Chapter Fifty-One – Live Laugh Lobsters

Chapter Fifty-One – Live Laugh Lobsters

“Some traditions, rooted in various cultural hang-ups that we find distasteful, still survive to this day.

A large part of that can be attributed to the prevalence of those traditional actions in the media we consume and the history and stories of our previous generations.”

–Excerpt from ‘The Ongoing Tradition’ 2035

***

Lucy gasped. “Cat!” she said before leaning forwards and spinning the booklet she was holding around.

The restaurant was a pretty fancy place. It was set a floor above the zoo, along one of the walls. There were big glass panels between us and the zoo itself, angled so that the seats closest to the wall could look down into the jungle-y gardens below, or up and through the large dome just above.

The place was nice. With actual flesh-and-blood waitresses coming to the tables and paper menus to order from, like in an old-timey movie. The prices were not so old-timey, unfortunately. Not that I really minded too much.

“What is it?” I asked as I squinted at the menu. Lucy was too excited to hold it level, so the words were bouncing around and hard to read. The pictures helped a little. “Is it the seafood dish?”

“There’s lobster,” she said. “It says it’s real lobster too.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Can’t be that hard to grow some of those in captivity, right?”

There was no way it was actually fished. If the weather over land was wild most of the time, then I couldn’t imagine how nasty it was over the ocean. And the ocean housed a lot of nasty alien bastards too. There was a constant move to cull them, but they’d come up to nibble on a fishing ship, I was sure.

Besides, I was pretty sure that wild lobster was extinct.

“This is rich people food,” Lucy said.

At rich people prices too. “Order some,” I said. “There’s two claws, right? We can share one. Or is it the tail?”

Lucy turned the menu around. “I don’t know. The picture is just a red thing. Oh, and it comes with brussel sprouts and a sauce and a salad!”

I grinned. It was impossible not to when Lucy was this excited over food. For my part, I stuck to something that looked a little more down to earth. They didn’t have what I’d usually order at a restaurant, but that was probably for the best. Chicken nuggets and burgers didn’t seem very fancy. So I stuck to the pasta section and hoped that I didn’t make too much of a mess of my face while eating.

Our waitress came over. A twenty-something girl with a few piercings that clashed with her uniform. She took our orders and was very patient when Lucy asked about how to eat lobster.

“You do need to crack the shell. We serve the meal with some special cutlery to help.”

“Oh,” Lucy said. “That’s cool! Cat, you’re stronger than me, can you help if it’s too hard?”

“Uh, sure,” I said.

The waitress smiled, then left, and I found myself reaching a hand to the middle of the table. Lucy did the same, and our fingers entwined next to a very unnecessary scentless candle. “This is nice,” Lucy said.

“It’s better than some of the dining experiences I’ve had lately,” I said.

Lucy nodded, then paused. “Have you eaten during an incursion? I mean, when you’re out murdering things?”

“Huh, uh, yeah, once or twice? I mean, Myalis will let me order food. Snack bars and stuff to drink. Gomorrah actually has a mini-fridge in her car, so whenever I ride it around I make a point of stealing a drink.”

“No!” Lucy said with a grin. “That’s awful.”

“Eh, she probably orders them by the dozen. Besides, they’re tasty.”

“Steal me one next time,” Lucy said, and I laughed at the switch from condemning it to wanting to be in on the theft. “I wanna taste it!”

“I will,” I promised. “You know. You could probably steal one yourself. Gom and Franny are basically neighbours now.”

“That’s super weird,” Lucy said.

“The nuns living nearby?” I asked.

“Having neighbours. I mean, we’ve always had them, I guess. But usually it’s… I don’t know. People that we’ll never meet or interact with, I guess. It’s strange knowing that there’s someone you know living two floors down. Makes it like the whole building might be full of people that it wouldn’t suck to meet.”

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“Wasn’t that always the case?” I asked. The orphanage was on the lower floors of a pretty old mega building, one of those early ones that went up in the thirties or so. “We never lived in a place that didn’t have others in the same building.”

“This is different,” Lucy said.

“How?” I asked.