Conversation on a Stupidly Minute Scale

"So."

"So."

So. There are two people. The two who just spoke. Sitting across from each other. Four hands--one pair dainty, rolling a silver band between thumb and forefinger; another pair thick and clenched around a mirror-image band--lay on the rosewood table. It's a small table, but they’re squinting across the vastest plateau imaginable. For the woman, this is not a good look - it makes her face pinched and desiccant. The man, however; it might well be his normal expression, like he has bad vision but is too proud to get glasses.

Apart from the brief dalliance into monosyllaby, it's apparent they've been sitting here silently for some time. Squinting, staring, fidgeting, the tension is a thick toxic sludge between them. Perhaps one or the other is hoping that in the absence of words cluttering space up, they will be able to achieve deeper understanding through the melding of conscious thought with their rosewood table counterpart. Maybe they have nothing to say to each other. Either way, the poison atmosphere eats away at their composure.

Possibly, there are no words capable of bringing out their feelings, but the man begins to try. As he speaks, his voice - initially hesitant with the characteristic treble emotionally distant men use attempting to speak emotionally - begins to pick up strength, fed by the heat of fires long tamped down, but now sparking. "Listen, Mary, we've had a....a good...I mean, I just don't know you anymore. It's like the little bird I loved and sheltered has up and flown the nest, leaving a dozen dour little chicks squawking at me in her place!"

"Loved? Sheltered?" The woman's voice is more of a hiss than a squawk. Its heat is of a different sort from the man's; not intense in sudden combustion, but smoldering; a furnace kept warm in preparation for the cold, bitter nights, now fully coming to life. "If by that you mean taking me in so that all your other little irregularities would go unnoticed. A nice looking woman living with you certainly settled a lot of questions at the Club, didn't it? Or did it? Jocelyn mentioned Vander might be having a few reservations about your business deal...whatever way, you certainly can’t afford to lose me now."

"Love, Mary, it was out of love, whatever you think you know about me," ground out the man. Heat retreated from his words momentarily, but traitorous knuckles continued tracing the table’s whorls. "Don't think you can rattle me, turn the tables, like you always do. Try to do. Fact is, you're more the hypocrite, however much you claim I am. I did shelter you, when you needed it, when your drunk of a father tossed you onto the street for a whore-"

Silver shot from the woman's hand, flicked expertly so it caught the man right between his eyes. Twenty-four karat diamond - expensive, flawless, meaningless to match the price - gouged a little nick on his sun-bleached skin. The man smiled, his eyes screwing up tighter than thumbscrews, and a single drop of blood squeezed out. Expelling a long and long-suffering gust of air – which would have reeked of bile, if life could reflect reality – he relaxed further into his chair. It was the affectation of men in his station, to sit at ease when most ready to lash out.

Mary smiled as well, but hers was the daring kind, the sort of facial contortion which screams to be rearranged forcefully and underscores a castrating viciousness. "There, dear. Now you know my thoughts on our situation. You only ever bought and paid for me - if you want to call that love, then fine. But don't call my acceptance of your trinkets, your moneyed trash, hypocrisy. It was an arranged deal; we both got something out of it, and I've never tried to pretend otherwise. But now I no longer wish to take part."

The man did not speak for a while, electing instead to dab at his forehead with a silk kerchief printed over with white roses, staining it indelibly. When he finally tossed the rag aside, his countenance was wholly that of the bemused husband. Anger and all signs of it had disappeared – his knuckles were relaxed. Mary recoiled, strangely stung by this particular wasp.

"If it was an arranged deal, then perhaps I can renegotiate the terms, change your mind?" His voice was bemused also, and Mary might well have wondered if perhaps he was a bit touched in the head by shock. The words though—those were not spoken by a man unmoored from reality, but rather obsessed with it. "I propose that you stay here. There is no love between us, you said so yourself, but you certainly cannot return to your father...that is a tenuous situation at best. And our children, Mary, do think of them. All in all, it is best for you to stay; it can do no harm, and preserve us both from quite a lot of it."

"Of our children, Glen is a father and husband himself, and Teddy hasn't lived with us for years." She talked sharply now, wary, ready for deceptions. “This is not a decision springing upon me from the shadows, either, as you seem to think. I am fully...cognizant of the consequences, and prepared to accept them.”

"But surely it would so much better for us both," whined the man, leaning forward across the table, reaching to clasp the woman's fingers - who scuttled away to the edge. “We can hardly afford to be seen as alone. People will…take advantage."

Now she believed he had come to it, and her smile was now that of the predator as it pounces. "Ah, but this comes back to you. And your strangeness. No, I won't be your cover. Not anymore."

He shook his head violently, clasping his hands together on top that rosewood table, and another streak of blood coursed down from his wound. “What do you think I am? Why, why, why is it so repulsive to you?”

Mary laughed, the companion noise to her taunting smile – she had him on the run and was enjoying the power. “You know what you are well enough. You’re only lucky the Club doesn’t. And why does it make me want to vomit whenever I see you? That’s simple,” she said, all traces of vindictiveness fading in an instant.

In its place: The void. “You’re a carbon copy of my father. One of those poisonous snakes midst the geraniums, down by the river where children play.”

“Your father?” asked Mary’s husband, swaying in his chair drunkenly, side to side, forcing her eyes to follow. “He was a grotesque! I have troubles, surely, little peccadilloes, but Mary, God! You must know I’m not like him…”

His face was melting away, skin flowing, merging, hardening into a snout, scales, flaps for nostrils. Mary quailed, terror pouring into her void, filling her up totally. Her husband’s drunken swaying was not drunken anymore, but serpentine undulation. It draws your eyes here, there and everywhere but from whence the strike originates. Where her ring had nicked his forehead there now was a long gash from slit-eye to mouth, red and raw but already speckled over with sloughs of dying flesh. Black lymph streamed out from the cyst, acrid to smell, and when what had been her husband opened its jaws—diamond teeth set in silver gums, etched in mockery, tarnished, menacing.

Its voice was still his, with a small overlay—an integument which stuck on the outer edges of his words, leaving a hint of sibilance as air passed round the obstructions. Only a hint. “Why? What is so wrong about me?”

The serpent’s smooth, sickly-pale stomach slid onto the rosewood table. Snakes are not slimy; they glide, not stick. This one glided across the short distance towards Mary, its head wriggling side to side so that first one slitted pupil, and then the other, could fixate upon her, and so that the whole room was brought under its gaze even as it advanced. Mary fell away from the creature, out of her chair, throat constricted with that horror which wells up inside when you realize the familiar is, and always has been, alien. Incontrovertibly wrong. Grey and black scales approximated the fine suits her husband had worn, colubrine eyes, as she knew too well, were his paranoia. The festering wound, the teeth…

It was all there. The story of her life with him, his life with her, and now it was slithering implacably onto her lap. A free hand groped madly for the chair, for a vase, for a poker, for anything which she could swing at the creature—where its inky blood landed on her dress, the material charred. But there was nothing, and in a moment she was fully encircled in her husband’s coils, tied with a living rope—it was no longer a simple metaphor for her domesticity. The gaping jaws loomed again before her, and a bit of sparkle made its, her husband’s, diamond teeth beautiful again for a moment—for an instant they were held apart from the whole.

Then the moment took its leave—or did it eject her?—and there was a unified monstrosity enveloping her once more. Her husband took her head into its mouth, and her memories were jolted by putrescence. The olfactory senses, after all, evoke the strongest memories—and this stench somehow brought all the terrible ones to the surface, and took the good ones and made them terrible. The diamond teeth pressed down on Mary’s throat firmly, easily and jaggedly slicing where they would, and she closed her eyes, taking some final sanctuary in the knowledge she would soon be dead. But those teeth did not rend her completely—the arteries were slashed, but were so pressed that Mary could not bleed out and her brain could not die. Instead she existed. Hardly living, but still aware of her pain and misery. Drops of acidic saliva and venom fell and rolled across her skin, stinging fiercely, leaving red welts in their wake.

Mary tried to cry, but she had no voice—what was still her husband used its voice instead, grumbling contentedly. “You won’t leave now, Mary. I can keep you here and, even if you won’t love me, I can pretend.” Black blood sizzled on her dress.

How could it speak so with its mouth filled up by her, keeping her alive only by the tightness of foul jaws?

Well, that’s the real question.