“What was that? What did you just put in there?” Stolitz asked.
“What does it look like?” Agratta replied.
Stolitz briefly glanced at the two small plastic bottles, one in each hand. He had been trying to discern if there was any real difference between the generic heartburn medication and the name brand one with a purple cap, since the latter was significantly more expensive than the former, even though both were, apparently, were the same drug - Omeprazole, which, if he remembered correctly, was the name of a demon he lived next to when he first got married, and before he moved into the manor he desperately wanted to return to. Or something close to it. He was going to need it; Earth food, particularly American cuisine, always disagreed with his stomach.
Had he been in Hell, he would have tossed the more expensive of the two into his cart without a second thought, but they weren’t in Hell, his considerable wealth was unavailable to him, and all he had to use was the cash in his wallet, which meant he’d have to be more judicious about his spending. It was, he assumed, part of the humbling - and humiliating - experience that his father intended him to have on Earth.
So, he returned the more expensive, branded medication to the shelf and placed the cheaper, generic one in his cart before removing the last item that Agratta had added to the ever-growing cache of supplies they’d been filling it with. Unamused, he looked at his wife, who appeared to be daring him to make a comment about it.
“Essentials, Agratta,” he said. “We’re purchasing essentials, here.”
Agratta huffed. “Yes, Stolitz. I am aware. It isn’t as if you haven’t said a dozen bloody times already.”
“Then why,” he asked. “Are you putting this in the cart?” He held up the small bottle of black nail paint and gave it a shake. “This… this is not essential.”
“Oh, I beg to differ,” Agratta countered. “It is essential to maintain my sanity, and, by extension, yours, that my nails be kept in pristine condition. And, currently…” She displayed her talons. “That is not the case.”
To Stolitz’s untrained eye, Agratta’s talons looked the same as they always did. Bare and clean of any varnish, maybe, but he’d never quite understood why it was so imperative to keep them lacquered to begin with.
“Oh, come off it,” Stolitz sighed. “You do not need… this to keep your nails orderly.” He withdrew a nail file from the cart. “Or this.” He pulled out a pair of nail clippers. “And - what the devil even is this?” He squeezed the spongy, foam block between his forefinger and thumb.
“It’s a buffing block,” Agratta said, reaching over the cart and snatching the goods from Stolitz’s claws. “And, yes - yes, you do need these to keep your nails orderly, actually. Just because you’re content gnaw on your talons like a hellhound doesn’t mean I’m going to follow suit. I may have had everything I hold dear taken from me, but I absolutely refuse to be stripped of my dignity.”
Stolitz’s eyes gravitated to her chest, where she’d folded her arms over the text printed on the front of the mauve t-shirt that read, I’M NOT A WINE MOM, I’M A WINE MILF, and wondered if she was truly arrogant enough that she was laboring under the misapprehension that she had any dignity left to be stripped, or if she was attempting to regain some by acting as if she wasn’t bothered. He wasn’t going to make any comment about it, though. As much as he’d resisted, the clothes he’d arrived in smelled odd after his impromptu dip in the plaza fountain, forcing him to relent and put on the one shirt in the closet that hadn’t made his stomach turn just to look at. Thankfully, there was one single shirt that did have a collar on it. It was, however, a pastel pink in color that simply did not compliment his hair-feathers all that well, but… well, it was better than the big dog shirt. He’d also put on a pair of jeans, since he was simply unable to bear the indignity of wearing one of the pairs of shorts he’d also found in the closet. Maybe one day, when he was desperate, but… not today.
Over the years, he’d learned which battles were worth fighting with Agratta, and this one, over supplies for her nails, felt as if it was one best finished with a strategic retreat.
“Fine,” he sighed. “Fine. Whatever you say.”
He looked away as Agratta returned the items to the cart. He did reach back in and take the paint. He was curious how much it cost, so he scanned the bottle until -
“Sweet sin, woman! Did you even check the price?” It seemed unlikely, since even he had to remind himself to do so.
“Yes,” Agratta answered, as if it should have been obvious.
“And, what? You just - you don’t think the price tag of twenty-four dollars isn't just a bit ridiculous?”
“It’s not that much,” Agratta said, unconcerned.
“Maybe back in Hell, no, but - we have limited funds at the moment, you do realize that, don’t you?”
Agratta rolled her eyes. “Yes, Stolitz, I am perfectly aware that our means are limited at the moment, and you needn’t keep speaking to me as if I’m an invalid who can’t remember the same shit you’ve said a dozen times over the course of ten minutes.”
“Well, maybe I’d stop saying it so much if you acted as if you even bothered to listen! Now, if you want to get… this, so be it, but - surely, there must be a cheaper alternative.”
“I’m sure there is,” Agratta said. “That’s why I picked that one. But I’m not going to debase myself by purchasing the cheapest of the lot. You could bear to have some standards yourself. I mean - really, Stolitz.” She reached into the cart and plucked the generic bottle of omeprazole from inside and shook the contents, which rattled inside. Agratta raised a black brow. “Generic medication?”
“I’m being judicious with our money,” said Stolitz.
“What you’re being is parsimonious,” Agratta grumbled. “And you’re going to regret it when you’re up all night writhing with heartburn.”
“Your concern is touching, but I’m sure generic will suffice.”
“My only concern is that you’re going to be whining about it and I’m going to be stuck listening to you whinge like a hatchling.” She let the bottle drop back into the cart.
And Stolitz let her. He was too tired too argue. Too tired, and too sore from sleeping on the floor. Everything ached and weird places on his body smarted from a night spent rolling around on laminate. At this point, he was ready to return with their haul and call this trip definitely over.
With that, their shopping excursion came to an end. For collecting nothing but essentials - or, at least, mostly essentials - the cart was nearly overflowing with goods. Then again, there wasn’t much in the way of anything in the house, save for the bed, which meant that they’d needed to purchase more than Stolitz wanted to, or even first thought he’d need. But, he realized that, many times, one didn’t know what they needed until they needed it and didn’t have it. The only reason he thought to by towels was because he’d spent the better part of an hour that morning drip-drying after taking a shower. There wasn’t any toilet paper, either, and he was grateful that he’d checked before he sat on the pot and accidentally bungled his way into a very uncomfortable situation. He had a bad feeling that, despite the amount of stuff he and Agratta had collected, they’d be suffering from the unpleasant epiphany that they had only scratched the surface of household essentials for the foreseeable future as they worked themselves into more and more situations where something was needed and not available, which meant that he’d probably be visiting this Target place more than he would like.
Something about it made him uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure why, exactly. So far as human stores went, he had only the knowledge gleaned from his interactions with the damned, but it seemed to be, so far as he could tell, decent. It was clean, for the most part. Well-lit. Orderly. Everything about it seemed reasonable, yet, in a way, distinctly… middle-class. And, even though Stolitz knew he was going to have to swallow his own socio-economic prejudice as a member of Hell’s privileged elite… well, he still felt distinctly out of place shopping there. He felt out of place shopping period. Shopping for basic household goods and food, even his clothes, was something he’d outsourced to imp servants who studied his personal tastes to the point that they knew what he wanted better than he did, and if he ever did deign to do it himself - or, more appropriately, had the time to do it himself - it was only ever to buy things that were far beyond the purchasing power of the average demon or devil, luxury items that were not available to the average demon or devil… or he took was taking out Astoria out to let her shop for herself. Or, as Agratta would put it, buy her affection.
He tried not to think about it too hard as he pushed the cart through the main thoroughfare. The store wasn’t crowded, but there were a number of humans milling about, doing their daily shopping, all blissfully unaware of the fact that a Prince of Hell and his demonic wife were currently walking among them. That, he knew, was partially responsible for his discomfort.
It wasn’t as if he’d never been to Earth. He’d come more times than he can count, and, every time, he felt the same sense of unease as he traveled among them.
Most of them can’t do anything to hurt you, his father had told him once, long ago.
He’d been a relatively young demon, then - only a hundred years old, or so - standing shoulder to shoulder beside his fathed in a crowd of shivering peasants on a cold morning in Paris during the waning days of the French Revolution. They watched soldiers guards force the necks of the condemned into the lunette of a guillotine. Some of them tried to squirm free. Some of them shouted in protest. Most of them cried.
Unless you act like a fool, the few that know how will never even know that they can, his father continued. Watch. See how easily they break.
The executioner pulled a length of rope. The blade fell, and the head followed, dropping unceremoniously into a basket before being lifted by the hair and displayed to the raucous applause crowd.
You needn’t be afraid of them, Stolitz, his father had said.
But Stolitz wasn’t afraid of them. Not then, and not now. No - it wasn’t fear he felt. As he walked among living human, it was the only time he ever felt guilty about what he did for a living. Seeing them in their natural environment, living their lives rather than being subjected to torture and torment that stretched the limits of their own imagination… it made him think about what he did in a way that he didn’t when he was in Hell.
It always felt to him like he was a wolf taking a stroll among ignorant sheep. Or perhaps a butcher in the midst of a herd of swine. He wondered if butchers ever felt the same when they watched a pig mindlessly go about it’s business, unaware that it would soon be slaughtered. He wondered if he wasn’t just sentimental. If he wasn’t just as weak as his wife and his father accused him of being.
“Why are you going to the self-checkout?” Agratta asked.
“It’s easier,” Stolitz said in a small voice.
She protested, of course. What was easy, according to her, was having some human thrall scan and bag their purchases. Stolitz didn’t tell her that if it meant he didn’t have to look a human in the eye at present, he was perfectly willing to do the work himself. He couldn’t tell if her refusal to help scan and bag the items and load them in the car was a sort of punishment for his disagreeing with her, or she saw herself above it all. Both seemed equally likely.
The car itself was one that he’d had trouble coaxing Agratta into. It, too, was unsurprisingly not to her standards. He’d found it in the garage while poking around the house, seeing what little there was to find, with the keys placed on the roof just above the driver’s side door; a rather mundane white sedan, neither new nor old in any great measure, well-kept but hardly luxurious, and indistinguishable from most other cars of a similar make parked in front of other houses in the neighborhood.
Of course, Agratta had a problem with it, which she made known upon first laying eyes on it. “It’s… it’s so pedestrian.”
“Well, you didn’t really think my father was going to pay for us to be chauffeured around up here, did you?” Stolitz had asked. He was just grateful to have a car, since everything was so far apart in America.
He didn’t often drive himself back in Hell. He had an imp who did that for him, just as he had imp servants to do most things, but, much like all the other mundane tasks he’d export onto servants over the years, it didn’t take all that long for the muscle memories to reawaken and the skills to return.
Not that Agratta was convinced.
She’d never learned to drive for a lack of a need to, yet, the way she spoke when Stolitz was behind the wheel, one would think that she had been doing so for longer than he had.
“Did you check the mirrors?”
“Yes, I checked the mirrors.”
“And you shut the trunk, didn’t you?”
“I’m fairly certain I would know by now if I hadn’t.”
Agratta pressed her back against the passenger’s seat with a deep breath as Stolitz put the car into reverse and began to slowly, cautiously back out, looking out the window with visible unease.
“Check your blind spots.”
“I can see perfectly fine, thank you.”
Stolitz turned his head to check for oncoming traffic in the other direction, when -
“Watch it!”
The car jerked to a halt as Stolitz slammed the brake pedal to the floor. Were it not for Agratta’s seatbelt - which he’d had to remind her to put on, both before they’d left the house and only five minutes previous - she would have kissed the dashboard. Hard. She pushed herself off the dashboard with a furious grunt.
“You bloody idiot! Pay attention before you get us both killed!”
“What?!”
“There’s a car coming!”
She motioned towards the road on her side of the car, which Stolitz hadn’t been watching. There was a car coming, she was right about that, though it was creeping along at a snail’s pace more than ten parking spots away from Stolitz’s own.
“Sweet mother of sin, woman,” Stolitz said, following with a sigh of both relief and exasperation. “Calm your feathers. It’s fine.”
“Fine?” Agratta balked. “Are you blind? Look at it!”
“I am,” said Stolitz. “And it’s - look. It stopped.” The offending car had slowed to a stop and turned on their turn signal as they waited for another driver to vacate their parking spot.
Agratta sunk in her seat, clutching the belt strapped over her chest with both hands. “It’s not like you knew it would.”
“No, but I had plenty of time to back out, and -” Stolitz made a growling sound in his throat as he turned to check for traffic again. “Great. Wonderful. Now there is another car coming from the other direction.”
“You’re welcome,” Agratta grumbled.
“For what?”
“Saving your worthless hide,” she answered. “Again.”
The only thing she’d done, so far as Stolitz could tell, was waste another few minutes of their time. Not that they were in any particular rush, but the sooner he could get home and out of the car with Agratta, the better.
As they meandered towards the exit of the parking lot, he noticed Agratta eyeing the rear view mirror.
“Don’t,” Stolitz said in a low voice.
Agratta squirmed in her seat. “I know you can’t see out of that thing.”
“Actually, I can,” Stolitz countered. “I can see out of it perfectly well, but I won’t if you adjust it again.”
While they’d been driving to the store, Agratta had taken it upon herself to adjust the mirror out of fear Stolitz hadn’t actually checked it as well as he’d claimed to. She kept her arms fastened over her chest, but he could tell from the way she continued to look at the mirror that it was taking all of her self-restraint to keep from reaching out, grabbing it, and turning it so that she could see better out of it, because apparently her view of what was coming up behind them was more important than his.
When they stopped to turn onto the main road, she tensed up even more than she already was, which would have been enough to bring about muscle cramps in any other demon who didn’t live in a constant state of agitation and anxiety. She watched oncoming traffic with fearful eyes. The flow of cars had come to a stop as the nearby traffic signal had turned red, but a driver had turned right onto the road and was driving towards them at a speed that gave Stolitz plenty of time to turn out of the lot.
“Don’t turn yet,” she warned. “You won’t make it.”
Stoltiz didn’t even bother justifying her concerns with a response. Instead, he eased off the brakes.
“Don’t,” Agratta muttered. “Don’t do it.”
Their car began to inch out into the road.
“Stolitz,” she gasped.
Stolitz turned the wheel.
“Stolitz! Stolitz, stop it!”
Stolitz sighed and pulled out.
“Stop! Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop!”
If he stopped now, they probably would be hit… assuming the driver of the oncoming truck was completely oblivious to their presence and wouldn’t slow down themselves to avoid colliding with their car. Agratta continued to squawk as he maneuvered into the lane and only stopped once they were safely on the road, unmolested and the car still intact. She crumpled in on herself with a long sigh of relief.
Stolitz kept his face still and the grin he felt tugging at his beak from manifesting.
“What were you - Stolitz, you idiot, what were you thinking?” Agratta hissed.
“That I was making a perfectly legal and responsible driving maneuver into a clear lane,” Stolitz answered plainly.
“You could have gotten us killed!”
If only I were so lucky, he thought.
As he drove the blessedly short distance between the shopping center where the Target was located back to their new neighborhood, Stolitz began to wonder if it hadn’t been a mistake to ensure that Agratta only ever traveled in a limousine with tinted windows. On one hand, clearly, her inexperience with seeing traffic was part of the reason she was currently teetering on the cusp of an anxiety attack as he navigated a long, straight, moderately crowded pedestrian road at a reasonable speed. On the other, however, if she could barely cope with riding in traffic conditions this tame, she’d probably have have some sort of apoplectic fit if she saw the way other demons drove around Pandemonium. There was a reason Stolitz had opted to have someone else do the driving for him, and it wasn’t because Pandemonium was known for having a population of skillful, patient, or considerate drivers.
By the time they had made to their new home (though, thinking of it as such made Stolitz’s feel ill), over the course of a car ride that elapsed a total of twelve minutes, they had almost died just as many times. Or, more appropriately, Stolitz almost got them killed.
“Next time, maybe you let me drive,” Agratta mumbled, fresh off another scare that Stolitz was about to slam into the back of a parked car that was parked slightly further away from the curb than most others on the road.
“You’ve never been behind the wheel of a car in your life,” Stolitz noted, glancing at his wife out of his peripheral vision.
“And I’d still do better than you,” Agratta said curtly. “Now, keep eyes on the road. Please.”
Stolitz turned the corner onto Nazareth Road. Even though only twelve minutes had passed, the simple trip to the store had felt more like an insufferable trek from the bottom-most layer of Hell to the top.
“Oh, great,” he heard Agratta grumble.
“What?” Stolitz asked, unsure of what he did wrong this time.
Agratta pointed ahead, not towards their house, but rather, the one neighboring it. The garage was open, revealing a lovingly kept and immaculately clean vintage car, painted a garish shade of bright turquoise blue, parked in the garage. Stolitz had never been one for cars - especially not Earth cars - but this one was certainly eye-catching, given the fact that it looked like an anachronism compared to the setting around it, just as the person standing beside it did.
“Sweet sin,” Agratta said under her breath. “That must be the neighbor.”
That morning, as Stolitz had wondered as he went about the house - just who were they going to be living next to? The answer to that question could either make his time on Earth much easier than he expected, or much more difficult than it needed to be. At first glance, he wasn’t sure what to make of the woman standing in the neighboring garage.
She was short, even by human standards, wearing a sleeved and collared dress that was every bit as antiquated as the car, and almost the same color, as were her shoes and the thick frames of her glasses. The only thing that wasn't red about her was her pale skin, her dark hair, of which there was a prodigious amount, and the bright, garish red of her painted lips.
Everything about her reminded Stolitz of London, when he’d been there in the middle years of the 1960’s. He’d worn chelsea boots and plaid blazers and turtle neck sweaters and spent a lot of time rebuffing the advances of girls that looked just like this woman at bars who told him, You look an awful lot like George Harrison.
“Someone needs to tell her that she’s about fifty years out of date with that look,” Agratta muttered.
“Well, it’s not going to be you,” said Stolitz. “If she comes over, be nice.”
Agratta neither confirmed or denied whether she would comply or not, but he knew that asking her to be nice was tantamount to politely requesting that a hellhound to adopt a vegetarian diet. Stolitz hoped that the woman would just ignore them. That, in his opinion, would be the best case scenario - a reserved neighbor would be preferable to a nosy one. He didn’t want to know her, and if she didn’t want to know him, either, that would be just as well.
Given the course the past forty-eight hours had taken, Stolitz was not surprised, but still disappointed, when his hopes that he would simply be left alone were dashed upon the cruel rocks of reality, and he saw the neighbor woman crossing the yard to confront him as he exited his car. She had the good sense to wait at the edge of the garage rather than invite herself in, but that small courtesy did little to endear her to him. Still, Stolitz was nothing if not polite - perhaps to a fault. For years, he’d still been cordial with Agratta, even though he’d wanted to be anything but. He could spare a smile for a new neighbor. He looked at himself in the rear-view mirror.
“What are you doing?” Aratta asked, her tone more disgusted than puzzled.
“Making sure I look amicable,” said Stolitz through his closed beak, maintaining his increasingly insincere smile. He turned to his wife. “Does it look natural enough?”
“You look like you’re excited about getting tickled in your arse.”
Stolitz’s expression collapsed.
Why did he even bother? He wasn’t sure.
Agratta exited the car and left the door open as she greeted the neighbor woman.
“Oh, hello!”
Stolitz winced - Agratta’s natural register was rather low, which made it almost painful to hear it spike so high, especially when it was dipped in and dripping with gobs of feigned sincerity. He quickly pulled himself out of the car as well, and not a moment too soon.
“Wow,” said their new neighbor with a tittering laugh. “I was told to expect some new neighbors, but I wasn’t told to expect a pair of giants! Look at you two.”
She looked younger than Stolitz had first thought up-close, but no taller. She only came up to Stolitz’s chest, and that was only with the help of both her shoes and her hair.
“Well,” said Agratta, a note of thinly veiled animosity in her voice. “I can say that no one told us to expect a dw-”
“Warm welcome!” Stolitz interjected. He pretended not to notice that the caustic glint in his wife’s eyes was now fixed on himself as he approached his neighbor. “My, my,” he tutted. “You Florida people certainly are a friendly lot, aren’t you?”
If the woman suspected anything amiss between himself and his wife, she masked it well. Her laugh was high and nasal; probably fake, but it wasn’t as if Stolitz’s was any less superficial.
“Oh, well - what can I say? We do it bit different down here in the Sunshine State.” Despite her cheery demeanor, she didn’t step any closer to Stolitz, keeping herself at the very edge of the garage like the concrete floor was some sort of barrier that she was incapable of crossing. “I don’t mean to jump ya right as you get home, or anything, but I wanted to come over and introduce myself. My name’s Ronnie. I live next door.”
“Ronnie,” Stolitz echoed. “Well, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” He extended a hand; a gesture that was met with a nervous laugh and a step back from Ronnie. She had both her hands raised and her eyes fixed of Stolitz’s hand, like she could see it for what it really was, scales and all.
“Ah, sorry,” she said. “Not to be rude, but, um - I’ve got a - a thing about shaking hands.” In a conspiratorial whisper, she added, “Germaphobic. Badly.”
Stolitz returned his hand to his side with a shrug. “Understandable.” He didn’t really understand, but it sounded like the right thing to say. “Well…” He straightened his posture and did his best to look like a respectable, upstanding, and perfectly normal, perfectly mundane member of normal human society. “My name is Stolitz, and that -” He gestured to his wife. “Is my wife, Agratta. And, um…”
He’d figured that, at some point, he’d have to get used to using the surname provided for him on the driver’s license. He didn’t want to. He hadn’t wanted to ever since he’d laid eyes on it, which, like everything else about this entire affair, he assumed was chosen by his father for the express purpose of chipping away at his dignity. He thought about using some other name. Inventing one on the fly, and seizing upon the first that came to his head, like Smith or Johnson or Jones. But, at the same time, he didn’t want to set himself up for future failure by committing to a lie. So, with a sigh, he admitted -
“We’re the Lovebirds.”
Title drop.
My first impulse was to make the last name Glasscock or Woolcock or some such name, but it felt a little too on the nose.
This is the sixth 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.
"We're the Lovebirds."
Yeah, sure you are.
I love the wit and panache of this series. Each episode is funnier than the last, especially now the Lovebirds are trying to navigate the mortal realm!