The Lovebirds - XI
“Well, I’m just… standing in the kitchen. Over the stove. For the fun of it."
When Stolitz awoke the next morning, he did so abruptly. No sooner had his eyes opened was he fully alert and aware. He hadn’t been dreaming, not after he’d lapsed back into unconsciousness after being subjected to Astoria’s birthday in the confines of his mental theater, but the image of Philith’s mirthless rictus grin was still lingered in his mind’s eye like the faint and ghostly strains of a song about dancing. A sliver of light spilled through a gap in the dark curtains, casting a wan gray slow across the room. A quick turn of his head to the side revealed the inflatable mattress to be empty, and the blankets under which Agratta slept neatly laid out atop it without a body underneath.
Stolitz sighed as he straightened his head and stared at the mountains and valleys across the stucco ceiling. He didn’t want to get up. He didn’t want to face another day. He didn’t want to contend with Agratta, or an angel, or anyone else, for that matter. All he wanted was to lay there, close his eyes, remain still, and wait until either his father grew impatient and called him home, he died, or time itself came to an end - whichever came first.
His body, however, had other ideas. Another night on the ground had left his body sore in odd places that were entirely different from the preceding nights. He was unaware that he still had parts of his anatomy that had yet to begin aching, but, apparently, there were. He fully expected for his hair-feathers to start thrumming with that dull yet unignorable pain that currently pulsed in between a handful of vertebrae and the backs of his knees. Still, no amount of aches, pains, throbs, or general discomfort could coax him off the floor just yet. He wasn’t ready to stand, yet. He wasn’t sure if he would be for some time.
Until he smelled it - burning.
Something was burning. Without any heed to the sudden jolt of pain that ran up his spine, the smell roused Stolitz upright with a sudden jerk. He sniffed again, just to make sure that he hadn’t imagined the vague scent of something burning. Most humans, he discovered, had quite the aversion to fire, which is probably part of the reason that it was a common sight around Hell. Thus, the smell of burning was one that he was well accustomed to - and one he couldn’t mistake.
The last vestiges of Philith’s grinning mug were whisked away from his mind’s eye in a smoky gale, replaced by the image of 477 Nazareth Road engulfed in a pillar of flame, replete with a small, stocky angel in a red sundress and sunglasses smiling deviously as she held a simple lighter in one hand and a plastic fuel can in the other. It was a mental image that made Stolitz throw himself off the ground and onto unsteady feet. The colorful blanket adorned with smiling cartoon puppies fell to the floor in a billowing heap as he rushed for the door, throwing it open and running down the hall to find no fire. No smoke. Not so much as a spark.
There was, however, Agratta, clad in a pair of baggy, plaid-patterned fleece sleeping pants and an ill-fitting t-shirt, standing over the stove with a simple pan in one talon. She glanced back over her shoulder, alerted by the sound of Stolitz’s feed stammering to a stop on the hardwood floor.
“Oh,” she said with no real amount of emotion. She turned her attention back to the pan, the contents hissing from the heat radiating up through the metal from the stove burner underneath it. “There you are. The way you were snoring last night, I was almost certain you had suffocated in your sleep.”
Stolitz stared at his wife. In the kitchen. With a pan. Cooking.
It wasn’t that he had never seen Agratta cook before. But he couldn’t remember when the last time he’d seen her do so was. There had been a time when she’d been a constant fixture in their manor’s kitchen. When they first got married, she cooked, she baked, she generally worked in the kitchen quite a bit. Even though Stolitz had always told her that she didn’t need to - after all, they could pay others to do it for them - she insisted that there wasn’t a need. That had been the order of things for decades, if not centuries, of their marriage. Even when Astoria was born, she didn’t stop her culinary experiments. Yet, much like everything else about their marriage - the laughter, the fun, the intimacy - one day, without warning, the cooking just stopped and never started again. When had she stopped? Stolitz couldn’t recall. But, there had come a time where her spot in the kitchen came to be occupied by a revolving door of imps and devils that cooked for the family, and the only time he ever saw her in it was when she was raiding the wine rack or liquor cabinet.
To see her there now, pan in hand, even humming a senseless little tune to herself as she pushed around something in it with a rubber spatula… it just didn’t make sense to Stolitz. It felt wrong. Incongruous. Since they’d arrived, she’d struggled to slap cheese and cold cuts on bread, like the very concept of a sandwich was foreign to her. She’d insisted on buying some basic cookware, but Stolitz had never anticipated that she’d actually make use of it. The sight was so bizarre that, had it not been for her unsightly Earth clothing, he would have thought that he was witnessing some sort of time flap, in which the Agratta he married had somehow slipped free of the confines of space-time and appeared here in this miserable suburban hovel they’d been trapped in.
Agratta once again looked back over her shoulder to him. This time, she did something even more strange - she grinned. It was fleeting. It was small. It wasn’t particularly vibrant or warm and, on the face of another, it wouldn’t have looked like an expression that was out of the ordinary at all, yet, without the malice or vitriol or sarcastic antipathy that usually painted the smiles that Agratta gave him, it looked foreign. Unrecognizable, even.
“What are you doing?”
It came out as more of a statement than a question.
Agratta set the pan on the stove and turned to face Stolitz. On her t-shirt was the image
“Oh. Me?” She pointed the spatula, glistening with a thin layer of grease and oil, at her chest, where the words SUPER MOM, SUPER WIFE, and SUPER TIRED were printed in loopy white text. “Well, I’m just… standing in the kitchen. Over the stove. For the fun of it.”
She smiled again and, this time, it was a bit tighter. When Stolitz didn’t offer a response, she took it upon herself to fill the silence.
“Oh, come on, now. What does it look like?” She shrugged. “I’m cooking. Breakfast.” With her free hand, she pointed at her face. Her eyes got a bit wider and her smile broader as she added - “For myself.”
And there it was. This was no time-displaced doppelganger; just Agratta, as she had been for decades, now.
“Bu-u-ut,” said Agratta, drawing out the word. “There’s, um - there’s enough for you, if you’d like some. I suppose”
Stolitz figured that was about as close as she could bring herself to come to actually inviting him to parttake in whatever she was making. As Agratta turned her attention back to the pan, Stolitz, with slow and cautious steps, approached the kitchen. He had this feeling, this… this nagging suspsicion that he hadn’t actually woken up, and that he was still asleep, suffering from some strange nightmare in which, at some point, Agratta would turn around to reveal some monstrous, ghastly face or hollow eyesockets dripping with black ichor, or some such terrifying sight, leaving him to jolt awake on the floor to find that the real Agratta was still asleep and that this was all some sort of cruel joke being played on him by his own mind.
Yet, the closer he drew, the more pronounced the smell of cooking meats and melting cheese became, and, even though he kept a good distance from what he thought was his wife, she didn’t do much more than give him a curious, side-eyed look.
“Are… are you feeling alright?”
Agratta’s beak pulled into a tight line as she gave a non-commital hum. “I’m hungry.” She raised a brow. “Are you feeling alright? You’re acting as if you expect me to… to do this!”
Stolitz recoiled, violently pulling away and stumbling back a step or two as Agratta jerked the pan in his direction with the speed of a striking viper. Yet, she held the handle firm and didn’t move it much more than an inch before sitting it back down with a snort of amusement. The grin on her beak took on a sly, almost playful bend.
“Got you-u-u.”
The way she sang the words told Stolitz everything he needed to know - either something was deeply, terribly wrong, or Agratta was deeply, terribly drunk. Either that, or he really was still trapped in the throes of a horrible nightmare, and some ghoulish surprise still awaited him in the immediate future. He stared at the woman that he was now deeply unconvinced was actually his wife, and more certain than ever was some sort of sinister double. He stared at her, running his eyes up and down her body, searching for some sort of tell that might betray her identity as an imposter. It only made Agratta give another huff of laughter.
“What’s that look for? Did you really think I’d waste good food throwing it at you?”
Stolitz looked into the pan and saw… he saw… what did he see?
“Are - are you cooking deli meat in a sauce pan?”
Agratta gave him an odd look. “No? I’m… grilling deli meat. In a frying pan. There is a difference. You should know this.”
Stolitz wasn’t sure how much any of what his wife had just said was true, but he also didn’t know enough about cooking to argue. Agratta, seemingly unbothered by his ignorance, busied herself with turning off the stove and putting the… grilled deli meat, apparently, onto generously toasted slices of white bread. The fact that there were two betrayed the falsehood behind her earlier statement that she’d been making breakfast for herself. Either that, or she intended to eat two separate sandwiches off two separate plates for no other reason than to hassle herself with an extra dish to clean. That didn’t seem like something Agratta would do. Then again, he would have also expected Agratta to have dropped several expletives by this point in their conversation, yet her diction had remained suspiciously clean.
Once the meat had been neatly and evenly distributed between the bread, Agratta placed slices of cheese atop it with careful and uncharacteristic precision. As she did, Stolitz noticed the glass of orange juice that had been sitting within arm’s reach of where she’d been cooking. He took it, which, for a moment, brought out the real Agratta. Her expression was cutting and sharp, clearly upset he’d taken her drink without so much as asking before he did so, yet it only lingered on her face for a second before easing into a curious, inscrutable stare.
Stolitz pointed a talon at the glass. “Did you put something in this?”
Agratta shrugged. “What would I have put in that?”
That was exactly what Stolitz had been wondering. He wasn’t sure what they had on hand that she could have spiked the orange juice with to make her act so… so… like this, yet, it had to be something. Agratta wasn’t acting right.
She wasn’t acting drunk, either, but, then again, an inebriated Agratta was difficult to define. For as long as Stolitz had known Agratta, drinking with her, he’d learned, was a bit like pulling from a box of assorted chocolates without looking - you never did know what you’d get. Or, perhaps more appropriately, drinking with Agratta was like playing Russian Roulette. Sometimes, you’d get a happy Agratta, who would smother you affection and sweet, honeyed words that didn’t really make sense, but they all sounded nice. He hadn’t seen that Agratta in many, many years, and suspected that, at some point, she’d ceased to be part of the greater whole that was his wife. More often, you’d get dour Agratta, who would get quiet, brooding, sulky, and withdrawn. Very rarely, you’d get an Agratta that couldn’t be pulled off you with a crowbar until certain needs were satisfied. Now that was a facet of Agratta that Stolitz was certain had long gone extinct. Yet, every now and then, in between pleasant Agratta and sullen Agratta and randy Agratta, there was also the belligerent, bellicose, and outright mean Agratta - the Agratta that would lapse into a tempestuous state of rage that would spin in a violent cycle of verbal abuse and yelling until finally collapsing into a drunken heap wherever she might be standing once the last of her energy finally petered out. And that was an Agratta that Stolitz had become woefully well-acquainted with.
The Agratta currently staring at him as expectantly, almost inquisitively, was not exactly the happy Agratta he remembered, but… she was close enough that he could see the resemblance. Which suggested to Stolitz that, yes - the juice had been spiked, and she’d been consuming it long before he’d woken up.
“Vodka,” Stolitz answered. It was the first drink that came to mind that seemed like something one might pour into orange juice.
Agratta neither confirmed nor denied the accusation. So, Stolitz investigated himself. He took a quick, experimental sip of the drink and coughed at the astringent taste of something not orange juice stabbing at his tongue. “Sweet sin,” he gasped as he set the glass down. “What did you - oh, Hell. What did you put in this?”
Agratta eyes narrowed into smug, self-satisfied slits as she smiled a coy smile.
“Grain alcohol.”
“And where - oh, fuck, when did you get grain alcohol?”
“Remeber when we went to Tar-Get the last time,” she said, pronouncing Target as Tar-Get, for some reason that was beyond Stolitz. “And I asked for ten dollars and disappeared for a minute?”
“You - you bought fucking ethanol with that?”
Agratta gave an unflattering snort of amusement. “Well… what did you think I was going to buy with it? Fucking candy?”
“Where have you been keeping it? Where - where did you hide it? Where did you even get it?”
Agratta grinned madly as she reached into one of the pockets of her sleeping pants and slipped out a flask-sized handle of Everclear. “Oh, well - there’s a liquor store right next door to the Target. And I didn’t buy a whole bloody bottle. Just this. Turns out that ten dollars doesn’t get you very much liquor, but it can get you this much, and, well - it isn’t good, but… it gets the job done, I’d say.”
Stolitz blinked. “You’re a bloody alcoholic.”
Agratta bat her lashes back at him. “Well - what is that you told me before? About - oh. Yes. Right.” Her smile grew wider. “I prefer the term…” She leaned forward, closer to Stolitz than he was comfortable with, and jabbed a claw harmlessly into his chest. “Economical.”
"No,” Stolitz said firmly, leveling his own finger back at his wife. “No, that’s not being economical, Agratta, that’s having a fucking substance abuse problem, is what that is.”
“And I suppose you would know a-a-all about that, now wouldn’t you,” Agratta said with an odd note of pride in her voice.
Though he wouldn’t have done it, and never would have done it, he thought that, in the moment, there was nothing he would have rather done than wring Agratta’s neck. “I am not the one drinking bloody Everclear at - at -” Stolitz glanced back at the oven and checked the time, displayed in glowing green numbers, on the readout. “Nine twenty-two in the morning!”
“I’m not drinking Everclear, Stolitz,” Agratta chided. She picked up the glass and, for some reason, Stolitz let her. She took a sip and didn’t so much as flinch. “I’m drinking Everclear and orange juice. That’s what they call a screwdriver, here in the States.”
“That’s not a bloody screwdriver, woman, it’s a fucking power drill, is what that is.”
Agratta shrugged, unconcerned. “Well. Call it what you want, but it’s a morning drink, all the same. You drink it in the morning, with your breakfast, which, I might add, is getting cold, so…” Agratta turned and took one of the plates.
She didn’t say anything, but she gestured to the kitchen bar and made her way to it, leaving Stolitz to collect the breakfast that may or may not have been prepared for him while she sat down. She didn’t wait for him to join her; she started eating, all the while glancing up at him with thinly (and poorly) veiled anticipation. It seemed to Stolitz as if she was very much expecting him to sit down in the other bar stool and eat alongside her.
Stolitz looked down at the sandwich that Agratta had prepared. It looked… fine. Clearly, she hadn’t tampered with the ingredients - she was eating the same thing she was expecting him to eat, without any indication that it might be poisoned, like some small part of him thought was possible. The bread was a little over-toasted, but not inedibly so. And, on the off-chance that his suspicion was correct, and she did intend to kill him off… well, succumbing to poisoning by some household cleaning agent would, if nothing else, save him the headache of trying to find a way to eke out a living in suburban Florida. Stolitz took the plate. He leaned against the kitchen counter, took the sandwich in his hand, and took a bite.
It tasted… fine.
“What are you doing?”
He looked up to see Agratta had paused her own eating, the sandwich still in her hands, hovering just shy of her beak.
“Eating,” Stolitz said through a mouthful of half-chewed food.
“Standing up?”
Stolitz swallowed. He shrugged. “Yes?”
Agratta was curiously quiet. She didn’t put down her sandwich. “You threw a bloody fit over buying these bar stools so you’d have a place to sit while you ate.” She didn’t sound incensed. She didn’t sound as if she felt much of anything, really. She sounded as if she was just making a simple observation.
Stolitz shrugged. “I’ve been laying down. All night. On the floor.” He took another bite, and added, “I feel like standing for a moment.”
Agratta put her sandwich down. Her eyes hardened, and Stolitz could feel the gears of her inner-workings beginning to shift. Even the air around him seemed to draw taut with an invisible tension, and he realized that no amount of alcohol could keep the Agratta smothered once she'd been sleighted over some trivial matter.
“Oh, sin,” Stolitz huffed. “Did I do something wrong, Agratta? Did I commit a crime by choosing to stand rather than sit?”
Stolitz braced himself for a flurry of abuse, but found that, again, Agratta remained quiet. The tension remained, and her stare was pointed, critical, even, but she said nothing for a long, uncertain moment. She laid her hands on the countertop flat.
“I,” she said plainly. “Am… trying. Stolitz.”
“Trying to do what, exactly? Drink yourself into a coma?”
“To be pleasant,” Agratta answered. Her response came almost instantaneously, and flatly, too. “That's what you wanted. Isn't it?” It wasn't an accusatory statement, as Stolitz has grown accustomed to, but rather a firm yet neutral question.
“Well, yes, but - I didn't think you'd need to get drunk on Everclear to do it. And you shouldn't need to, either. It shouldn't be such a big ask of you to be fucking pleasant that you require a handle of bloody grain alcohol to do it!”
“And it shouldn't be a big ask for my husband to sit next to me and eat the fucking food for I made for him.”
Stolitz felt himself lock up where he stood. Agratta wasn’t screaming. Wasn’t yelling. She was talking firmly, yes, but it wasn’t her usual attack.
“You want to a wife who's pleasant? Well, I want a husband who will - will sit next to me and eat the bloody food I made him. And, here's the thing, Stolitz.” She raised a hand, one finger raised in a way that told Stolitz that he was about to suffer through a lecture he didn’t want to hear. “Here's the thing.Y-”
“Oh, please, Agratta. Spare me the histrionics. I'll sit down if it’s th-”
“No.”
Stolitz flinched.
Agratta took a long, trembling breath. There was a look in her eyes that he couldn’t identify. One that he didn’t recognize. “No,” Agratta repeated. “Just once - just - for once in your life, listen to me.”
“Listen to you?” Stolitz balked. “Woman, I listening to your bitching every day of my life.”
“Don’t say that.”
He jumped again as Agratta brought a fist down on the countertop, sending a rattle through the plate and glass set before her. She breathed audibly and hard.
“Don’t - don’t you say that,” she said through her teeth. “You do not listen to me, Stolitz. You hear me, but you don't - you never actually listen to what I say. It all just goes in one of your ears and straight out the other, and, last night, I - I listened to you. Last night, I honestly, truly did my best not to just… just hear you, but actually fucking listen, so, please… do the same for me.”
Stolitz wanted to argue. Badly so. He wanted to tell her all the times he’d sat there and listened to the abuse she hurled at him, the venom she spit, the insults she leveled, and he took it all without a word. All the criticism. All the critique. All the pointless nit-picking and hen-pecking and needling, and now - now she had the temerity to ask him to do it again, as if he didn’t suffer whatever she had to say every time she opened her beak.
Yet, he remained quiet. He stood up straight. He looked at his wife, hard-eyed and stiff, and let his silence invite her to continue. He’d gotten a tongue lashing before. He could take another, if it quelled her drunken, indignant anger.
“Last night,” Agratta said. “Last night, you said - you said to me that you've been dying for me since we married. And… and I understood what you were saying. I did. But… you don't seem to understand that I-” She pointed her claw back at herself. “I have been trying. For decades, now. Trying to give you what you want, what you need, what you ask for, just like I told you I would do, but - y-you - you never -” Her words were interrupted by an awful trilling sound in the back of her throat as a grimace pulled on her face and her eyes screwed shut. “You said that what you do wasn’t enough for me, but nothing I’ve ever done was enough for you!”
Stolitz felt all the fine hairs on his neck bristle. He thought it was offense - his own aching pride, but, in the moment of silence that stretched between Agratta’s words, he recognized it for what it really was.
Guilt.
“Whatever I do, I’ve always done it wrong. And I always did exactly what you told me to do. I tried to give you exactly what you asked of me, but - it was never right. Never. You asked for space, so I give you space, and then you turned around and called me cold. You want to be left alone, so I leave you alone, and then you said that I was ignoring you, or - or that I didn’t care about you, so I tried to show you I did and you… you told me I was smothering you! So, then, you - you tell me you need space, and the whole fucking thing just starts over again. I can’t get close to you. I can’t give you space. What can I do? Then, you asked me to make dinner, and so many nights, I made it, and you couldn’t even be bothered to eat any of it. You asked me to take care of Astoria, and I did, and you did nothing but critique and criticize how I did it. You asked me to decorate the house, and - and you never liked what I did it with, not the furniture, not the bed sheets, not the fucking curtains, none of it ever pleased you. I couldn’t even be fucking intimate with you because every time I tried you - you weren’t in the mood, or it wasn’t the right time, or you’d had to much to drink, or I was pushing or bothering you or disturbing your peace and I just -” She threw her hands up and let them slap limp against the counter.
“Now… now you ask me to be nice, and when I try, you tell me I'm not doing it the right way because I needed a bloody drink just to get myself in a state mind where I can be! Because… yes. Yes, there came a time where I just stopped listening to you, and I stopped trying, because I just couldn't figure what the fuck you actually wanted from me. But I tried. Whether you knew it or not, or - or whether I showed it enough or not, I did. And now… now I’m trying again, and it's the same bloody thing. All over again.”
Agratta took a long, pensive pause. Her eyes unfocused and drifted from Stolitz’s own.
“I’m trying,” she said softly. “And… I apologize if that isn't enough.”
The guilt in Stolitz’s chest expanded. It pressed against the interior of his rib cage and rose in his throat like bile, making it difficult to swallow, hard to breath. His own words echoed inside his head. And he felt all the more guilty that his first thought was - How dare you use my own words against me? He felt his knees buckling beneath the weight of knowing that the words fighting to escape his mouth were - You’re manipulating me. He knew that if he had his way, right then, right there, the two words he would have told his wife, more than anything, would be simple and precise - Be quiet.
Which told him one thing; she was right.
Wordlessly, Stolitz took the plate he’d set down. He walked around the countertop, slid out the other, unoccupied barstool that he’d lobbied to buy, and sat down. He couldn’t bring himself to say anything. He didn’t even want to risk opening his mouth and one of the hateful, spiteful things struggling to be spoken in the worst parts of his soul from leaping out.
So, he stuffed the sandwich into it. Even when his mouth was full, he crammed more in, just to give his jaw something to do that wasn’t eat. Out of his peripheral vision, he noticed Agratta staring at him from hers. He pretended not to notice. After a moment, he heard her sigh. Or maybe she was just breathing hard. It was hard to tell over the sound of his own chewing in his ears.
“How is it?” Agratta spoke so softly that Stolitz could hardly hear her.
He nodded and waited to swallow before speaking. “Good. It’s good.”
“I’m not impressed,” Agratta said.
“Well… you did what you could with what you had on hand.” He stopped to eat more. “We’ll get some more to work with today.”
“Can we get something better to make drinks with than grain alcohol.”
Stolitz almost laughed. “Ask about it, this time. I might think about it.”
“Good,” Agratta muttered around the rim of her glass. She took a sip and, this time, she let herself pull a face. “This is actually ruddy awful.”
After that, for a long while, the two ate in silence. But, for the first time in even longer, they ate together.
I consulted with a certified and licensed bar tender with years of experience - myself - to bring the Power Drill to life. Here’s what our consultant came up with; three parts ever clear to eight parts orange juice. Do not consume on an empty stomach. Drink with breakfast. Serve chilled and enjoy. Max serving limit: two.
Maybe.
This is the eleventh installment of my ongoing series for Thorny Thursday, which is spearheaded by Kathrine Elaine and The Brothers Krynn. I encourage you to check out the other authors that are participating, a full list of which can be found on either of their pages.
As always, I sincerely hope you enjoyed, and I hope to see you in the next.
Oh, the joys of mending broken bonds. These introspective moments for Stolitz and Agratta are well handled. Both are departing from who we've seen them as, but the slipups and backslides, as well as the gradual nature of it, gives it that much needed sense of believability. Theirs isn't an easy relationship to fix, nor are the flaws in their personalities, and you do a fine job of presenting the sorts of small steps that need to be taken to make those necessary changes. Steps that sometimes rely on some pretty unhealthy crutches.
Oh, and it's a popcorn texture on the ceiling, not stucco. Stucco is used on the exterior of homes. Aren't you just *so* glad to know a pedant who works with contractors on a daily basis? ;)
A very touching scene in the end, and I really enjoyed this one and Agratta’s chance to say her piece. Thank you for another chapter!