Title: To Market 
Author: Scynneh 
E-mail: scynneh@yahoo.com
Distribution: If you want it. 
Disclaimer: Pointless to beg Joss for them. 
Improv 20: twin, deaf, mild, asleep. 
POV: Anya
Notes: Really, a summer drabble. hopping and taking care of your neighbors, where does all of that fit in? 
July 2001

*
They have to go out and buy groceries once every week, not that either of them eat a lot, but everyone else has to.  So they take turns, one shops and the other nursemaids.

It was Tara’s idea to check up on the others, and she would never have been able to think of such a thing, so she is grateful. Mildly resentful sometimes, that one of them is able to be so collected.  But that is what the outsiders are supposed to do: keep the rest of the world away long enough for their colleagues to get back on their feet.

Anya knows that she is part-of-Xander now.  But she is still cash-register girl with all of the expertise of her life, and she likes green olives.  Twin jars in the basket.  They clank against the Catsup and dent one of the essential boxes of Kleenex.  Hmm, detergent better get that funny blue talking one. That commercial makes Giles snort in that English way of his, almost disgusted amusement.  Interesting man.  Ah, there it is, up on tiptoe, and into the metal cage with the rest of the items needed.

It has been hot so far this summer, ground shrinking up, the grass colorless sticks of ow on the bottoms of her feet.  Her sandals are old, the soles have been eaten away by that arid dirt, and she thinks of teeth trying to get at the soft flesh of her arches, those lines that she never understood in the skin some kind of warding, preventing the loss of toes while going barefoot. 

She wonders if she did a bit of rambling about when she was first mortal, but that time is so blurred that her eyes cross whenever she tries to remember it, so she does not.  During the day; when she is asleep, there are strange doings; games played on machines, and pieces of paper whose images consisted of creatures that exist only in the minds of mass marketers and gullible youths.  Playing behind those modern diversions are simpler voices, circles in sand and games, which have no names for they are so long-gone.  And every morning, before the world interrupts her thoughts, she is wearing animal skins, not imported but homemade.

Men do not like air fresheners, especially vanilla.  She shoves the various scents about and finally settles on a herbal/mango something, knows that it will be forgotten and that her remarks about primitive plumbing will not be challenged. 

So what if she is deaf to those human tears in the bathroom, she will provide the supper. 

Fin