The Lovebirds - V
"If you want to sit here and languish in this… in this… suburban cesspit, then by all means, do so, but I shan’t be staying here a moment longer than necessary."
“It's not in here.”
“What do you mean it's not in there?”
“It means that - sweet Lucifer, woman, how does it's not in here have any other meaning than exactly what it sounds like?”
“Well, it - it has to be in there somewhere. Look again!”
“It's a wallet, not a duffel bag. It's not like it could hide from me.”
“Oh, you'd lose your tail feathers if they weren't stuck to your arse. Let me see.”
Had anyone been out driving along Nazareth Road close to midnight, they would have seen a strange, perhaps even comical sight. They would have seen a couple, both tall and pale and dark-haired, built like bean-poles and dressed in natty clothes, standing on an unlit porch and fussing over a wallet, searching for a key to unlock the front door to the house that most would presume they lived in. They might have passed by just in time to see the wife - a woman only a hair shorter than her husband, her features sharp, hawkish, and defined by what some might call a terminal case of resting bitch face - snatch a wallet out of her husband's hands and rifle through the contents with a scowl that seemed all too natural to her face.
“Well?” Stolitz asked. “Did you find it?”
Agratta stared into the wallet as if she expected that, if she did so with enough intensity, the key would materialize.
Stolitz knew, as Agratta now did, that there was nothing in the thing save for cash and two driver's license for people who, until today, didn't exist. He flinched as the wallet bounced off his chest, tossed by Agratta, and fell to the ground.
“Well, if he didn't leave a bloody key, how did he expect us to get in?”
Stolitz groaned as leaned over, picked the wallet off the concrete patio. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said as he stuffed it back into the pocket he'd found it in.
“My guess is probably better than yours,” Agratta grumbled.
“Oh, is it? And what would that be, then? What are you thinking, o wise one?” asked Stolitz.
His wife had her arms folded over her chest and seemed to be looking everywhere except for at him; perhaps in search of the house key that been eluding them for the better part of ten minutes.
“Well, I'm thinking that your father got this house and didn't bother to leave a fucking key for us. Just to spite us.”
At this point, Stolitz would have only been slightly surprised if his father intended to have them break into their own quarters, just as a means of making their lives all the more difficult. At first, he wasn't convinced that the address printed on the cards in his wallet weren't just a random address he'd picked, and that they had pulled up to some stranger's house and were now currently trying to commit a crime by entering. However, not a single light, inside or outside were on, and, by this point, if there were any residents inside the house, they would have already heard the two demons bickering and come to investigate. Probably with a gun, which probably wouldn't kill them, but limping away with a gaping gunshot wound to sleep in the woods would have definitely made an already bad day all the worse.
“He gave us money,” Stolitz said. “And he gave us identification cards. I can't imagine he'd have done all that just to leave us locked out of the place he meant for us to stay.”
Stolitz turned his back on the door, placing his hands on his hips as he surveyed the front yard, taking in the details and thinking to himself that if he was going to hide a key somewhere… where would he do it? Nothing obvious came to mind. Then again, that was kind of the point, when hiding something - one didn't put something meant to be hidden somewhere obvious. But, there was also no place he could see to hide one. No stones to put it under. Not even a tree. There were bushes - maybe it had been dropped in those? His eyes spied the brick mailbox at the end of the concrete walkway, out by the street.
Well… it didn't seem like the most logical place to hide a key, but it made more sense than simply dropping in in the bushes besides the porch.
“Alright,” Stolitz said. “You look around up here. I'm going to check the mailbox, and if it's not there, I'll l-”
The distinct metal click of a deadbolt being unlocked. He turned around. His wife had one hand on a small, bronze door key, now inserted into the lock on the front door, though she was looking back at him.
Grinning. Smugly.
“Where'd you find that?”
“Under the welcome mat,” Agratta replied. Smugly. Stolitz looked down to see that there was, indeed, a welcome mat that she was standing on that, somehow, he'd entirely missed. The words, Welcome to the, were printed in black letters across the top, below which were big, loopy, cursive characters that spelled out Shitshow.
It read more like a threat than a joke.
Stolitz clicked his tongue. “Well… I could have thought of that.”
“But you didn't,” Agratta said.
She turned back to the unlock door, but… she didn't open it. Her hand rested on the handle, and for a moment, she hesitated.
“Well?” Stolitz asked. “What's the delay?”
Without answering, Agratta turned the handle, opened the door, and didn't step inside. Her hand slipped off the door handle and fell limp to her side. Even though the interior of the house would have been too dark for a human to make anything out, Agratta and Stolitz weren't human. Over his wife's shoulder, Stolitz could see inside, perhaps not perfectly, but enough to understand why his wife said what she did next.
“You… have got to be fucking kidding…”
Agratta, on slow, staggering feet, stumbled dumbly into the darkness as if she were blinded. Stolitz followed, and flipped on the lights. Agratta, eyes bulging and panicked, circled the room is a desperate, futile search for… something.
“Stolitz,” Agratta said in a breathy, hushed word. “Stolitz… where - where's the furniture? Where's anything?”
The front room, which doubled as a den, was empty. Barren. Devoid of anything save for four white walls of sheetrock, faux-hardwood floor panels, and LED lights in recessed cans overhead, with a single fan bolted to the ceiling. The kitchen, too, was empty, and so was the pocket office to the side, while a large, sliding glass door gave an expansive view to a rather spacious backyard. There were a few palm trees. A handful of bushes. But no swimming pool. Not even a jacuzzi.
Agratta hobbled through the emptiness and drew ragged, quivering breaths as if she'd just been grievously wounded.
“I - I need a bed.”
“Agratta,” Stolitz called after her as she began to veer off down a hallway. “Agratta, it's not - don't do anything stupid, now.”
“I need something to faint on!” Agratta hollered from down the hallway. Stolitz, in quick pursuit, and his wife throw open one door. With only a moment's pause, she staggered to the next, and did the same. As Stolitz passed the first door, he saw a small powder bath. Empty, save for the standard plumbing fixtures, of course. When he got to the second door, he found Agratta leaning against the threshold, her body loose and lax.
Oh, sweet Lucifer - she hadn't been exaggerating when she said she needed to faint.
Stolitz threw himself against the door frame to find that, actually, Agratta wasn't unconscious and about to fall. She did, however, sound as if she were beginning to hyperventilate.
“What -” Agratta gasped. “What the fuck is that?”
She leveled a finger at the mattress on lying on the floor. It wasn't exactly small, but, compared to the bed that the two shared in Hell, the two might as well have been the size of a saltine cracker. In Hell, their bed was big enough that the two of them didn't even have to see each other, if they didn't want to. When they'd first bought it, Agratta had joked that they'd have to send telegrams just to communicate from one side to the other. Astoria could sleep in between them, laying horizontally, and all three of them would still have room to themselves.
But this? There was no way the two of them would fit on it without having to… touch each other. At the very least, they'd be laying so close to one another that he'd be feeling the heat of her body against his. The thought alone made the soft, fine fur on the back of Stolitz's neck stand on end.
Whoever had arranged the house - whether it be Stolas or a flunkie of his - had the decency to put a sheet on it, and leave some bed dressing in a neatly folded square of fabric on the side.
“I think that's… that's the bed,” said Stolitz, his own voice distant in his ears.
Agratta tottered forward and took the folded sheets in either hand. She let them unfurl. Wordlessly, she studied the colorful, cartoon dogs, each one wearing the garb and headgear for various different professions (adjusted appropriately for canine proportions), and met their broad, toothy grins with quiet despair.
Stolitz read the words emblazoned in bright red balloon letters stamped across the pattern at various intervals. “Puppy Dog… Pals…”
The grinning cartoon puppies crumbled and folded as Agratta let the sheet flutter to her feet. Her despair had curled into an expression of abject hatred.
“And what are you fucking snickering about?” Agratta snapped. “Do you think this -” She kicked the heap of bed sheets. “Is god damn funny?”
"Well…” Stolitz said, unable to remove the smirk from his beak. “It's… come now, Agratta, you - you have to admit that one's… the absurdity of it all, it is a little… funny.”
That had been the incorrect answer. Stolitz knew it was, and, yet, he'd said it anyways. Agratta snatched up the sheet again and began to ball it in her hands, inhaling sharply and her chest swelling, which he had learned from years of experience meant two things - he needs to gird his body and brace his ears for -
“This! Is about as funny! As a fucking! EXORCISM!”
The ball of wadded up bed sheets smacked Stolitz in the face with the force of a medicine ball. Over the ringing in his ears, he heard his wife storm off in a flurry of feathers and muttered obscenities. As he tore the sheets from his head, he the last of her tailfeathers disappear through the door to the bathroom. Moments later, as Stolitz studied the mattress and wondered how, exactly, he was going to manage to share such a small space with someone who refused to touch him, his thoughts were shattered by a full-throated shriek. It was an ugly sound - a sound of absolute terror and sincere distress. One that Stolitz was accustomed to hearing from the torture pits, but not one he’d ever heard from his wife, and that alone was enough to send the sensation of a dagger lancing through his heart.
“Agratta?”
Agratta burst from the bathroom at a full sprint, bounding towards Stolitz until she realized what she was doing, and her distaste for her husband overpowered whatever had frightened her. She stopped just short of colliding with his chest, dancing in place and flailing her hands madly and sputtering out little noises of panic and fear.
“Agratta,” Stolitz snapped. “Agratta! Sweet Lucifer, woman - get a hold of yourself!”
Agratta didn’t shake her head so much as look to be trying to whip it back and forth hard enough to detach it from her neck.
“What the devil’s gotten into you?”
His wife swallowed a gasping breath. “Th-the - the c-closet,” she gibbered, wracked by violent, visible shudders. “It’s - oh, the closet!”
“What? What about the closet?”
“The clothes, damn it!” Agratta’s eyes were close to bugging out of their sockets, slitted pupils now wide as a human finger. “It’s the clothes in it, oh, Lucifer - the bloody clothes!”
Oh. Right. Of course, out of everything that could possibly be wrong with their given situation, it would be something as trivial as clothes that would send Agratta into a frenzy. With a roll of his eyes and a beleagured sigh, Stolitz shook his head. “Oh, for the love of everything unholy - that’s what has you so worked up? The clothes?”
“You didn’t see them,” Agratta growled. She drove the tip of one of her claws into Stolitz’s chest. “You - you didn’t see them! Your arsehole father - he wouldn’t let me pack and - and - this is what he leaves me with?” She gave an avian shriek of anguish and pain, which, if the way she writhed was anything to go by, she was very much in.
“Well… I’m sure they aren’t the haute couture that you’re accustomed to,” said Stolitz, restraining the desire to add, And that I paid for. “But - sweet sin, woman they can’t be that bad.”
Agratta blinked. “That - that bad?” she squeaked. “That… bad?”
Her tail feathers whipped against Stolitz as she turned and, in another storm of murmured swears and oaths, stormed back into the bathroom. Stolitz heard the snapping of plastic as she tore clothes from hangars and, within a few seconds, reemerged with a bundle of clothes clenched in her talons, holding them at length as they were a rancid, malodorous bag of rotting trash. She tore one free and held it up for Stolitz to see.
“Look at this!” she yelped. She gave the pair of pale blue jeans a shake. “Blue jeans! Bleached. Blue jeans! This is denim, Stolitz! Denim!”
Stolitz felt one of his eyelids twitch. They were… well, they truly were not haute couture. And the bleaching, was… yes, it was certainly unflattering. But…
“Okay,” Stolitz admitted. “Well, yes. I, um - I admit, those… those are rather garish, but - but plenty of respectable demons were denim jeans. Sometimes.”
"Well, this one bloody doesn’t,” Agratta snarled. “And the denim - that’s the least of it. Look. Look at this!” Agratta dashed the jeans on the carpet at her feet and took another article from the small bundle of clothes for Stolitz to see.
“T-shirts!” Agratta shrieked. She lurched forward. “With… kittens on them!”
She jammed it in Stolitz’s direction, and he recoiled with a sound of disgust. As if it wasn’t bad enough that it was a plain, simple, collarless, and no doubt cheap t-shirt, but… a t-shirt with a tacky, tasteless, and gauche graphic. The shirt was black, and on the center was the image of a doe-eyed, white-furred kitten with a demure smile and the words I WILL END YOU printed beneath it.
It wasn’t something that Stolitz could imagine his wife, what with her taste for fine, custom-tailored clothes crafted by the most talented and exclusive designers in Hell, wearing.
And, as soon as he thought that he couldn’t imagine it, his mind proved that he absolutely could, and the image of Agratta wearing a pair of hip-hugging, high-waisted bleach jeans and that silly shirt - tucked in, of course - with her arms crossed and arms scowling, popped into his head.
The smallest sound of smothered amusement came from the back of his throat.
And, some how, Agratta heard. Even though he’d kept his expression completely even, even though the sound had been tiny, even in his own ears, she’d still heard. She still knew. His wife’s eyes narrowed into hateful slits. Stolitz felt his chest constrict.
“Oh…” Agratta chirped with mock amusement. “You - you think that this is funny, too, don’t you?”
Stolitz shook his head. “No,” he lied. “No, no, I - I didn’t -”
“You think this is fucking funny, you arsehole?” Her scowl inverted into a cruel smile. “Well, you just go ahead. Go ahead and laugh, you bastard, laugh as much as you want, because if you find this funny? Oh, you’re going to find this next one hilarious. Because this one… this I found on the other side of the closet.”
The kitten shirt joined the jeans on the floor and, with theatrical flourish, Agratta presented the last piece of clothing, holding it wide with both hands for Stolitz to see in all it’s awful glory. Stolitz gasped hard enough to choke. His hands raised in a feeble attempt to repel the graceless display of suburban American mediocrity and he took a step back.
“Oh - Oh, Lucifer, no.”
“Oh, yes,” Agratta hissed. She took a step forward, bringing the awful shirt even closer to Stolitz. “Yes!”
On the shirt, the graphic of a smiling cartoon hound of an indiscriminate breed, wearing a pair of shades, black lips curled in a smug, self-satisfied smirk, lording over text printed in big, bold letters that red, That's Mister Big Dog to you!
Stolitz stepped back and turned his head to avoid the haughty sneer of the cartoon canine. “Put - you put that awful thing away, right this moment!”
Agratta drew even closer, the manic grin on her beak spreading with every step. “Look at it! Look at it, you coward!”
Stolitz opened his beak to protest, but felt his ankle catch on the floor-bound mattress. His balance gave out and he keeled back, his fall being stopped by the delicate touch of the ad hoc bed. No sooner was he on his back did Agratta reach down and, before he could react, spread the shirt over his chest. He’d been squirted with holy water, once - the burning sensation of consecrated water on his skin was much the same he felt smothering him now as the shirt covered him. He writhed with discomfort. He squirmed with shame.
Agratta stood over him.
“Look at you,” she said under her breath. “Mister Big Dog…” She smirked like the dog on that stupid shirt as she shook her head with disapproval. Over the course of their marriage, Agratta had called Stolitz many different things. Most of them unflattering. Even more insulting. A good number were words or terms that could not be repeated in polite company. And, yet, still, out of all of them, Mister Big Dog had a particular sting to it that Stolitz had never felt before.
“Don't you feel… silly?” Asked Agratta. “Don't you feel… stupid?” She cocked her head at a questioning angle. “Don't you feel… a little ashamed?”
They were all rhetorical questions.
“Laughable,” Agratta said in a low voice. She turned her back to him and began to pace aimlessly in a circle. Stolitz, with a groan, sat himself up. He peeled the shirt off him with a grimace and, pinning it forefinger and thumb and tossed it away like it was the decaying carcass of a small animal. He watched Agratta walking, walking, walking in a circle for a good minute until she decided to stop, or her patience for his presence ran out.
“What are you staring at?”
“What… what are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” Agratta snapped. “I’m thinking about how I’m going to get us out of this bloody situation.”
“You?” Stolitz asked.
“Yes,” Agratta replied, placing a hand to her chest. “Me, Stolitz, since you’re apparently content to just sit there and twiddle your talons like an imbecile. You got us into this situation, but, mark my words, I will get us out of it. Or, at the very least, I’ll get myself out. If you want to sit here and languish in this… in this…” She shivered with disgust before spitting the words, “Suburban cesspit, then by all means, do so, but I shan’t be staying here a moment longer than necessary. Believe me when I say that I’d be perfectly content to leave your sorry arse here, if I could, but I have this sickening feeling that my release is contingent on yours.”
Me. There was a lot Me talk coming from Agratta, and even more blame being singularly heaped at Stolitz’s feet, as if she was some blameless victim with clean feathers. He didn’t appreciate it… but, at the same time, he felt as if arguing with her would be a fool’s errand. They’d been married long enough to be well aware that, once Agratta’s mind had been set, Lucifer himself would be unable to alter her convictions, and attempting to force the issue, argue over it, or even reason things out would only result in her digging in her talons all the deeper and cementing whatever idea was in her head even further, just out of spite.
“Then maybe,” said Stolitz, speaking slowly, deliberately, and carefully. “Rather than continue to cast aspersions against me, we need to work together.”
“And risk having you cock it up even more?” Agratta said with an indignant snort.
“My father said that we’d only be allowed to return to Hell if we put aside our differences. That’s not going to happen if you keep me at arm’s length and act as if I’m solely at fault, here.”
Agratta looked as if she meant to argue, only to deflate with an angry sigh. She averted her eyes from his. “Typical.”
“What was that?”
“Typical,” Agratta repeated. “I said typical, because that’s - oh, that’s so very Stolitz of you, isn’t it? Refusing to own up to your failures and pleading innocence as if you’ve done nothing wrong, and then placing blame for your problems on the shoulders of everyone and everything except for yourself.”
Stolitz rose to his full height, a scowl on his beak. He knew he shouldn’t engage, he knew damn well what he was walking into, but he’d been having a very bad night, his head was not in a good place, and, more than anything, he had lost the stomach to tolerate any more Agratta’s baseless accusations.
“Excuse me, Agratta, but the only one of us that’s refusing to accept responsibility for the mess that we’re in is you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, Agratta. You. Even when we were in front of my father, all you could talk about was me and what I'd done wrong. Me, me, me, as if you didn’t have just as much a part to play in getting us stuck here as I did.”
“And that,” Agratta bit, closing the distance between herself and Stolitz, stopping just short of pressing her chest to his. “Is exactly what I’m talking about! You keep shifting the focus back to me when there’s trouble, just as you always have. You may say that you accept responsibility but you never actually act as if you do. You never own up to what you do. You’ll say that you did something wrong, but you always manage to find an excuse that justifies why it isn't your fault or why it isn't a problem or why you shouldn’t be blamed. It was never your fault that you didn't had time for me, it was because of your work, it wasn’t a problem that you’d come home and lock yourself up in your study, because you'd say we both needed space. You’d never sit at the bloody dinner table and eat the food that I fucking prepared for you because you didn’t have the time, and it wasn’t your fault that you were never there for Astoria, it was -”
Agratta flinched, and when her eyes snapped open again, Stolitz’s finger was leveled in her face, right at the end of her beak.
“Don’t,” he said under his breath. He shook his head. “Do not bring Astoria into this.”
Agratta didn’t smirk - that was how Stolitz knew she wasn’t toying with him, now.
“Struck a nerve, did I?”
“Everything I did,” Stolitz growled. “Everything I’ve done was for Astoria’s sake. You have no idea - none - the work that I’ve done, the time that I’ve toiled, the sacrifices that I made to ensure that girl was able to have the childhood that you and I never had, and I will not stand here and have you make the claim that I am a bad father.”
For a long, long moment, Agratta was silent, and only the sound of their breathing filled the air between them. Then, in a small, quiet voice -
“It was just for her, then?”
Stolitz reeled back, all of the grief and despair and regret pent up in his chest erupting in a futile cry.
“Oh, for the love of - she’s my - she’s our fucking daughter, you selfish bitch!”
“And I’m your fucking wife! We’re supposed to be a family!”
Stolitz barreled back over to his wife, hands out, talons bared and fingers splayed apart, another cry of impotent frustration filling the room. He stopped himself before he did something he would regret. Maybe she’d say he was a coward for doing so. Maybe he should just -
No. No, no, no, no. She was right - she was his wife. And even if she wasn’t… it would be beneath him to do anything stupid. That wasn’t who he was. That wasn’t the demon he was, nor the demon he wanted to be, even if adhering to basic demonic decency made him a weak, craven, spineless coward in her eyes. He had nothing if not his dignity.
He shook his head. He turned away from her. “I can’t do this,” he said. He threw his arms up and let them slap against his sides. “I can’t - I can’t even look at you right now.”
“The feeling is mutual.”
“You can have the bed,” he snapped, reaching down and snatching one of the two pillows off the mattress and brandishing it like a weapon. It was ridiculous that he'd even considered laying next to her. “I'd rather sleep on the floor than next to you.”
As he stormed out of the room, he was stuck by another blow from the wadded sheets against his back.
“Don't forget your baby blanket, you overgrown child!”
Stolitz bent over and collected them, too. “Fuck you,” he snarled.
“Fuck you!” Agratta snapped back.
The door slammed shut in his face.
Stolitz stood there in the darkness, pillow in one hand, sheets in the other, staring at the white, wooden door, simmering in his own indignant, impotent anger, seized by the urge to tear the thing from it's hinges and stomp on it until it was splinters, if only to vent his own misery.
From the other side, he heard a sniffle. Then a stifled sob. Then, the waterworks began.
He'd heard Agratta cry before. Many times. It was not a foreign sound. Yet, even now, after the heated exchange and hateful words, the sound of his wife sobbing stirred something in the very core of his being that brought about a distinct and unique sense of guilt that could never be brought about by anything else. Despite everything they had said about one another, despite everything they'd done, despite the burning and raw animosity between them, it still made him feel as if he should go back, embrace the same woman who'd done nothing but insult him, and apologize.
Perhaps it was some mental conditioning - a lingering remnant of programmed behavior that had been instilled in him from a time when the relationship with his wife had been very different than it was now. Maybe it was just the natural, knee-jerk instinct of a male demon hearing the sounds of a female demon in distress.
It didn't matter. There wasn't anything he could do to take back anything he said. He knew she wouldn't even make the attempt to retract anything she'd said, either, and she'd only dismiss any attempt he made to do the same.
As he listened to his wife shed those bitter tears, Stolitz knew that it wasn't just the sound of her despair; it was the sound of his own abject failure as a partner.
Stolitz sauntered into the empty den. He turned off the light. He unfastened the buttons of his vest, removed it and the shirt underneath, slid off his pants, and folded them in a neat square on the ground. There was no point in searching for a place to sleep - one patch of faux hardwood floor would be no more comfortable than any other. In the middle of the room, he laid down beside his discarded clothes, wearing only his undershirt and a pair of thin, black undershorts. He put the pillow over his head. He draped the sheet over his body. It wasn't long enough to cover his feet, but, at the moment, he didn't really care.
Stolitz, face up, lying like a corpse on the floor, closed his eyes. He didn't want to sleep, but he wasn't sure what else to do other than close his eyes and hope that, when he opened them again, he would find that this whole night had been one long, dreadful nightmare. He wasn't tired, but it wasn't long before sleep found him.
That night, Stolitz dreamed about Astoria. That night, he dreamed about Disney World.
Do they still make Big Dog shirts? I remember my dad had some growing up, and there was an entire store in our local mall that sold them, way back in the stone ages when I was a child.
This is the fifth 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.
He dreamed about Astoria.
He dreamed about Disney World.
Notably absent from those dreams was the Galactic Starcruiser.
I very much enjoyed this episode and will be looking forward to the next one. I’m laughing at the thought of them in the Galactic Star cruiser!.