The toes on her left foot felt like they were fusing together as they rubbed against each other. She glanced down and saw that the tea was sticking there on her foot and tisked at herself, taking a napkin from her breast pocket and wetting it on her tongue, then bent over and cleaned off her foot.
When she turned her head back up towards the trees, they stopped moving. They hadn’t been moving when she’d been staring at them and they were still again now, but clearly they had been even though Roxanne had felt no breeze. It was like walking into a room where people were talking about you and they all shut up at once. The shrubs seemed to have joined the trees in staring at her now, as if the trees had let them in on the joke.
There was a silence in the air so thick that she was tempted to poke her fake nails forward to see if she could jab a hole in it. There were no birds chirping. There were no sounds of rats at the garbage around the corner. There were no voices fading in and out as people walked down the street. When the trees moved they rustled, but they weren’t right now. Right now the only sound that happened was made by her when she took a puff of her smoke, hearing the paper tube crackle and pop as it burned.
The smell on the air was the crisp clean that came with fall, dew, and condensation weighing down every leaf until they couldn’t hold on anymore and fell to earth. She drew in breath hard, half expecting to get a nose full of fire and brimstone. When she did not, she laughed at herself for being so silly, allowing a smile to caress her lips. If nothing else, this non-adventure had taken her mind off the conversation she had had with Tim White.
She felt heat on her fingers. She looked at her hand and realized the cigarette was almost down to the butt. She brought it to her lips quickly for one last puff before turning around to doubt it against the cement wall.
As soon as she turned, she heard the familiar rustle of branches she had a moment ago. Dropping her smoke immediately, she turned back around towards the trees, again watching them as they stopped moving. This time it was the bushes, still waving a little bit before halting completely.
“Hello?” she called out, her voice cracking slightly.
There was no response, just the silence and motionlessness of the trees.
She hissed in pain and jumped off of the rock as her smoke burnt though the fabric of her pants and onto her leg, swatting at it with her hands and sending embers flying everywhere. The trees and shrubs seemed to go insane as she did this, like they were laughing at the punch line they hadn’t bothered sharing with her. When she looked up this time they continued to move, finally coming to rest after a few moments. She raised one of her carefully plucked eyebrows in curiosity. Checking her leg quickly to make sure it wasn’t burned, she took a step towards the tree line.
The shrubs in the far right of her vision moved. She turned her head towards them and they stopped, with the only hint the event had really happened being the steady vibration of the leaves. One fell from its branch finally, twirling and baying until finally hitting the ground. Now that it was gone Roxanne could see into the shrub a little more than she could a moment ago.
It was hard to focus, but whatever was in there looked... white. White and glimmering dully in the low light inside the foliage. It was in the rough shape of a half moon with the fat side down. As it slowly came into clear view, she saw that the crescent-shaped object was further divided, sectioned off in tiny squares.
It was the Devil’s smile.
Her hand was at her mouth with instant shock. The second she saw the teeth and gums of the smile, it was impossible not to see the whites of the beady green eyes locked onto her own, burning with hatred and bloodshot.
A fist shot out through the shrub and caught her in the chin even as she pulled away, trying to remember the self-defense training she’d taken a few weeks ago and coming up empty. She stumbled to the ground even as the Devil rose out of the orange and red leaves. Once again she was reminded of Hiroshima, the man being the mushroom cloud that rose up into the sky and towered above her.
He didn’t have red skin or a pointed nose or a tail, but he was the Devil all the same. He was slim and toned, smelling of cheap drugs so strongly that she didn’t know how she hadn’t gotten a whiff while sitting on the stone having her smoke. His hair was short and wiry, looking like the crew cuts that had been very popular a few years back. He had a small mustache that looked like it had been scribbled on with a pencil. His face was trim and there didn’t seem to be any fat on his body. There was a stench of B.O. and cologne. Not expensive cologne, but the type with a sailboat on the bottle. Roxanne’s quick-witted mind wondered instantly if it was to hide the stench of brimstone.
Because she didn’t care that the man in front of her looked just like Allan Bishop. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was looking square into the eyes
