Page 1 of Brenna, Brat

Chapter 1

Awoman’s scream echoed through the room, bouncing off the high ceilings and old wooden floor before trailing off in a gasping, gurgling moan.

“Holy shit!” a man yelled, terror ringing in his voice.

I only sighed.

That scream was one of my boss’s quirky ideas. She firmly believed that she was very special and different, and she always had to prove it. Like, every time I saw her, she had a new hair color…until the day she shaved her head, and then she was all about wigs. Look at my new tattoo, she’d tell me, look at my new piercing! Was she talking with a British accent? Sure, she’d been born and raised in Detroit but she’d come upon this manner of speech totally organically. Had she mentioned that she was traveling to the Bass Islands—no, not the ones in Lake Erie, they were in Polynesia. What led her there? The fact that no one else ever went. She was eccentric and cool, didn’t I get it? She practically panted for attention.

She needed to be told to sit down and be quiet but sadly, I couldn’t be the one to do it since my paycheck depended on her. I kept my mouth shut about her hair, her travel plans, and (mostly) about the way she ran her art gallery.

But the man at the door didn’t know anything about my boss and her fun quirks, so he yelled again: “Holy shit!” Then he pelted through the exhibition space and he came right around the side of the black lacquer table that we were supposed to use for all our business dealings, even though it was too low for comfort and had no drawers to hold anything useful. Luckily, not too much actual business went on here.

The man put his hands on my shoulders. “Are you all right?” he asked loudly, directly into my face.

“Let me go,” I stated.

His brown eyes were huge. “What happened? Why did you scream like that?”

I sighed angrily, and yanked myself away from his grip. “Calm down,” I ordered. “There’s no need for a hero.”

“What—”

“That’s the sound the front door makes when it opens,” I explained. “We don’t have a bell, we have a scream.”

He looked at me for another moment and visibly swallowed. “Every time someone comes in and out of here it sounds like there’s a murder taking place?” he asked, and I nodded. “That’s sick.”

“No, it’s supposed to be unique,” I explained. My boss was a fool.

“Wow. Phew!” he breathed. He shook his head as he expelled the word. “I’m glad you weren’t dying.”

Had he really run toward the scene of a crime? Idiot. “No, I’m fine, not dead at all. May I help you?” I stared hard at him and then slowly and pointedly turned my gaze across the lacquer table, to where he was supposed to stand. We each got a side, since I worked here and he was a customer. Wasn’t he?

He didn’t seem to notice my hint, but he did step back slightly, giving me enough room to breathe. “I do need help. I need to get a gift,” he told me.

“Why?”

“Uh, why do I need a gift?”

“No, why would you come in here?” I asked. “This isn’t a place that most people would think of to shop for presents.” This wasn’t a place that most people thought of, full stop.

“I feel like I’ve looked everywhere else and I haven’t found anything,” he explained. “I was driving to my office on my way back from a meeting and I decided to try here. I hadn’t noticed this shop before.”

Yes, he was one of the billions of people on Earth who had never seen nor cared about the Alecta Alberne Gallery. The man glanced at the latest display set up on pedestals, which were sculptures created by a local Detroit artist who worked in unusual mediums. For this new collection, the medium wasused gum, the discarded wads that you could encounter under desks, beneath drinking fountains, and stuck to your sole when you were having a particularly bad day. While supervising the installation, the sculptor had complained about an apparent downtick in people chewing it, because he’d really struggled to find his materials. He’d also complained about the lack of heat in the gallery that day, because there was something seriously wrong with our furnace. The low temperature made the pieces more brittle and fragile, but they remained equally as disgusting as when it was warm.

The customer squinted at the sculpture nearest us. “Is that a dog with its leg lifted, peeing? Made out of old gum?”

“It’s conceptual, a commentary on the loneliness and absurdity of urban life. Please feel free to look around the gallery,” I recommended. Please don’t stand here with me any longer, I also wanted to add, but again I could not. I was, after all, the employee who was supposed to sell things, even if I highly doubted that this guy in a tailored suit, half-Windsor knotted tie, and polished loafers was going to make a purchase. Conceptual sculptures of a dog peeing really didn’t seem like his cup of tea.

I studied him and decided that no, he wasn’t drinking tea. He enjoyed cups of expensive coffee from an Italian machine that he had built into the wall of his kitchen.

“That’s amazing,” he said, and did I hear admiration in his voice? “Imagine how much time it took to chew all that.”

“The artist harvested his supplies during scouting trips to several foreign cities,” I said. “You can read about it there.” Ipointed to a placard on the wall that described the process, and to my relief, he did walk over to read it. Good, he was out of my space and I continued scrolling through my phone. My one sister was having a problem…

Maybe it was important to explain that I didn’t have “one” sister. I had five of them and also a brother, and someone was always having a fit about something. Right now, it was Juliet, and usually she and I didn’t get along very well—to be honest, none of my sisters and I got along great, and I couldn’t stand my brother. In a sea of siblings, I was my own island: Brenna Atoll. Atolls were made of coral, if I was remembering correctly, so maybe they were too sharp to step on and people stayed away.

“That’s amazing,” the guy repeated as he read the posted information, and interrupting my thoughts. “I’m impressed by how much effort he put into his work. Remarkable.” He paused and turned to me. “Also, disgusting.”

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