Page 49 of Fibre and Ink

Tane: No! I genuinely wrote it for Aster

Aster: oh my god, you’re the best!

Tane: you’re so welcome

Mickey: ...

Aster: you’re the best after Mickey, my incredible and cute and strong and amazing BOYFRIEND

Harlow: I am leaving this group chat and deleting all of your numbers

Aster: no you are not I will add you back, bitch

Harlow: Mickey, Aster is bullying me!

Aster: am not

Dillon: So, what time Sunday and what should we bring?

Mickey: I’ll let you know the details asap

Epilogue

Aster

“This job actually requires no alpacas.” I said.

Aladdin kept pace beside me, eyeing the remains of the large bowl of salad.

“No alpacas needed at all, for this.”

Stitch joined us, on my other side.

Mickey laughed as he came out from the farmhouse. “Need some help?”

“Just a little.”

Between us we got the salad inside the house and safe from alpacas.

Tane, Dillon and Harlow had driven off a half hour before and we were slowly packing up the leftovers from the barbeque. Mickey had moved the picnic table out to one of the fields with a nice mountain view so we could hang out with the alpacas but keeping food from them had proved tricky.

All the same, it had been a really successful day.

I was ready to become a farmer’s husband. (Not that he’d proposed or anything, we were taking it slow and steady and that’s fine, but like. I could see it.)

I slept well, curled against Mickey’s side.

The alpaca all knew me now and were very close to listening to me.

We’d saved the lake, Mickey and I were starting the second season of X-Files and he’d promised to show me another old Japanese movie that night.

Life? It was fucking good.

To top it all off, I was writing an article about the adventure we’d had, exposing the proposed data center. I was confident someone would pay me to publish it when it was done.

It wasn’t poetry, but maybe, just maybe, it could change the world.

Empower concerned citizens to fight back, defend their habitats from unfeeling corporations.