The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady by Richard Raley

don’t trust any woman,
boy, not even your grandmother, but she trusts Dale to keep you
safe. How about that?”
    “Guess I’ll try to trust her too.” As far as
I could spit on her.
    Dad gave me a hug of his own, much more like
a wrestling hold than a hug. “Why don’t you get in the kitchen and
start chopping up onions and peppers while I take my shower? I’m
thinking for my King’s going away he’s going to have his favorite
mole enchiladas for dinner.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Sure thing, boy, sure thing.”

Session
106
    The Fog was thick as sewer water by the time
my shop neared closing. T-Bone had left after busting my balls over
my display of particularly delicate glasswork, some in shapes of
animals, others like mythological creatures. Good thing he didn’t
know I made them myself. Back off me, I learned it for a girl . .
.
    One old lady came in, bought a couple of
shot glasses that were probably worth more than she paid, then
left. Everyone was gone. Just me. All alone. Nice and quiet—good
lighting and plenty of space on the counter for me to spread out my
papers outlining my next bit of Artificer experimentation.
    I’d been praying for silence ever since I
was three, the very day I started to realize what sisters were and
how loud and annoying and bossy they could be. In my shop, I
finally got it from time to time.
    Is it wrong that I actually like it when the
customers stay away?
    Guess that means I like losing money.
Electricity costs. Water costs. Retail space costs. It all adds up.
It all weighs you down. If the static rings didn’t become a seller
to more than my already established customer base I was going to be
in deep shit. I was burning money at a rate of higher five-digits a
month. Eventually Ceinwyn was going to tell me to get lost, call me
a failure, and probably kick me right in the balls—no matter how
much she claimed she didn’t care about the money.
    Maybe it’s from being born without anything.
Anything I couldn’t steal at least. I didn’t like spending money if
I could help it. At the Asylum, everything’s provided for you—food,
clothes, school supplies, even entertainment—if you needed
something black market you either traded or you scrounged or you
stole without getting caught. Even for anima. There was no cash. No
debt. Especially not at the levels I was dealing with for my
shop.
    I burned through more a month on anima alone
than my father had made in a year. After two years of operation, I
will have accumulated more debt than my father ever made in his
life.
    The fuck!
    The! Fuck!
    When I allowed myself to think about it, the
situation staggered me silent. Even the glory that is fuck can’t come to describe how screwed I was. Just like the problem I
was trying to fix, my shop couldn’t keep going at the same pace,
something was going to break one way or the other.
    My fingers found my temples and started
rubbing circles as I eyed over my papers for the third pass. I
don’t know what’s worse: my ledger or going over anima conversion
formulas. At least the ledger’s simple. Got to give it that. The
answer’s the answer. A bad answer but it was easy to come to. My
formulas . . .
    Thirteen different anima types acting
thirteen different ways, plus if I got the formulas wrong bad shit
would happen. Like explosions. Like pure, unadulterated anima
burns. As Plutarch used to say, ‘ you only get one anima burn in
your life, if you make it to two you’ll be dead before you leave
this school .’ It hurts—a lot. Imagine being burnt by the very
essence of earth. Yeah . . . it hurts. That meant double and triple
checking every formula I wrote, especially the parts interacting
with each other. The last thing I needed to add to my ledger is
hospital bills.
    My fingers pressed in on my skull, pushing,
trying to relieve my headache. “Maybe I should take up drinking . .
.” I muttered to myself. “Couldn’t make it much worse . . . runs in
the family . . .”
    That’s when