Craft by Lynnie Purcell

had
become for her and Thane, she crafted them both a large breakfast,
complete with furniture and decorations. She set two chairs at the
rectangular table she had crafted with a flick of her wrist, made
sure the eggs, bacon, grits, biscuits, and gravy were perfectly
warm, and then called out to Thane. He woke up with a snort,
jumping a little as he did. His eyes immediately went to her and
the food she had crafted. His stomach rumbled hungrily at the sight
but he was suspicious.
    “Are you trying to poison me?” he
asked.
    While he could certainly craft his own
food to eat, his food never smelled quite as good as Ellie’s. It
was the sort of food craft he associated with his grandparents and
his mother.
    “A Bumbalow doesn’t resort to poison,”
Ellie said.
    “No, just stabbing in the back,” he
said.
    Ellie shook her head at him, but she
did not argue. She knew it would be pointless and cause a fight she
did not want around her good mood.
    “It’s a sin to be so ill before
breakfast,” Ellie said. “How’s about you be nasty when my belly’s
full?”
    “I can do that,” Thane said
dubiously.
    He rolled out of the bed and sat down
across from Ellie at the table she had crafted. He gingerly sniffed
the food, his expression suspicious. After the first bite of eggs,
he forgot his suspicion. His hunger was king. He started shoveling
food into his mouth – food flew into his mouth faster than he could
chew it.
    Ellie was amused at the sight. She
felt some of her preconceptions of him drop away. Not all Coopers
were snobs who ate their meals off silver platters and lived with
no lust for life. Some ate like the pigs Cousin kept. It was proof
that Thane might have not been as different from her family as she
had thought. One eyebrow arched in amusement as she watched him. A
smile played on her face. Ellie gestured at him when he looked at
her with a frown.
    “I thought the Coopers were supposed
to be all fancified,” Ellie said.
    “I thought we were saving the insults
for after breakfast,” Thane said. Eggs hung down to his chin, as he
replied. He did not seem to care about the mess he was
making.
    “The way you’re eating made me
forget,” Ellie said.
    Ellie started taking modest bites of
her food. She was content to enjoy the taste of her food, unlike
Thane who seemed more concerned with filling his belly as quickly
as possible. Ellie avoided looking at Thane as he ate, but she was
curious about him. She wanted to know his story.
    “So, how’d you get to be at the fight
the other night?” she asked him.
    Thane swallowed another mouthful of
food and shook his head. He waved his fork at her to reiterate his
point. His expression was serious. “Oh, no, we’re not doing the
backstory thing…” he said. “You’re a Bumbalow, and I’m a Cooper.
That’s all we gotta know.”
    “Why?” Ellie demanded.
    “That’s the way it is,” Thane said.
“That’s why.”
    “‘ The way it is!’” Ellie
mocked. “Everything is always ‘the way it is!’ You’d think people’d
come up with a better answer to something they don’t understand!
You’d think they’d take the time to figure out why things are the
way they are.”
    “You love your family, don’t you?”
Thane asked.
    “Yeah, I do,” Ellie said, “though I
don’t like them most of the time.”
    “Well, I feel the same way, and two
people who love their families, even if they don’t like them, and
whose families happen to hate each other, simply should not get to
know each other. You catch my drift?” Thane asked.
    Ellie was not convinced by his logic.
She thought he might have been afraid of seeing her as a person. It
would challenge his worldview. He was not prepared to see her as
anything beyond a Bumbalow. Fear had him refusing to talk to her,
not logic.
    “Seems like a simple way of
complicating things,” Ellie said.
    Thane didn’t seem to know what to say
to that. He focused on his food again. His enthusiasm for the food
was