Darla Intro

Darla, she deserved to be happy. I wanted my best friend to be happy. I hope you believe that, if it’s the only thing you believe that I have to say.

It was the summer of ’37 and the last one before our final year in the Mechanic’s Guild trade school:  summer vacation, what a novel idea from the farlanders. Darla and me were as inseparable as always, cow and a cowdog, born to look out for one another. Darla Dairy came from a long line of farmers, cheesemakers and butterchurners. Dairy was more than in her name, it was in her blood. Or that’s what her family would have liked to think. Being a milkmaid was the furthest thing from her mind.

Darla was a unique specimen. She was a homely holstaur, rare but not unheard of, and still going through the worst puberty I’d ever seen. Her acne was the kind that would leave scars in an orange peel landscape of craters when it finally went away. The scourging infection went right down into the valley of her B-cups. And you could see it, because she always left them out in the open with tied shirts and halter tops. Nothing else would do; she said it got worse if they got sweaty and couldn’t get air.

Pizzatits, they called her. Well, not exactly, you have to understand the insult isn’t the same. The language is different after all. We have a messy pastry back home that’s like a tart filled with sour cream, and the name puns nicely with nasty breasts before you anglicize it. But I think I’ve lived and breathed enough third world culture to make the right substitutions. Here I’m already admitting that this all has a few lies in it. But try to forgive me. Wordplay rarely translates well.

Where was I? Right, the end of that fateful summer. We’d both been busting our asses in the broiling heat to earn some extra cash: helping lay utility lines under the packed dirt streets of our burb of Katason. It was nothing but a growing little military town then, not even a dot on the map, springing up around the air base the farlanders thought for some reason was important to have in that corner of nowhere. Thank whatever convoluted reasoning for that. Electricity, running water, everything mechanical and physical… it was like magic to us, except everyone had it and everyone could use it. People were still transitioning from the feudal mindset then. The scars of Contact had healed with the shared bonds of Big Gate. We were the first generation maturing after the war, born after the alliance. And I have to tell you, we were totally in love with all your world had to offer, and I mean more than the seemingly endless supply of eligible men.

Earth was a fantasy land where anything seemed possible. Symbols of it became prized. If we had the things you had, then it felt like we could have everything you had. You have to understand that worship to get some of the crazy things we did. Me and Darla were worse than most, complete fangirls. We wouldn’t be working toward being grease girls otherwise.  That’s what got us into trouble.

We were walking the two miles of dirt road back home from the ramshackle collection of stalls that passed for the market in Katason, and I was on cloud nine. I’d just thrown down nearly a whole month’s pay for a pair of genuine blue jeans, not the popular reproductions, the real McCoy. They were too tight on my ass and I couldn’t bear to cut a notch for my overfluffed tail, but I was so proud of them. I remember taking them from that shady gnarled elf in a back alley and just smelling them: the lingering scent of detergent, the faintest hint of artificial indigo, all under the cotton and old sweat, a tangible piece of a place you could walk toward forever and never reach. Darla strolled by my shoulder, lowing on about some harebrained scheme she had to motorize a bicycle. Those were common, and within a bracket girls from peasant families like us could afford.

She loved engines. Hell, we both did. And between the half-baked talk of soup can carburetors and where to score some gas, I picked up a strange scent. It was an orange-colored smell, sweet and cloying, the smell of hot antifreeze. On the horizon, the setting sun glinted off something, something polished and black, something that didn’t belong.