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When Carbuncle awoke, the first thing that he noticed was that it did not seem too much later than when he had actually gone to sleep. It was about as disorienting as his arrival on the southern shores. It was just as dismaying to think that he hadn’t even been asleep more than maybe five or ten minutes, but then there were the other things that seemed to say it was something else altogether. The dampness was gone from his body, as was the ache that had long plagued his back and shoulders from trying to find a less awkward way to cat nap inside of a rowboat. It was the better part of twenty minutes (a very spaced out twenty minutes) before he realised that he had quite literally slept what seemed like an entire day.
More disturbing was the notion that he had done it without being bothered. He had slept through without the feeling that he was going to be attacked or mobbed, without the feeling that he needed to stay awake on the off-chance that he would be called upon. Carbuncle couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Not that it really mattered either, because the concept that he may have been safe didn’t occur to him readily. The idea that he had actually made it all the way into whatever town this was (the name had already eluded him) without being seen or followed was bizarre. So when he made his way out of the bed and breakfast he had passed out at, he was on edge. Maybe, just maybe, they had all been waiting.
But once he was back out on the streets, the paranoia faded away, or was at the very least taken over by other things. Hunger had come to him rather quickly and behind it was thirst. His hand ached and felt warm to the skin and fur that hadn’t been burnt; his head ached with a resounding chorus from stress and strain. But it was the hunger that he attended to first and unsuccessfully to begin with. Two houses turned up nothing, but the third had given him peculiar items from an overturned and dented fridge. Canned ham and an unopened box of baking soda. Ham was a three lettered word he understood (never minding that it was twenty plus years old), but he had no idea what in the hell baking soda was. He took it anyway.
Getting the ham open was another story altogether. A metal can, one that had seen better days, but it had nothing on it that screamed to him “this is how I open!”. So he had taken it out of the house, shaking it by his ear and listening to it all the same, before resorting to bashing it against other things. Notably such racket took place from the interior of an old hardware store that had long since been gutted and torn up. He casually banged the can against shelving and once against a sawhorse before setting it on the counter at the back of the store.
But it would not open, even in light of all of the V-shaped dents and scuffed it had added to it’s lacking arsenal of decor. Beside it he had left the baking soda and the two items of better years sat together in silence. If only I had a hammer, he thought, briefly turning around to survey the empty store that looked more like the hollowed out frame of every other building he had been in like it. Box stores, his father had called them. Carbuncle had to agree with the name too — they looked like boxes from the inside. But nevertheless, he had gone back to pounding the canned ham on the edge of the counter without so much as another thought. Annoyingly so, at that.