Humans Make the Best Winterwear

Rica tightened the stitches in her knee, patted the folds of her skirt into place, then raised a fist of sickly green to rap upon Mr. Sporespire’s door.

When it swung open to reveal Mr. Sporespire — a smile shining from beneath his fungal cap — Rica snapped to attention, throwing a mock salute.

“Sir! I’m here about a monetary opportunity sir!” she announced, beaming.

“Miss Cadáver!” He chuckled, amused already. “Please, come in.” He moved his lanky form aside, and Rica stepped into the classroom. “I’ve actually been grading your class,” he went on as she passed him, “so don’t look at my desk, please.”

“All good grades I hope, sir!” Rica said, coming to stand by the far windows. It was still so strange, in an exciting way, to be at the school after all the other students had gone home.

Sporespire chuckled again, and resumed his place at his desk. “Nice try. Give me just a moment to finish what I was doing, then I’ll get you ready and tell you what you need to do.”

Rica nodded enthusiastically, doing her best not to look at whose work he was grading. Mr. Sporespire was the school’s very best art teacher, Rica thought. A towering mass of bioluminescent fungus that just vaguely made the shape of a person, he was held together by roots, warm tea, and (in Rica’s opinion) a propensity to be perhaps a little too kind to the students who still drew stickmen in the tenth grade.

Sporelings — tiny, adorable mushrooms with smiling faces and stubby little legs — began to gather at her feet as she waited, so she scooped one up and tickled its round body. She wasn’t exactly sure how many of these Mr. Sporespire kept around, or how exactly they were created, but she enjoyed their company.

She’d always wanted a pet at home, but knew it was a terrible idea. Suture-folk like herself didn’t tend to mix well with anything interested in the playful biting or pulling of loose strings and stitches.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” came Sporespire’s voice as he rose at last. “And, I do apologise, but you’re going to need to get a little dirty for this one. You did say you were open to anything, so long as it paid in coin as much as extra credit.”

Rica nodded, turning to him happily. “Just tell me what to do.” She placed the sporeling she had been petting on the nearest desk.

“Throw on some overalls while I do,” he said, gesturing to a wall of aprons, overalls and gloves of all sizes. Rica fetched a pair that would fit and began to pull them on as he continued. “Long story short is there’s an eyebat in the vents. You’ll have to climb up and after it.”

“Eugh…” Rica stuck out her tongue. “How did it get up there?”

“It ran away from an exam that was run in here this week, I think.” Sporespire smiled. “I can’t believe it’s nearly the end of the year.”

“I can!” Rica giggled, a little offputtingly. “I’m doing all of this to afford the ski-trip, after all!”

“The ski-trip?” Sporespire frowned. “Rica, that excursion is paid for by the school.”

“Not the way I want to do it, sir! I need some makeup, and a new jacket first.” Rica grinned. Sometimes even she was impressed by her ability to conceal the truth without lying.

Mr. Sporespire’s expression softened, and he shrugged. “Well, it isn’t as if I’d say no to your help regardless. Are you ready to go?”

Rica nodded, fastening the final buckle at her shoulder. “Just one thing; you meant to have said flew.” She felt the corners of her mouth curling.

Sporespire cocked his head. “I’m sorry?”

“You said the eyebat ran away.” Rica explained, now smirking in full. “But, it must have flown, not run. It doesn’t have legs, Mr. Sporespire.”

Sporespire chuckled dryly, then simply shook his head. He’d learned from past experience not to indulge Rica Cadáver any further than that. “Let me find you a ladder in the back.”

#

Eyebats were drawn to mischief, Rica recalled, hauling herself up and over another rise in the filthy ventilation. Were she clambering around in the school’s air conditioning for any other reason, the puckish thing might have come to her, instead. But it knew why Rica was here as well as she did.

The vent itself was just barely taller than Rica’s shoulders and just as wide, so she could move at a crouch with relative comfort, given the circumstances. Her hands were free to swipe at any airborne eyeballs that flew her way and, thankfully, at least one in every four or five maintenance lights seemed to be working. The space was just barely bright enough for her to see.

“I know you’re in here…” she mumbled. Her voice rang metallically off the cobweb-covered walls. “If you turn yourself in peacefully, I promise to be gentle. You’re my last job, after all, Mr. Eyebat! You’re my ticket to warmth, and high fashion, and free time again at last…”

A fat spider appeared in her path, so she smiled, and petted it as she passed by. It was actually kind of peaceful up here, she thought. She never did blame spiders for their choices made in real estate.

She had just reached a fork in the ventilation when a wet, chittering noise rang out from the path to her right.

“Got you,” she whispered, starting to head that way. Then she stopped, and peered back at the lefthand path. If the eyebat managed to squeeze past her, she thought, it would have a fifty percent chance (Rica felt she was very good at math) of taking the path that would lead it right out and into Mr. Sporespire’s office, back where she had come from. That would make things easy — maybe even easier than if she caught the thing in the first instance.

She thought for a moment. Then, smiling and shaking her head at the simplicity of the plan, did what any rational person would have done in her situation; she tore her arm off at the shoulder. Her green flesh parted as the sutures binding it twanged and came undone. The sleeve of her school shirt fell loosely over the now empty space.

She placed the arm stump-down on the vent floor, then had it wave to her. Lucky she was already dead, she thought, or an open wound on the floor of a vent might have been unhygienic.

“That’ll spook it,” she mumbled, rather deviously, then continued on after her quarry. Eyebats were cowardly critters, she knew, and even a small obstacle for it to fly over if it were to go that way might encourage it to go in the more ideal direction instead.

By the time she found the thing she was wearing a bonafide layer of dusty, greyish grime. Jorgie would have to wash her hair now too when she saw her, Rica realised with dread. Jorgie wouldn’t like that.

The eyebat, for its part, was rather innocently hovering behind a large rat, which seemed to be going for an evening stroll. The eyebat’s chiropteran wings — either side of the head-sized, lidless eyeball that made up the rest of its body — fluttered in place to keep the thing aloft.

Rica noticed a dead end only a short ways up ahead, and frowned. It was strange for an eyebat to corner itself.

“What’s got you so interested?” she asked, and the eyebat made a sound like a bird chirping underwater. Rica was almost certain it didn’t have a mouth to make that kind of noise with, but didn’t think too much on it.

She eyed the rat. Perhaps it was a mischievous rat, what with eyebats being drawn to mischief. Perhaps it was off to do a mischievous thing to another rat. Rica would actually like to see that, she realised.

No — she shook her head, dispelling her curiosity — she was here for the eyebat. An eyebat for coin, coin for makeup, makeup for passage, and then her ski-trip was as good as perfect before it had even started.

She began to sneak up on the eyebat, which was not a very difficult thing to begin doing, crouching as she already was. She stretched her remaining arm out to one side, curved so that she might swipe, and trap it like a football against her chest.

The eyebat glanced at her sidelong, its eye-torso seeming to rotate independently of its wings. Rica froze. She was just barely in range to grab the thing, she guessed, but it wouldn’t be easy.

“Don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be,” she whispered stiffly.

The eyebat slowly turned to face her in full. The rat faced it in turn, drawn in by the drama.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Rica went on, daring to take another step forwards. “I just… Need… To…”

The eyebat suddenly burst towards her at speed, glancing away from her grapple by choosing the side of her body that was at least one arm less capable of catching it.

Rica grunted with surprise as it struck her, then whirled after it as it passed. It disappeared around the corner Rica had just rounded.

It was faster than Rica could move at a crouch so, thinking quickly, she did what any rational person would have done in her situation; she gripped her bottom jaw, hooking her thumb into her mouth, and tore off her head.

No longer obstructed by the low ceiling, she sprinted at full speed after the eyebat, with her head cradled at her chest so she could see. Her footsteps were so loud she wondered what the classrooms beneath her must have sounded like as she passed them over.

It didn’t take her long to start to gain on the bumbling thing, though it was a close race. As they neared the intersection, she bit her lip nervously, having never really thought her severed arm plan would get this far.

The eyebat reached the crossroad, paused for a moment, then seemed to panic at the sight of Rica’s disembodied, grasping arm sticking up from the floor. It looked back at its pursuer, then took off again anxiously in the direction of Mr. Sporespire’s classroom, the one-way exit that Rica had come in by.

Success, Rica thought smugly.

When the eyebat saw the exit, it stopped in its metaphorical tracks, realising its mistake. It turned to face the sprinting suture-girl, whose head was already cracking a grin of triumph.

Mr. Sporespire, hardly halfway through his grading for the evening, looked up from his desk just in time to see Rica Cadáver soaring through the air of his classroom, an eyebat grasped confidently under her one remaining arm, and her head tumbling separately out of the air vent alongside the rest of her in a plume of dusty smoke.

#

“I’ve never even had that many spiderwebs in my own hair, Rica.”

Jorgie, the best special effects artist in the tenth grade, batted disapprovingly at Rica’s face with a skull-shaped sponge. The latter’s head was still separated from her body, and so had been propped up on a shelf in the backstage changing rooms. Her hair, still damp from the wash Jorgie had given it, was pinned up in curl clips, away from her face. Her skin was becoming less green with every powdery impact of foundation.

“How did you manage to lose both an arm and your head again?” asked Gladia, who trotted around the rest of Rica, stitching her arm to her body with a length of white ribbon. She was a ballerina, and she was on in five. Her goat legs came up into a beautiful pink tutu.

“I—” Rica was interrupted by another makeup bombardment from Jorgie.

“Don’t talk to her,” Jorgie told Gladia, over her shoulder. “Do you look okay?”

“I’m ready to go on, yeah,” said Gladia as she worked. “Thanks for staying back to help the troupe, Jorge.”

“It worked out well for everyone.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’m too nice. At least Rica paid me for the makeup.”

Rica glanced to one side (there wasn’t much else to do as a severed head) into the wide mirror at Jorgie’s flank. In its reflection, a gigantic spider decorated with beautiful ornaments was doing her makeup, rather than the schoolgirl she saw when she looked forward. This was Jorgie’s true form; she was a shapeshifter, or a jorōgumo, more specifically.

Or, jugomoro. Geronimo?

Rica wasn’t quite sure how to say it.

“I’m impressed that you managed to save up all that coin in time, Rica,” said Gladia. She pulled the final ribbon-stitch tight in the suture-girl’s shoulder. “Still a month or so to spare! You’ll have to tell us what it’s like, shopping with the humans.”

“Couldn’t you have done it without needing to be put back together so often, though?” Jorgie asked.

Rica grinned. “It’ll be worth it, you guys. I promise I’ll let you both borrow whatever I buy.”

The others nearly protested, but both ended up shrugging in agreement. It was true after all, what everybody said; humans made the very best winterwear.

Rica closed her eyes happily in anticipation of her adventure. It would be late when she got to the humans’ city, but she didn’t have much choice but to leave for it right away. Most adults about the school (and especially those that monitored the dorms) would disapprove of a suture-person painted up to pass for alive, with every intention of infiltrating the ranks of the humans for a jacket.

If the shop was closed, she would simply wait for it to open.

If she was asked who she was, she would simply tell another not-lie.

If she was discovered and chased out of town with pitchforks and torches, she would probably get very sad about it, because she didn’t have a backup plan for that.

Humans were, after all, nearly as good at chasing things as they were at making warm but lightweight snow jackets.

#

“I still can’t believe how… Alive, you look,” said Henrique, dismounting his horse first so that he could help Rica do the same. “I knew Jorgie was good, but if I’d known she could do this I might never have made this bet.”

Rica took his hand when it was proffered, and swung her human-coloured legs off one side of the horse to join him on the dirt road. A short walk before them, the lights of the human city shone beautifully against the night sky.

“All you had to do was believe in me, and I’d have paid you too!” She giggled, then gave a twirl, ecstatic with her disguise.

Henrique turned to his horse, and fed it a handful of darkness, or shadow, or death or something. Rica had known him and his steed Trolley for a long time, but really had no idea how headless horsemen worked.

When he turned the gaze of his flickering pumpkin-head back to Rica, he gave her a nod. “Good to take it from here, Cadáver?”

“Yeah.” She smiled. “You sure you want to wait for me? I might be there until morning just to —”

“It’s not that I want to wait around all night within throwing distance of a bunch of humans,” Henrique cut her off, chuckling. “It’s that I don’t trust you to outrun them, if you blow your cover. They’re really good at chasing things, you know.”

Rica nodded happily. “But nothing outruns Trolley.”

“Nothing.” Henrique’s pumpkin-mouth cracked into a smirk, and Trolley gave a whinny. “Now go on. They could be closing the shops as we speak. We’ll be waiting around here someplace.”

Rica gave him a hug, but only because boys would do anything if you hugged them, not because she liked him (she was not as good at not-lying to herself). Then she gave Trolley a quick pat, and waved them both goodbye as she started off towards the human town.

#

Rica’s heart sank more with every step she took towards the shopping centre. Despite all of her efforts, her perfect disguise, and almost a full year of extra credit, chores and savings… The humans couldn’t take their eyes off her.

The streets were positively bustling, even with children, despite the time of night. Every front door was open, and alive with laughter and conversation. Parents ferried their youngest around in adorable groups, and teenagers travelled in packs, trading and bartering candy from their baskets.

She wasn’t sure it was going to ruin her plans, but Rica was shocked to see that she was the only accursed human here!

“What in the world is ‘Halloween’...?” she mumbled to herself, dodging a tiny, adorable ghost as it ran beaming to the next front door.

She never had to dress up at all. She could have been here hours earlier. She could have saved on all the coin she’d paid Jorgie for her material, or all the time she spent earning it beforehand. She’d walked past at least four people who looked like she did when she woke up this morning.

Didn’t humans chase monsters like her? Why were they now celebrating how she looked before she wasted all that time dressing up?

The only store open in the shopping centre was selling things like Henrique-esque pumpkins, cats made of black plastic and witch’s cauldrons that doubled as candy baskets. She gazed longingly through the sports shop’s winter display. Colourful ski jackets and snowshoes of every size gleamed like treasures.

But she would have to wait.

Sitting on the street outside the shops, she saw only one way to kill the time. She smeared the makeup from her face, and spent just a fraction of her coin on one of those cauldron baskets.

Whatever Halloween was, she decided, it did seem like a lot of fun.