Turtle Racing

Today was a pleasant noontime, auburn leaves were speckled through the low, even-shaved grass of Chestnut Green. I hovered just over the wooden track that had been erected for today’s event, my mother floating beside me with her weaker wing fluttering almost twice as hard to keep her steady. Two hundred dwarves and catfolk crowded around the borders of the track, making it such that us fairies flying overhead had a much nicer view.

“Grolda rounds the bend! She charges down the lane, cuttin’ to the middle. Grolda takes Casper the Third, she pushes past Anton Wild-wild! Grolda coming up on the finish! It’s Grolda!” A fat dwarven man bent over, panting. The announcer carefully set his hand down on the ground and picked up Grolda. The competitors were all turtles.

My mother pressed her hands together, clapping quickly and softly. Grolda was a special turtle, such that betting on her was more of a safe investment than a gamble, and only people visiting from faraway places bet against her. No fairy ever flew close to her, letting the dwarves handle her, for she had a long, spiked mouth and had a tendency to bite her handlers. Grolda the Biter, some called her. She was carefully brought around for a group of dwarven children to pet the back of her shell. I thought it looked a bit rough, but I’d heard it was actually rather soft and slimy.

The race had only been two minutes long. These turtles were trained to run three laps through a fenced-off track, which was set up once per month near the south end of Chestnut Green. Grolda had been racing since before I was born, and her shell was painted with the flag of Tinborough. The other races weren’t from other places, but they’d been painted with the flags of Glibbridge and the Sapphire Capital and the much-loathed Nox Mountain, who often won against us when they met for jousting and croquet.

The oracle had suggested Moxi and I leave the morning after we spoke, but it had yet been three days since. Packing for a weeks-long trip wasn’t a single day’s affair. Moxi was above doing chores, and she was terribly indecisive, telling her mother to prepare one thing for her, then to remove it for another. I was sure about the exact, practical clothes I would take with me, and it was my mother who kept trying to persuade me to take more.

“Excellent race,” I said to my mother. Below us, they were continuing to parade Grolda around, putting her up on one tall catfolk’s shoulder as she tried nipping at his cheek with her spiked maw. Mr. Tongtimber, who had announced the race, pushed forward a keg of foamy stout beer that became quicker the new life of the party than Grolda had been. There were four more kegs carefully stacked behind it, all depleted in eleven minutes.

“I like watching these races with you,” she said softly, “take it as you will, but I never knew turtle races in my first world.”

“I’d heard of them in some rural places, Nebraska, and the like at some kinds of county fairs, but never the sort of thing to have much structure or organization. The turtles weren’t right trained for it, nor regulars to the event, just the sorts to be scooped up and brought along for one informal race.”

“Hana, you’ll have to on and tell me quite what Nee-braa-ska was. Oh, you told me on and more about this Ne-yew Your-shk and all these buildings as big as mountains but square as parchment.”

“It’s as big as some countries are here, but it’s mostly all farmland. I never actually went there, so now you know as much about it as I did. I never really wanted to go there.”

Her eyes opened a little wider, and she tried to mask her smile a little bit, the corners of her mouth intentionally curling down a few degrees, “W-well, I suppose this Earth wasn’t all that much, then.”

“There are a lot of beautiful things I never got to see,” I turned toward Mount Addor, the bits of exposed starglass refracting sunlight off them in vibrant colors. “We used to have an idiom on Earth, it went like: one in the hand is better than two in the bush. Do you agree with it?”

“In the bush?” She questioned.

“It’s from bird hunters. If you catch one, and have it in your hands, that’s better than two sitting in a tree that you may not get at all,” I watched Grolda’s handlers slowly put her back into a makeshift crate. The wood was bent and torn from the turtle’s tendency to bite the outside of it. A few feet away, Casper the Third, who’d come in a respectable ninth place for his flag of Nox Mountain, was fiercely headbutting one of the corners of his own container. I took a deep breath, “Is it worth it to risk going hungry if you could possibly get something a little better?”

My mother hovered, almost still in the air for a good deal of time. Her eyes darted south toward the road out of town, following the distant, clopping hooves of a merchant’s mule. She only shrugged, “I don’t know, Hana,” she muttered disappointedly, “I really don’t know.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“You know what I want you to…” she cut herself off, as if she was correcting herself, “I want you to do what’s right for you. I’ve been always poor with carrying things of tremendous weight. Even so light as a tot you were, I struggled to fly and carry you at once, and not for lack of wanting. I wished I could have flown you all the places I loved and showed you them all. It was this wing, and even it had to fight to stop me.”

“I don’t want to leave.” A group of workers below me started taking the wooden walls of the track down piece by piece. My eyes settled on the grass itself, hardly moving at all even in a subtle breeze.

“I know…” She flew closer to me, whispering, “I know, I know. When I was your age, the same thing would have been too hard for me. I don’t understand this at all, I just imagine if I had the same thrust upon me when I was your age. Chasing after Gwendolyn killed me in my last life."

“Did you ever think she passed away before you went looking for her?” I asked.

My mother frowned, but nodded, “I always thought that was the case. Yet, I had to look for her 'til the very end, anyway. Love is an irrational captor, not benevolent or malevolent; good and evil can both be vanquished. It has been the chain of justice and also the beastmaster of tyrants. It is hatred in all ways. I hate, so vilely, anything that could ever harm you.”

The turtles were well and gone now, and all the people below were digging deeper and deeper into their drips, yelps, and cheers echoing up from below them. Mr. Tongtimber reached around the twice-as-tall Constable Broadster, wrapping him in a tight hug, but also using the human for balance as the dwarf swayed side to side, his face pinked from ale. The constable put his hand on the dwarf’s head, “Jolly on, sir, or I’ll take’a to me lockup for failing to finish yer drink.”

“Oh-hoh! No better’s a place to be lockin’ up in fer a night or twee!” Sung the dwarf. “Pleasures I drink and revels I don’t.”

“My good sir!” The constable huffed, “Now, I know ye was a right respectable businesslady in your past life.”

My mother called down, “Weren’t you a cheese-seller, Broadster?”

“The best damned cheese in two worlds!”

She turned back to me, “Did he ever tell you where he came from?” I shook my head, so she went on, “Broadster used to live in the Sapphire Capital, you know? Was trying to find a way to make cheese like he’d made in his first world, but it just was never quite the same as he remembered it. So, he moved here and wanted to do something he enjoyed instead.”

I took a deep breath, “I’m going to go and see Moxi. How her packing ordeal is.”

“Oh…” She muttered. “It’s beautiful out, want to go down to the Gale Parks first, at least until sunset, then go and see?”

“Alright, Mom. Let’s go. I’ll go and get her when it gets dark.”