“Well, I have a dog I’ll need to feed eventually.”
Her eyes mist over with sorrow, as though she’s heard better excuses in her day, but is still willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, she has hope, clings to it. “What’s his name?”
“Fenris.”
“What kind of name is that?” she asks, so you tell her it’s Scandinavian, just like you, and it brightens her afternoon, she believes you now, she says nobody would just make up a name like that and asks what breed of dog Fenris is.
“He’s more of a wolf, actually.”
With widening eyes, “You keep a wolf in the city, isn’t that dangerous?”
“Not for Fenris. He thrives on it.”
“I’ll bet you don’t have many problems with your neighbors.”
“Not anymore.”
“That’s funny, you don’t strike me as one of those guys who has to have the meanest dog around,” she tells you, it’s a fumbled compliment. “I knew this guy, well, lived with him for a month if you must know, it was Rottweilers or nothing for him. He was as hairy as the dogs, almost. But you, you have such a cultured look if you don’t mind me saying so, like you could be an artist maybe. And your voice, I could listen to you talk for hours.”
Which sounds like a threat, as she drinks two to your one, a ratio Merilee seems to have some experience with. Her hands start and stop for her cigarettes so often you lose count, her fingers drum with nerves and pretty soon the situation arrives where you know it’s been heading all along. She tries not to cry over things she can’t even tell you about, worries what you must think of her, with her eyes she begs you not to judge too harshly. She dumps her soul at your feet, skinned and raw.
“Loneliness is a cancer,” she says with frozen tears and a lurch in her voice, “and it never gets tired of eating at you day after day.”
It touches you like nothing else she’s said or done. “I know exactly what you mean.” You point to the front window, overlooking the sidewalk. “Walking around out there today, how many people did I see, do you think? Five thousand? Five thousand and they’re all selectively deaf, selectively blind. I might as well not exist for all they care. I could stand on a streetcorner and shout at the top of my lungs, and they’d hear me almost as well as they’d hear a gnat buzzing near their ears. They only want to know about you when they can take something from you.”
“Like your kids,” she murmurs with a faraway gaze.
“The world quit feeling, if it ever did in the first place,” and you’re saying more than you should but she’s made you talkative, “so we may as well just give it back.”
Give the world back to where, to whom, she wants to know. But you’re canny enough to smile and shake your head as if to admit you’re only spouting off, you’ve never thought it through. Merilee says she’ll be right back, she scoots off toward the restroom with purse in tow and while she’s gone you hold her glass and swirl it, checking to see how ignored you are.
When she returns your trick is done, you can tell she’s tried to freshen up, she’s washed the smudges from around her eyes.
“What was that about your kids?” you ask, and at first she’s hesitant but you persist, you really want to know.
“Anybody can make a mistake. It was only bathwater, it didn’t feel too hot to
“Earlier today this guy came up asking for money for food, so I took him to get a cheeseburger,” and before you can finish she’s asking what’s wrong with that, it sounds positively saintly. “But while he was in the restroom I put ground glass in the sandwich. He was drunk enough, I doubt he even noticed. The glass was pretty finely-ground to begin with.”
Merilee blinks at you, her face is as blank as unshaped clay, in her bovine eyes you see the future, see how she’ll continue to propagate more kids that may or may not be taken from her bungling hands and what kind of specialized monsters and parasites they’ll turn out to be, the world doesn’t need them, although that’s all academic now. Or will be in a few more hours.
She slaps her forehead and laughs. “You’re joking again! You really had me going for a minute, you have the strangest sense of humor, did anybody ever tell you that?”
“No, never,” and now you’re checking the time, how many hours since tricking the panhandler, the glass should be well on its way into his aching digestive tract by now, small intestine for sure, indigestible razor dust cutting soft tissues along its peristaltic journey, if he’s drinking and he probably is his thin blood will leak out that much sooner.
“I like you,” Merilee says, and you nod toward her glass and tell her to drink up, every last drop, for it’s time you should be on your way, it’s almost the second Thursday of the month, and the end of everything that’s overdue already.
*
It always comes back to history for you, most history being cyclical, because of the fundamental stupidity of human herds that never learn, or less often the realization that sometimes the old ways really are best. New generations must discover this on their own, why should they take anyone’s word for anything?
Some months ago you first felt it, felt that cold wind blow to you from across the ocean, from Norway, home of your ancestral genes and much that you hold dear. For a few years it’s been going on and you never even knew, until your chance encounter with a small newspaper article, which led you to a more detailed magazine article, which triggered your search for all that you could find on the subject of the Norwegian church-burnings.
A war has been declared, fought mostly in the middle of the night, churches a thousand years old, some of them, set aflame and razed to the ancient ground, burned in the name of old gods once sacred to Viking lips and warriors’ blades. The newly churchless blame it on devil worshippers, poor Lucifer gets dragged into everything, if the pious have no greater sense of their own ancestry than that, then they’re no better than poodles and dachshunds, maybe they really should be burned out. The culprits are musicians in most instances, modern-day sons of Odin and Thor, evidently they’ve had quite enough of missionaries and meddling, would’ve put a stop to it, too, if only they hadn’t been born a thousand years too late.
