AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the previous episode, a taste of Beer. Now back to Rhoda Crwys the Welsh student, pursued and befriended en route.
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 50

Rhoda Crwys hurried down the road in the direction of Largest Hill. She was experiencing a single-minded determination heretofore unknown to her. At last she’d find out the 50% truth of the matter that had consumed her like a raging tuberculosis for so long. Nothing, she felt, could turn her aside. For once in her life, she was going to see something through to the end. Wild horses, couldn’t drag her away. Peppet was disgusted. He’d have to come up with another plan, he thought, the equine cadavers still smoking in his wake. The girl was plunging on, veering left out of Woodville at the twenty-four hour convenience store, barreling into an employee locking up for the night. Without so much as a ‘sorry’ Rhoda raced on, the hounds of hell on her heels. They were no match for her, she was unstoppable. Where in blazes was she headed? Peppet cursed as he slowed to reload. The second beast had taken three bullets before it had died, loath to return to its underworld kennel. Well, that wasn’t Peppet’s problem, what did he look like, the fecking Cymru SPCA? Where had she gone? There she was!

He spotted her a block away, her titian hair churning in the slipstream created by her own passage. Rhoda Crwys, Welsh student, was on her way to academic immortality traveling at close to the speed of light. She had just arrived at the place where she’d had her purse ‘borrowed’ when a movement ahead of her, at the fast approaching bus stop, caught her eye. Something thin, perhaps a stray piece of pasteboard, was peeling itself off the asphalt and in an odd flexing twisting motion had flipped itself directly into her path. She zoomed past it causing it to flutter up into the air and spin crazily a few times before it drifted down again, cutting a swath of pendulum arcs in its lazy earthward journey, beheading Peppet as neatly as a scythe in one fell swoop.

The thing landed featherlight feet first and took up the chase where Peppet had left off, but with altogether different motives. It needed cellotape fast and having met Rhoda once in the library and asked her for the loan of a pencil, it had observed in amazement as in her hunt to locate her ‘really sharp pencil’ she had apologetically emptied an office supply depot’s worth of stationer’s goods from her purse, including three rolls of cello-tape, one transparent one regular, one waterproof. The strange bendy thing torqued down the road behind her, calling out her name as it went, but Rhoda Crwys sailed onward full speed ahead, deaf to all but the siren call of Largest Hill and the 50% solution.

It occurred to the object that perhaps her name was not the one to call out. She’d seemed taken with itself when they met in the library, modestly covering her smiling eyes and blinking her teeth prettily. She’d been offered a name, the one it most frequently employed with strange people, and it was this name that now reached her conch-like ears as a tissue thin whisper, as of cattle softly rustling on a summer night:

‘rhohhdaaa! it’s meee! sunny quiiitooo!’

Rhoda Crwys stopped. She did, after all, have a little extra time.