Trolls in the Hamptons by Celia Jerome

healthy?
    â€œI’ll make enough for your young man, too,” she said.
    So maybe she wasn’t so bad, after all.
    Â 
    We left early for the hospital. Susan couldn’t eat breakfast so I didn’t either. I figured I could get a croissant and a fruit cup from the kiosk in the lobby while Susan had her tests. Except they didn’t call her for her nine o’clock appointment until after eleven. I was starving. The waiting room was mobbed, with people from lots of nationalities and languages and conditions. No one was real friendly, most were nervous. The acoustics were dreadful, with names being called and doctors being paged and people on their cell phones, despite the signs. There was no way I could concentrate on the new book.
    Susan thought I had almost an hour to kill once they called her. She had to drink some crap, then sit by herself before they injected more radioactive stuff that could show contrast. According to my cousin, who ought to know, cancer cells appeared on the screens as a different color.
    I got a buttered roll and an orange juice, and a bottle of water for later, then found a stone ledge outside the hospital where I could sit down to eat. Now I could breathe the exhaust from the street traffic and the smoke from the workers and patients—good grief, the cancer patients—who weren’t permitted to light up inside. The weather wasn’t as nice as yesterday, kind of overcast and dreary, but the atmosphere was better than the heavy miasma of the drab radiology waiting room with too many anxious bodies and sporadic air conditioning.
    I looked at the blank pad I carried, but had no new inspirations to write down or enthusiasm for reworking the outline. The hospital depressed me, I guess. And I had to get back upstairs to be cheerful for Susan, so checking my watch broke whatever concentration I might have managed.
    When the hour was almost up, I left time to find a ladies’ room. The one near the nuclear medicine waiting room wasn’t real clean, and I had second thoughts about all that radioactivity that had to go somewhere. I went up a floor and followed the signs. This bathroom was less crowded, with two women talking at the sinks, two of the five stalls occupied.
    I put enough toilet paper on the seat to make my mother happy. I still couldn’t wait to wash my hands. The problem was, a troll was bent over the sink before me.
    Wrong, wrong, wrong.
    First, this was the ladies’ room.
    Second, a woman nearest the door was nonchalantly drying her hands on paper towels as if pink soap wasn’t spurting across the room.
    Third, there were no such things as trolls.
    I flattened myself back against the stall door. “You do not belong here!”
    The woman gave me a dirty look. “What, you own the john?”
    â€œNot you. Him.” I pointed. She looked right at Fafhrd and shook her head, muttering something about a psychiatric ward and slobs. She went out.
    â€œGo away!” I tried to whisper, so the women in the last two occupied stalls wouldn’t hear.
    Fafhrd obviously wanted to get the water to keep flowing, but the sinks had that industrial device that only kept the water on for enough time to wash maybe one hand. He kept pounding the spigot part, which only broke the metal piping.
    Before he destroyed anything else, I edged toward the sink farthest from him and turned the faucet handles. Maybe he only wanted to wash the pink soap off his hands. And his chest, his neck, his hairless skull.
    Fafhrd smiled at me and splashed the water at his smooth, stony abdomen. Then someone flushed a toilet.
    Uh-oh. The sound got his attention. He stood up, bashing a hole in the ceiling, and cocked his head in the direction of the stalls.
    â€œNo!”
    A middle-aged woman with a name badge came out, gathering her purse and her jacket. “Are you all right, miss?”
    No!
    The troll walked right past her and knocked the door off the stall. I could