Was this payback for the fight between Elm and Cy? I hadn’t wanted them to fight, hadn’t meant to make them fight…
“Foot, or commonly known as a Bigfoot, or their winterized counterparts, a Yeti, technically classified variants of Creeson Nine according to the Galactic Order. Your mother would commonly be considered, uhm, something like what an Easter Bunny is depicted as. She was a Haslepyr, to be exact. Think more hare than fluffy bunny.” She wasn’t smiling, or laughing. She was Cy-being-serious kinda serious.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Like, laughed my butt off, cackling until I was choking on my own spit. Good god, what? Was she mad? High? Drunk?
Sunny’s smile was small, sympathetic. “Your mama worried you might react that way. I think it’s why she put this all off for as long as she did. She always did worry your memory loss was permanent.”
That had my cackle dying dead in its raucous tracks.
My memory loss?
“Great.” I tossed my hands up, incredulous. “So now I not only have an Easter Bunny mom and Bigfoot dad, but now I’m an amnesiac?”
“Your mom was from a planet called Sylvylen Prime.” She looked uncomfortable at the look I gave her at this supposed news but she forged ahead. “Lepyrs fled their home world as the wars raged, any way they could. Long distance escape pods are not the reliable things they should be. Many were scattered, crash landing across the galaxy. Several found refuge on Earth.”
Staring at her for the longest time, her expression even, calm, cool, I finally gathered the nerve to ask, “Where- Where is this coming from? Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”
Grimacing, Sunny took my hand in hers, her other hand coming over mine to pat the top. “Sweetie, I know it’s a lot to take in. It’s not easy to be hit with it like this but you have a right to know.”
“You really believe this,” I breathed as I tore my hand from hers and stood.
“Is it really that hard to believe?” With a shrug, she smiled. “You didn’t honestly believe my nonsense about the boys and my Forest having the worst case of hypertrichosis in existence to date, did you? I mean, look at them! They’re milder forms of a full bred Lo denaii. My Forest, his mother part Zhubarbeast, his father half human, and our boys are half Lepyr, Coniculepyr, from their mother, from me, and part Lo denaii, human, and Zhubarbeast from my Forest.”
“Right.So… now I’m expected to believe you’re part of the alien Easter bunny weirdness too, I’m assuming? Your vegetables are made gargantuan from what, advanced alien knowledge or something, is that the trick? Where are you hiding the fur and ears? Do you shave head to toe every day? Hadplastic surgeries to make your appearance more humanlike? Huh? And what, you traded in your long ears for human ones?
“Well, actually, see that’s what I was getting at,” she calmly went on. “It’s what happened to you that we decided not to go through with the procedure for the boys.” With a small smile, she added, “My Forest has a nose for gardening, you could say, on the veggie front.”
“Procedure?”
At the look on my face, she hurried on. “It was supposed to be a simple procedure but, uh, well, there was an unfortunate circumstance and it left you, uh, well, you sorta, kinda, lost any memories leading up to the, uh, accident and that’s when your hair started falling out.” Sunny nodded like she thought the stunned stupid look on my face had anything to do with me actually buying any of that.
“Alopecia. That’s why my hair started falling out,” I muttered quietly, firmly.
“Do you remember anything before that?” she asked, curious. Large blue eyes with shots of green at the centers studied me intently.
“I remember Cy, Elm, Birch, us all playing together, my parents,” I blurted. That was, admittedly, about all I really recalled of anything before I started losing my hair, now that I thought about it. It’s pretty normal to forget very young memories. I never thought anything of it.
“You remembered the boys?” she chirped happily, like this pleased her immensely. “She never told us you remembered the boys. She made it sound like a total blank out but for your parents. Hm.”
“And then you turned the rest of my life shortly after the terrible teens a massive block of bullshit, total bullshit thereafter, when you banned the guys from ever seeing or speaking to me,” I huffed out. “Do you have any idea what thatwas like? You took my best friends in the entire world from me. I was devastated.”
Sunny blinked, her mouth dropped open, then she shut her trap with an audible snap. “I- Is that what you think?” She truly looked taken aback.
Was she seriously just going to lie about forbidding them from seeing me? Brow furrowing in a scowl, she murmured softly, “Sweetie, is that what your parents told you?”
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” I refrained from throwing Elm under the bus, god knows why.
Her frown was a full blown scowl now. “May I see those papers with the symbols on them?” It was a weird ask but I gamely handed them over. If it would get her to leave sooner, then all the better.
Scouring over them, she started to mumble under her breath and then glanced up and asked for a pen and paper. “Now, I’m not an expert in Lo denaii but I believe this should about cover it, and this is for those.” Her hand lifted and she pointed to the first stack of papers, scribbled on from front to back. “They’re correspondence,” she told me. “Between Forest and your father, and your father and mother and myself.”
Standing, she wiped invisible dust off her pants and adjusted her purse over her shoulder. “Obviously, you have thoughts on all of this, reservations, naturally, and I don’t blame you, honey, but those,” reaching out, she tapped the papers, “those are a good start at setting everything to rights. I’m just so darn sorry it all had to come out this way.”
“And how, exactly, did this little accident of mine cause hair loss and amnesia? What were they trying to do to me and how were they trying to do it?” That should poke holes in her nonsense.
Her smile was small, not quite reaching her eyes. “They’d have given you the stars if they could. They loved you very much.”
Folding my arms over my chest, hugging my middle, I stood there, stared, waited.
