“What is this strange food?”
“It’s pizza.”
“And this is the first course of how many?”
“One. Unless you want to raid the cupboards where I have some cookies.”
He gapes at me as I pick up the small cup of garlic butter and drench my pizza with it.
“You have despicable manners,” he declares, probably because his plate is still empty and he seems to think that he should be waited on first.
“I’m glad to hear that,” I say while I grab a much-needed beer and sit down at the table. Kit prances on my shoulder even though I’m well aware she doesn’t need any of the pizza. I pull off a pepperoni and hand it over.
She makes some happy noises as I watch Torin slowly reach out and pick up a piece of pizza before examining it closely.
“This is not food. This is an atrocity. This is?—”
“It’s all this humble peasant can afford,” I lie.
He nods, taking pity on my peasant persona, and takes a bite. I see a spark of enjoyment before he quickly covers it up. “It is… edible.”
“It’s delicious, isn’t it?”
Torin takes another bite and moans. “What is this called? I shall make this a new staple in my palace.”
“Pizza.”
“And the white stuff on top?”
“Mozzarella.”
He freezes. “We are cannibals?”
My face scrunches up. “No! Mozzarella is a type of cheese! You’re the one who went off on a tangent about it being a person. It’s cheese!”
“I would lust after mozzarella after eating this as well.”
I sigh and wonder if maybe I could drown him out with some TV. I reach for the remote and hit the button to turn it on. “Now this is a TV, it’s?—”
His weapon embeds itself right into the glass, shattering it all over my floor before the TV teeters and then crashes to the ground.
“I have saved your life from the miniature assassins.”
I stare at the wreckage as I think about how I could explain to him what a TV is so he’d understand why the little people inside are not assassins, and that he destroyed our only form of entertainment for the evening.
“Thank you for saving my life,” I say instead.
He beams at me. “You are quite welcome.”
After I finish two pieces of pizza, I move to the couch where I watch Torin eat the entire rest of the pizza that he’d bitchedabout. Then he longingly gazes into the box like another whole pizza might appear if he stares long enough. When that evidently bores him, he looks over at me.
“What do we do for entertainment in this world?”
“We mostly just stare at walls. I’ll stare this way and you stare at that one.”
He glances at the wall before slowly looking back at me. “You are one sassy man… I already forgot your name.”
“Riley the Peeved Peasant.”
