She became his most regular visitor afterwards. “Tell me more about the Merry Go Round people,” she requested in her cool, silky way while remotely animating the pair again and making them spin around a common axis. Axis, she thinks. Her *husband*.
“Crack and Whack, police agents, or so they claimed. More prisoners to this small isle,” he said in his toy bear voice, just made for a loving child who was far far away now, in a different plane of existence actually. “Punished because of a bust. Broken into pieces they said he was. Took them forever to put the guy back together, the chief-inspector said, Petty I believe, unless it was Ketty — can’t recall which, actually. Usually my memory is excellent, like an elephant’s.” Should have *been* an elephant he laments here, daring to glance past Alysha’s tall, sprawled out body beside him at the Ella Phanta ride across the water to their right. Still fully on dry land. Unlike him.
“Hmm,” she replied, and sat up or rolled over, take your pick. But then she switched everything around and enacted the unexpected, turning toward the bear instead and starting to apply suntan lotion to his smiling head. New!
“So, Mr. Teddy (squirt). Tell me (squirt apply) how Baker Bloch got off that island over there? (apply apply)” She’d taken off her hat as well. Didn’t get her anywhere. He hadn’t requested she turn into a bobblehead, like Baker. After all this time. You think it would happen already if it was going to happen. She was tired of talking about the beach toys. She’d gotten their story now a half dozen times apiece. Always the Ketty-Petty confusion, and he doesn’t even know he’s repeating himself.
“Jen-nny,” he said, completely falling under her spell and revealing stuff he would never do otherwise. “Paii-d.” He meant bail here.
The next time she kept her hat on while still fulfilling his sentence. You can say their relationship changed.
Sunklands 