“The Cancer of Danger”
Chapter 1: Time Flies When Flies Time
It was a dark and stormy night. Too dark. And too stormy. The kind of weather in late November that made Gem Lembeck think twice about the dog shitting in his condo. What were the odds Fancy would do it? Pretty damn good since Gem found Fancy eating baked goods from the kitty litter box again. How that Chinese Crested mix found her way to the basement Gem didn’t know. He just wasn’t ready to chance an accident on the Persian rug.
The rug came from Damascus, but Gem’s mother Eileen always called it Persian, so the name stuck. As a child Gem would get lost in the intricate pattern of geometry woven into textile. It was one of two heirlooms he demanded at her funeral. The other was a piece of steel from the same city. He loved them the most, nostalgic for the magic carpet rides he imagined before twelve turns thirteen, and that kind of pretend goes into repose for other people’s pleasures. At 30 that included Fancy’s walk.
But the night was still dark and stormy. How many nights like these had he spent walking that naked ugly dog for Vicky? Too many to count. Several dozen at least since she moved her toothbrush and retainer into his bathroom. She wore it at night to keep her teeth in line—her cuspids long ago domesticated. The last thing she said after popping it in: “You’ll take Fanshy out one lasht time, righsht?”
He didn’t answer. She knew he would for the sake of domestic tranquility and his Persian rug.
“Come on, ya fat rat,” Gem muttered, not looking at the dog sleeping on a quilt lining his couch. Fancy cracked an eyelid to watch Gem put a rain coat over his robe. Gem would not have been comfortable knowing the length of his robe was designated a skirt, nor would it be comfortable after this walk—soaking up the rain running from his slicker in streams. He walked towards Fancy, still prostrate, to clip her collar with the six-foot leash. The clip snapped, lightning crackled, the dog popped up.
They both looked at the driving rain when Gem opened the front door. Fancy looked up at Gem. Seriously? was the expression on the little dog’s face. “Yup,” was Gem’s response. He caught something shuffle in the corner of his eye. The cat he called Fatty stopped to condescend to them both across the warm, dry, well-lit room.
“Fuck you, Fatty,” Gem offered. The calico did not care. She was a shaggy bag of skin and gut, and had never left the condo in the two years since her discovery as a kitten.
Regret hit both man and animal with their first step outside. Fancy regretted not shitting in the house, and Gem regretted forgetting Fancy’s raincoat. For the uninitiated a Chinese Crested is mostly hairless, with mottled pink-grey skin save four socks on its feet, a flowing horse’s tail, and a mullet that breeders call a crest. Vicky had picked up Fancy on the cheap following her mom’s affair with a bulldog. Fancy had width and a flattened snout that were against breed standard, but no coat.
The dog curled its cold wet body into a tight immovable unmotivated ball once it touched the ground. Fancy pulled her neck back towards the living room, hoping Gem would be merciful. Gem wasn’t; he picked up the dog under her barreled chest and walked her into the driving rain. He kept walking as the wind howled around them, drowning his string of curse words unseparated by breath. It was a reliable maneuver: carry Fancy to a far spot she regularly marked and then let her retreat to home base.
Gem and Fatty lived with Fancy and Vicky in Endecott Gardens, a condominium complex that infringed on the marshland running out of town. Buggy in the summer and floody when it rained, Endecott Gardens was built in the late 70s when cocaine mattered more than building codes. From that moment to this it served bachelors, single parents, immigrants, and the forgotten. Gem stormed past his neighbors’ condos with built-in garages collecting water. He could not afford such luxury. He parked outside.
Fifty yards from his front door and Gem lowered Fancy across the parking lot above an ineffective culvert. A crash of symbols echoed from the overflow. Gem never told Fancy that two years earlier he’d found a scrawny kitten down below; it was instinct to commemorate the spot with urine and feces.
“Come on you stupid horrible primadonna. Shit and we can run back home! No one wants to be out on a night like this. And I refuse to suffer without something coming out of your—”
Fancy hunched her back.
As Gem felt relief at Fancy’s relieving a street light turned on the far end of the lot. The few working were sensitive to motion, and it was true to its design, discriminating between the driving rain and its discovery of denizens, a dozen of them, determined to demonstrate.
The complexity of Endecott Gardens involved a series of dead ends, figurative as mentioned but also literal. Parallel parking lots bisected by one main exit, with condo footprints configured in Ls and 7s on both sides.
Gem lived at the end of the last L on the left, number 63 at the bottom of Endecott Gardens. As he kicked Fancy’s leavings into the marsh, the dog began pulling Gem home. Gem did not follow. It was a dark and stormy night. Too dark and too stormy for a dozen assholes standing in the middle of it fifty yards away. Three more joined the cast from the end of the last 7 on the right. Fifteen people in the rain, standing still in front of number 64 at the bottom of Endecott Gardens.
“What the fuck.”
Gem got an answer. Amidst the percussion of water on the yellow vinyl of his hood, the crash of water inside the culvert, and the howl of wind around him, Gem heard from behind what sounded like the clicks of plastic teeth when you run your thumb along a comb, or pull a zip tie. He suddenly smelled the rank air of low tide during the summer that made him light headed. But this was intense. The world spun and he went with it. The dog barked, then yelped, as his eyes went dark and his mind stormy.
Eldritch Scerry