The threat of litigation was supposed to unnerve me into silence, but to the contrary, I was looking forward to it.
Author: C.L. Zeitstück
“Whatever. I told my parents about how they’re treating the infestation and they said it’s not going to work. And my parents are always right when they say stuff won’t work out.” I’m not joking, this was their actual logic. That their life didn’t live up to their parents’ expectations and neither would exterminators. Whatever AJ’s therapist was being paid, it wasn’t enough.
AJ said one night, by way of greeting before I was even out of my hotel uniform. “All of these bugs? Just crawling on me? They just feel like tiny little rapists.”
“LITTLE DRAMATIC,” I thought, filling my wine glass as much as it could possibly go.
Somehow, Franzia was one of the healthier things I’d put my mouth on that year.
“Yeah! He thought I was a girl! Didn’t you hear it?” It’s hard to describe the look in their eyes, this sort of unhinged desperation. Almost as if my hearing this myself would make me go, ‘Oh my gods, AJ, you’re right, you’re the most tragically estrogen-laden person on the planet, clearly the only solution is to starve yourself and take chainsaw to your hip line, I can’t believe I’ve been so blind.’
“Oh, I’m sorry, AJ.” I said, muttering through an entirely hypothetical conversation as I hauled my things off the porch of a residence I no longer lived in. “I can’t afford to give you gas money to your job interview. As it turns out, the fucking UNSEELIE FAE KING was too busy cementing their ass indent in Arkady’s couch to drop off MY PROPERTY THEY TOOK to the middle of downtown so I had to pay for a BLOODY Saturday night Uber.”
I both liked and disliked the way she talked. Her cadence was that of a gameshow host, with enviable precision of verbiage but an over-acted quality to it. She gave the vague impression that she was imitating a scene in a film. “After I was kicked out– me, who was the centre of every problem– how long did it take for the situation to collapse?”
I smiled. Or it might have been a grimace. “About a month and one week.”
I didn’t know, at the time, that these were my life’s worst abusers, brought together by dubious circumstances. You’d think that amount of toxic coming that close to each other would actually cause a rift in the universe. Maybe it did.
I remember this starkly because when I first laid eyes on them in person, it was in that very room. The walls were painted startlingly crimson, there were Asian antiques all around. It reminded me a lot of– it reminded me a lot of–
I wasn’t well-versed in Tarot at the time, but we had fun chatting with the bartender. We told them we were a polycule out for Valentine’s Day, who was dating whom. I wish I could tell you what the other three drew. But goddamn if my ass didn’t draw the fucking Tower.
“When I end up being proven right about this, you owe me three crates of champagne!” I called down the stairs. I felt comforted by that. Finally, something coming out of my mouth that was more believably me.
Arkady was not amused. “That’s what I’m fucking talking about!” I heard him snap back from the kitchen.
Living Fiction 