I ate. It was the best meal of my life.
"Don't be afraid of the heat," she murmurs. "The heat is just energy. You control it, or it burns you."
The first time I heard the crack of dawn, it wasn’t from a rooster. It was from a bone.
Her kitchen was a hazard zone for humans. The countertops were waist-high on me. The knives looked like short swords. But the pot on the stove was the size of a small child, bubbling with a stew that made my soul leave my body.
I’d just moved into the crumbling duplex on Willow Lane—the one with the rent so low I suspected a haunting. I was wrong. It was worse. It was an Ogress.
That was three months ago. Now, I wake up to a lunchbox on my doorstep every morning. Pink, with a ribbon. Inside: onigiri shaped like rabbits, tamagoyaki folded like gold, and a little note in shaky handwriting: "You forgot to take out your trash again, Mouse. Do better."