After a long day's work, I'd retire to the kitchen to fry myself some eggs, chug some milk, and toast bread for a handful of berries and some honey to drizzle over them. I was eating finely, no doubt – between cattle steak, home-baked sweets, pork pasta, chicken soup, campfire roasted fish, and buckets upon buckets of fruit in yogurt, I was making The King look like a starving beggar. Living with an accountant and an oil-driller had its perks. I was looking as strong as I felt, no longer threatened by The Chief's callous harassment nor his sexual threats, and was beginning to make even him look rather weak. But I wanted to respect the balance, so eventually, I started picking my meals more carefully, making sure not to outgrow the de-facto man of the house – even if I was certain now I could handle my own against him. Or at least, in my young, thirteen-year old hubris, that was what I assumed. I still never wanted to find out, and I was still sore from the time he pushed me into the wall in front of everyone else to establish social dominance. I don't even remember what I said – just his arm on my neck. Yet, my bedroom was blessed with a lock to which he resentfully had no key, so I never met him in a way that wasn't supervised. Even when, in my private throes, I'd accidentally made too much noise, and heard him complain to his wife about my banging on the wall – he was unable to reach me for reproach in a room where someone wasn't watching. This was the advantage of The Rationeer's constant family gatherings, with people I hardly knew – there was always someone to see if he was on his best, and he was decidedly more preoccupied with making sure they laughed at his jokes. Nobody else was allowed to be funny except for him. Either way, he was bound to return for Arabia to farm more liquids for their barons and tycoons. Though he bragged about his role as spokesperson for the other employees, as their representative, I had a murky feeling he was overstating his helpfulness to them – because he always seemed to have a little more money than you'd expect from someone who'd just traveled home. That, and his work poisoned the land of his brethren – it was lucky they were unable to reach The New World, or they'd have done the same there already, and turned all their rivers just as black. I wondered how long that would last, given the way Silk Roads are sewn so fast.
Regardless, with him gone for another year, I was back to my old ways as a vegetable-picker, and eating raw carrots to stave off the hunger pangs that came from quitting flesh. It was a mad craving, meat, and demanded all of my faculties – and bred in me a lust for violence, action, and gnashing teeth. I could feel the fire in my lungs and lower belly, and it set me entirely ablaze! If I hadn't quit eating it on such a regular basis, I'd have become a wolf, or a tiger, or something far, far worse. I wasn't even sure what. I could see nothing in my dreams but pounding paws and fleeing prey for weeks. It took me a while to reason out there was a civilized way to hunt, and an uncivilized way – that kept man from eating himself, and all those around him. But I did not contain that civilization myself, so long as I was addicted to the carnal source. This made me scared of myself, and the only method of blowing that steam that I had was to take it out on the yard. Eventually, I began to crave the work, and even impressed The Rationeer. For some reason, she'd asked that I start calling her 'Grandmother' then, and that I say 'I love you' with a hug every single night before bedtime. Like I'd earned some kind of commendation, I suppose. At the same time, she had only disdain for my dietary reversal, once she realized I was getting thinner again and staying strong – to her, I suppose, it looked unnatural. Like some kind of comedy. They refused to be informed of how I'd done it, and told me "it'd never last" and that I was mad. All of my knowledge and advice, earned through years of medicinal schooling at the castle, was lost on them. They were busy with their divorce, entertaining their guests, and with their second helpings of beef stew, with gravy and biscuits.

Around the time the yard was finally finished, it was time to harvest the small, fenced garden in its far corner. I'd built wooden boxes and shoveled dirt into them for which the food to grow, and The Rationeer had made her mornings out of watering them every second day. I'd also heaped so much soil into those muddy pits they'd turned into flat, even ground. Practically at the same time, I was turning a hill into a stone sidewalk, complete with gravel beds for the trees, wood-chip beds for the bushes, and even a brick patio by the back door. The Chief, though rarely present, had managed to build a wooden deck and a set of patio chairs for the family to lounge around in. It was the nicest thing he'd done since he'd made his return. He was forced to remain until the house had sold, and even if he left off for the oil-fields again, he was (as far as he knew) still married until the house sold. The tension was like a violin, strung with razor wire.

That was when The Collector, The Rationeer's daughter of a previous marriage, moved in. She (three children in tow) had just left a messy divorce of her own, with a man she'd called The Ogre. They'd had a house together two towns over, but he'd wasted away her goodwill and wife-hood on drugs an' whores aplenty. Just like The Chief, he was in oil, but his task was to bring it home from ships so it could fuel lanterns and be used to start campfires. This left him almost entirely to his own devices, in a place he knew like the back of his hand; whether he was piss-drunk, fumigated, or everything in-between. The final straw was when he'd made a royal ass of himself at a child's birthday party, acting like one of their schoolyard bullies – fully blown out of his own mind like a wisp. By all his own relatives and hers, she was mightily embarrassed. The children were afraid for him, bereft of understanding for his drug-born lunacy.
Now, in fairness, The Rationeer herself had often used opium as a means to steal sleep from her husband, and avoid speaking to him or myself – while he dabbled in it mostly to relieve his joints after another one of his self-grooming workout sessions. Those, by the way, were disgusting to behold, but at least kept him distracted... even if it seemed like he was grunting in my exact direction, for some sort of signal. A signal to behold his grotesque, lumpy majesty. I'd chosen not to respond, and to simply avoid eye-contact. My face couldn't have shown more disgust and apprehension if I'd tried – it was like being flexed at by a giant baby, too proud of its girth and chubbiness to see its own ridiculous self for what it was. A creepy, obsessive, oversexed golem, with a vain flash behind his eyes. It made me feel like I was being cornered. Still, by the time I'd reached the other room, somehow. Gone was his care that he'd shown the wee ones – now, even they were starting to catch his fiery glare, like he'd 'held on for long enough', so to speak. The drama of The Collector's wayward husband was exactly what I needed to keep my mind on something less disturbing. Figure that for a comparison: a bodybuilding lump of leathery vitriol, versus a tragic ex-spouse with a substance addiction.

The Ogre's behavior was more than just erratic. The Collector was no longer able to live in her own home, because he'd trashed the place with discarded tinctures and smashed potion bottles. It was overgrown with weeds, the food was let to rot, and the curtains were torn to shreds. The Rationeer and Chief were more than reluctant to let anyone reside in their work-in-progress, but The Collector's children were of far greater concern to The Rationeer than her husband's miserable growling. And they had nowhere else to turn. Like with guests, I carried their luggage to and fro, until their carriages were emptied and all lay inside that basement, a place they'd have to call home for the time thereafter.
After they'd settled in, I was carted over to the ruined house for a grim task: discarding the refuse, and recovering any valuables which could be sold. His entire lineage was present, apparently, but I recalled not one of their faces. My great uncle, a Prosaic, made a comment about keeping something, and was met with ire. He was an old, marble-haired poet with a firm unibrow, sharp face, and skinny body – yet hard-edged from his work building stone walls for the villagers. He was always smoking, and jabbering on about 'bloody foreigners'. I found him annoying at times, but at the very least, genuine. He seemed unaware of his own speckled origins when he spoke, which I always found odd. Or blind, perhaps. Regardless, his comments embarrassed me, including the one he'd just made in the ruined house. To be fair, they were all a bit stuck-up – none seemed ready to admit The Ogre was as much a product of their own tree's blood, as he was of his drugs and potions. Carts were loaded up, and we left in separate ways from where we came.

Back at the house I kept busy maintaining the yards on all sides, and harvesting the freshly-grown garden. It was hours of plucking weed roots from dirt and wooden chips, then mowing grass with a strange rolling contraption. A spiraled blade, with two wheels, and a bar handle to push it forward. I'd never seen anything like it in my life, and wondered how it would measure up to a scythe. Compared to threshing, however, I find in retrospect that it's quite inefficient; more often than not, it's just a mess of tangled fibers to pick through, and a gigantic waste of time. But with children on the green who refused to be swayed elsewhere, a sickle or scythe just wasn't safe. If their pants had gotten caught, I wonder if they'd have even screamed, or just giggled at their own predicament. The way both weeds and grass grew, it was an endless war against God's green earth. But the food was worth it, and after I'd stopped drinking milk and eating meat, I was always more sated by my own meals anyway. Steamed carrots, scores of baked gourds, cucumbers, berries, peas, and radishes buried in the earth. The very same soil I'd helped till not two seasons prior. My stomach had shrunk, my appetite dried, and the horrible nightmares had stopped... save for one where I saw myself from the outside, naked in The Chief's lap with his slimy hands all over me, while his wife ensnared me from the other side – which took a week to forget again. Though I'd felt nothing by touch, it alarmed and disturbed me more than anything I'd ever witnessed. That was a month after the one where The Rationeer had cornered me in a senselessly-constructed mansion of ceilings on walls and stairs on ceilings, and twisted my guts with her bare hand... a malevolent smile on her face. When I told her that, she'd cried and told me she needed counseling for what she'd just heard, and that I was hurting her again – so obviously, I elected not to tell her the far worse one, which made me feel as though I'd been violated so vividly I wanted to jump out of their windows and scream. It'd become plain to me that all I really ever wanted since I arrived was to escape, and that their hallways were far too narrow for a second person to sidle through – which is exactly why they always waited until I was there, by known my steps on those thundering, flimsy floors, to accost me. Even the masons couldn't fix bad construction of the house's foundational bearings. Worse, I was no longer able to live downstairs, where I could escape them – I was forced to dwell in the room across from theirs, across a single thin wall from them and their arguments. If not for my dedication to silence, I'd have been caught twice as many times, rubbing shoulders with monsters and hating myself for letting it occur. I was lucky they seemed to find each other, in bed, as immobile as two stones of a pair. But that was a small, meaningless grace; I just wanted to go home.