Her companionship was like a warm soil about an exotic.

And as ridiculous as it may sound, sometimes all any of us needs in life is for someone to hold our hand and walk next to us.

Cadmium has a similar chemical structure as calcium. It attaches to the soil the same way that calcium would and competes with calcium for those binding sites. As calcium would normally move through the food web, cadmium moves through instead.

I wasn’t a person after all. I was simply this exotic thing for people to observe and investigate, an alien in any environment I was in.

Right now they are classified as an exotic.

The meal she served was unlike any I had encountered in Vienna, or anywhere else: red seaweed garnished with pickled radishes; black rice noodles and spotted mushrooms boiled in wine, grilled squid stuffed with flying fish roe; and yellow cherries sauteed in butter. The hot bread was laced with cinnamon and paprika. The goat cheese was coated with thyme honey.