Venom in Black and Yellow

They opened the curtains to reveal a gargantuan spider on stage. Each of its eight legs were chained and it tried to rear up, but its forelegs couldn't clear the ground and it crashed back down in a fall that shook the theatre. My pepsi cup was drained and the feature presentation was over, so I slipped out through the lobby and hailed a cab.

"Good show?" asked the driver.

"Greenlight district," I said, "Just north of Howe and Dylan. The show was alright. Rain much tonight?"

"Just eased off," he said. He was a black-skinned guy and was curled up over the wheel, too tall for the standard sedan cab. "Its a quiet night out, yeah? Cold, I think this sudden wind has put a hold on everyone's plans."

He spoke for a while, and my attention turned to the streets - couples clutched together by their forearms, wearing thick felt coats and scarves. Window displays were darkened and lined with thick metal bars. An orange-flashing tow truck was parked by a dinted hatchback. A woman walked by in a black dress with two bold yellow stripes under the bust.

"Stop for a second," I said.

"Huh?"

"Just stop, alright?"

The car pulled up against the curb and I got out, leaving a ten dollar note on the back seat. I hurried back along the sidewalk to where the woman in the black dress was walking in high heels towards the theatre strip.

"Jessica!" I called. "Hey, Jess!"

She turned around and I jogged towards her.

"Who's that... Kurt?"

"Yeah, it's me, Kurt - what are you doing here? Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," she said. "I'm staying at the Plaza. Just for a few nights."

"How's Toronto? Here, I'll walk with you."

"It's good," she said. "Not like it used to be. They pay me well up there, though."

"Glad to hear it. You're not missing much, same old freakshow down here."

We walked for a while, eyes low to avoid the passing headlights. The pavement was still damp from the rain and the wind was cold under my shirt.

"Here, you need a jacket? Cold night," I said.

"I'm fine," she said. "I'm meeting someone for dinner."

I grabbed her arm and stopped.

"Is it important?" I asked.

She turned around and we looked at each others' faces for the first time in a while.

"Is what important, Kurt?"

"Dinner. I haven't eaten." I gestured to the street. "I miss you, Jess."

"Don't," she said. "This is it. We're over, right?"

"What's a few nights?"

She turned, wrestled her arm from my grasp and kept walking. I followed a little behind her, and she stopped again.

"It wouldn't be right."

"It would be so right."

"I have plans."

"Cancel them."

Later that night, after we ate big meals at an organic steakhouse and spent hours drinking beers and cocktails, I undressed her in her hotel room. She shed her thin stockings and her black dress, a flimsy layer, and I sunk into her dark, warm places and clutched her thigh closely against my cheek. Her fingers crept through my hair and flattened themselves down my neck and the rain outside started up again.

Far From the Kitchen

The instructions were simple: three tablespoons of salt, a cup of ash and seventeen ground tomato seeds, spread in a circle the width of your index finger. Ben made the mess on the countertop, between his cup of apple juice and the dirty dishes, and uttered the incantation as it was described on the printed email.

"Hexam lacunae disperse!"

At first nothing happened, but he knew it had worked when the circle of powder caught alight and the apple juice turned back into an apple and popped right out of the cup. It hit the roof and bounced once on the floor beside him. Quickly he took off his glasses and clutched them in his hand.

Vanishing feels strange, he thought. It's like waking up. However sure you were that you were in a kitchen, you're now even more certain that the kitchen was a vague hallucination and you're really lying on the white sand of a beach, the palm jungle hooting to your left and the waves crushing over a reef somewhere far to the right.

He stood up and brushed the sand from his back and shook his legs to get it from his trousers. He walked up to the edge of the dense plantlife and kicked aside a coconut. There was a path which led straight to the other side of the island.

"Am I stuck, then?" he asked aloud.

He circled the island. It took less than five minutes. He spent an hour breaking through the leaves and bushes until he was sure he'd stepped every step it was possible to take. The only interesting thing he found the whole time was a bean plant growing up a metal spike, its fat pods ready to be plucked.

"I'm stuck," he said.

After a while of lying on the sand, he realized he still had two dry tomato seeds in the pocket of his trousers. He quickly walked to the centre of the island, the point of the path from which he could see both sides of the sandy beach, and dug a hole the depth of his thumb. He dropped the seeds in, spat on them, and covered the hole back up with the dry dirt. For now all he could do was chew on a couple of bean pods and hope for rain.

"Cooee," called someone from the other side of the trees. "Anybody about?"

Ben ran across the island again, careful to not stamp on the freshly dug hole in the path.

"Hey!" he cried. "Help!"

"Ah! I thought I saw something land!" The grown-up was standing at the front of a canoe. He was wearing shorts and a patterned shirt and he had his hands on his hips. "Hello there kiddo! Come aboard then, there's not much to do here."

Ben waded out through the clear water and pulled himself up onto the canoe.

"You ready to go the the Crystal City, then? Or there's a hot meal waiting at the old McMahon's homestead, if you like farms, that is. Just let me know before we get to Spring Island because I need to change my course accordingly."

"I've never been on a farm before."

"Very well then, McMahon's it is." He moved the boat in broad strokes quickly through the water, jutting up and over the incoming waves at the perfect moment between breaks. Soon the water settled again, and it was a smooth and relaxing ride despite the ocean's growing depth.

"Look over there - a colossal sea turtle!"

The hump breached the surface of the water, its rock-like surface wide enough to be an island of its own. Ben watched it cascade back below the water.

"Hey mister, can I get back there? To that island?"

"Sure!" said the man. "I bring the ferry over once every year or so."

Ben smiled, and leant to scoop his hand through the cold water as they moved on towards a growing island in the distance.

The Cougar

We walked along the river, my hands in my pockets and hers in woolen gloves, clutching my arm. We were looking at the logs, in rows and rows, being floated down towards the harbour. The wet, golden pine steamed, and the steam grew into the fog overhead. It was morning and we'd already had coffees, and the day was unplanned, our only course the packed dirt path underfoot.

"Did you speak to your Grandmother?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Is she okay?"

"Still upset," she said. I nodded, and we continued our matching step through the wooded trail.

"Nice to be back here," I said. "You want to stop for a moment? We can sit on that log."

"Looks wet," she said.

"Alright," and we kept walking. The edge of the river curved and we followed it, lined with trees at some points and at others rocky slopes. Eventually our path rose away from the river and back into the dense pines.

"Did you hear something?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said, and stopped for a moment. "Just a bird, probably. Over there."

There was another sound of movement in the undergrowth.

"Sounds too big to be a bird..."

It was a cougar, and it came out over a fallen tree quickly and went for my leg. I kicked out and knocked it under the chin, but it got up quickly and jumped up at me. I fell over with the claws deep in my chest but managed to roll onto it. It was heavy and strong underneath me and it squeezed out, but Kelly kicked it under its belly twice and it vanished again. I rolled over, my leather coat pocked with holes and the scratches on my chest bleeding underneath.

"Oh god, oh god," she said.

"I'm alright," I said. I could feel the cold and wet on my back. "I'm alright. Give me a moment."

She fell down to her knees beside me and her face went red and she cried, eyes covered with her hands, and I wanted to hug her but the cat had taken the wind from me and I couldn't get up. I looked up into the pine branches and the grey sky and waited until my chest started to sting and Kelly put her arm under my neck and helped me up.

Such a Moment

This part is the genesis, which could be skipped but is in fact essential. I'm not going to tell you why.

Curly-lashed Freida shoved up against him at the bar; she smiled and asked in her accent what he was having, with a nod towards the spirits rack. He was having beer but he said 'Gin'. 'Would you get me one too?' she asked. The child who was born twenty-years earlier (when the name 'Desmond' was scribbled on a piece of paper) could only flop open his wallet and pull out a note.

'My friends are boring to me, can I sit with you for a while?'

They went outside to a spot beneath an umbrella which would have been green in the daylight. It might have looked nice with the stained wooden table under it, and the wooden planks of the deck, and the wooden chairs.

'I like your shirt,' Desmond said to the horizontal pattern of red and purple.

'It's a sweater, you silly,' she said. 'I knitted it.'

'Then it's a nice sweater.'

---

Now you really have to listen!

Freida's mother called every second night, at that precise moment between 8:29 and 8:30. When Desmond moved in it was the second unusual thing he discovered; the first being the closed room he was not permitted to enter. The door to that room had a hole, straight through the chip-board so that only a flimsy layer of paint on the anterior side seperated the room's contents from the rest of the house. Desmond often had the temptation to poke his index finger through this fine layer but never had the courage in the face of the home's matronly regime.

'You can put your things in the other room. It has a window. You can paint in there, no?'

He liked to cook but it was not a home for cooking; the kitchen was so narrow that the counters almost met each other in the middle, and every cupboard with the potential to become a pantry was filled with clear tupperware containters with blue lids. Freida cooked in there occaisonally, vegetables hopping straight from plastic bag into the pan (sometimes a ribbony receipt would flit dangerously close to the stove's flame), and after dinner she would pack the leftovers carefully away in the abundant tupperware and label it for the freezer. In such a manner was the freezer packed, dinners stacked and labelled like library books, the fridge below home to only three expired mayonaisse jars and a tub of natural yoghurt.

It is easy to imagine that in such circumstances Desmond's artistic skills withered; after a haiatus inflicted by stunned confusion, he returned to his canvas to find that all he could paint was an orange stick-figure in a trapezoid boat. Over three nights he returned with fresh canvas, and when the fourth orange man appeared with its bracket smile he threw his paintbrush down in frustration. At that moment the telephone rang to pronounce the strange moment just before 8:30, a moment which, under the circumstances, seemed perfect for some fresh air.

'Dessie!' cried Freida, tilting over the chipped white railing, cordless phone clutched against her very heart. He stopped in the damp street and looked up to her. 'Will you bring me back a diet Coke?' He nodded and carried on along the asphalt.

Oh, what fate! But as he paid with three dollar coins for the cold bottle, ready to turn around on the mission of delivery which had cut short his adventure before it began, he wondered if it was all so bad; wondered if, after all, an orange stick-man was not a worthy companion - wasn't it his own creation? In that room with a window and an easel, with his suitcase still lying open and empty, what better companion could one have? All these thoughts he was having at a time he should have been having thoughts about the bottle-cap; which he twisted and opened in his vacancy.

The ramifications, you'll understand, were severe.

Entrenched

There were rats in the trench from the second night it was dug. They bit holes in the sandbags and shat all through the dirt. The soldiers would grab them with fast hands and chuck them like grenades over the razorwire. Sometimes a rat would be shot in frustration and the guts would splash darkly against the packed dirt in a grim mimicry of the situation.

"You want one?" said Gill. He tilted his cigarette forward before lifting it into his mouth. The rat scuttled awat. "Stupid rat."

"Talking to yourself, Gill?" asked the Lieutenant.

"I'll tell ya, Muzz, these rats are a fucking curse. Smoke?" He passed a cigarette to the Lieutenant, who lit it behind his cupped hand. "Don't you think it's a bad sign?"

"Sign? They'll be dead by the weekend. Base is sending up ten kilos of rat sack. That'll be a sign."

"Looks like rain," said Gill. "Does it rain here?"

"Now and then."

"Christ, this place is going to be a muddy cesspit."

"Enjoy it," said the Lieutenant. "If we're driven out of here you won't even have a cesspit."

The rain came during the night, hard and constant. It didn't stop until eleven the next morning. The trenches had flooded to thigh height, the water coffee-grey, its surface filmed with old paper and rat shit and dirt. Gill waded through it, tired, his rifle held above his head in one hand, a bucket skimming along in the other.

"Hey! Gill!" Gill turned - Reggie, a tall, pale soldier was behind him. "Forget the bucket. We have to get out of here. Boss says we've got orders to retreat."

"Retreat? But we haven't even-"

"Doesn't matter. It'd take a week to drain this place and the locals would have us in a real tight spot if they got here before that. The front's withdrawing. Forget the bucket."

Gill glanced back towards the other side of the trench before he let the bucket go. It bobbed in the water. A rat paddled past it, claws flailing desperately, its wet, hairy body hardly able to keep above the surface. The soggy troops retreated in open-roofed trucks, leaving the crates of rations and beer hidden silently under the now still waters.

Much later, when the trenches had dried, the rats came back; scurrying along the empty corridors, they gnawed at deserted boxes and slept in hard-packed corners. For a long time the trench was this way, inhabitted by only the rats, wood, dried paper and empty buckets.