said, facing Mel and Rachel directly. Her hands made motions even as she spoke. "Please sign in."

There was an old-fashioned clipboard, sheet, and pen. Rachel signed first; Mel bit his lip as he struggled with the letters and was unhappy at the result.

Four other people filtered in as the minutes ticked by. When it appeared that they'd reached their crowd, the young man with smartglasses closed the door, and the older woman stepped forward, speaking aloud and signing.

"Welcome, everyone, to the monthly meeting of the American Sign Language Society. We are here to promote the recognition and use of ASL . . ."

They listened and watched. The watching was new for Mel. He hadn't realized how much attention it required to follow her hands as opposed to just listening to her words. It made him think about Jordan, Soong, and the other brain slug hosts he'd met. The way they turned to face him when he spoke, how their eyes fixed on his face. It was a kind of attention he'd been conscious of and found slightly unsettling, but now he knew why.

They were listening. Actively listening. Waiting to see if he was going to sign to them. To speak in a language that they understood.

". . . now accepting applications for our beginner class. This is offered for free to the first twenty-five applicants, though you will need to purchase your own coursebook and any supplementary materials," she said.

Rachel and Mel both signed up and received a course syllabus listing the course text, which could be purchased at the campus bookstore or its online website. As they made their way back to the bus stop, Mel saw that Rachel was quiet, contemplative, not meeting his eyes but staring at the sidewalk, the traffic on the street.

As they got to the bus stop, his hand brushed hers. She turned toward him, and there were tears in her eyes.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Even if this works. Even if I learn to sign," she said. "Am I really going to be talking to her? Or just an alien slug that's wearing my sister like a suit? What if this is all for nothing and Jordie is gone forever?"

They were in public. Mel wasn't sure he should offer a hug. Instead, his hand found hers. He squeezed it, not hard, but firm enough; she grabbed him like a lifeline.

"I know that if we don't learn to sign, we'll never find out," he said quietly. "I knew kids at the orphanage, siblings, who got broken up. They're not supposed to do that, but if they're only half-siblings, or one goes to juvie, or they're special needs or something—and they had no way to talk to them, no way to know if they were alive or dead. No one to help them, because the adults won't talk to you, won't tell you anything, they're just doing their jobs and tell you that's the rules, or the regulations say this or that. The ones that accepted, after a while, were like tigers at the zoo—like something had gone out of them, even if their bodies kept moving and going through the motions of life. The ones who didn't give up, didn't accept the non-answers; it drove them. Sometimes it was the only thing that kept them going."

Mel realized he was squeezing her hand too hard, her relaxed his grip. Rachel didn't let go.

"If you thought she was dead, you wouldn't be here now. You would have given up, moved on. You didn't. That isn't grief, that's hope."

She sniffled. The bus arrived.

They sat next to each other. Her hand found his, and he held it all the way to the bus stop nearest the Cosmic Fill-Up. It was time to work.