Laird Hunt - Ray of the Star

“They are coming,” said Harry, and hit the bell again,

“Yes, they fucking are, but only if you say the words first, say the fucking words, and stop with the bell,”

“Those are the words,” said Harry, hitting the bell once more,

“Listen, Knight of the Woeful Fucking Countenance, the fucking words are ‘take me instead’ and now for jerking us around with that bell you better add a fucking ‘please,’”

Out of the corner of his eye, Harry could see smoke beginning to seep from their mouths and bits of blood drip from their lips and an icy lake opened up behind them and a car skidded off the road and slid sideways into it, and it occurred to him that perhaps what he was seeing now was one of the pictures the almost invisible camera had taken and that, in fact, he wasn’t seeing anything, or not what he thought he was seeing, right this moment, at all,

“I’m going to go in and ask Alfonso if he’ll let me borrow the submarine again and then I’m going to go and apologize to Solange for lying to her and I’m going to tell her about my kids, and then I’m going to buy those two guys a drink,” Harry said, hitting the bell a final time, then walking toward the door,

“That’s beautiful, fuck face,”

“Yeah, that’s just gorgeous, now if you want to see those kids again, turn around, and say the words.”

Harry didn’t turn around and he didn’t say the words though a moment later he wished he had because as his hand closed around the doorknob one of the connoisseurs emitted something like a snicker, which Harry understood quite clearly when he had the door open and could see what was in the room waiting for him on a filthy black couch they were sharing with a bloodied and unmoving Alfonso, which couch looked directly onto a large backlit aquarium full of multi-colored houndfish and blood parrots that held his darlings’ attention the way the television once had when they had used to sit in front of it in the early morning in the flickering half-light, all those years ago, in fact they seemed utterly mesmerized by the fish, which were doing nothing so terribly striking as they moved slowly in and out of synthetic coral and plastic seaweed and a tower of bubbles that rose through the center of the aquarium like a column of air, and while it suddenly seemed imperative to Harry that he gobble them up with his eyes and take them into his arms, he was halted first by Alfonso’s voice — which seemed, by some trick of acoustics, to come out of the aquarium and not from Alfonso’s mouth—“You still owe me your story,” and then by his own answer, given as he stared into the roiling water, “I think it’s just getting started, here, right now,” so that when, as he began to lower himself onto the couch and to lift his arms and open his hands and found himself back out on the street just a short distance behind Solange, Ireneo, and Raimon, the image that played on his retinas as he started to run was not of his darlings but of a brightly lit box in which dark things moved, and though, when having reentered the courtyard, he yelled, “I’m sorry, take me instead,” he and these dark things were flung back out onto the street, where, as his friends came up and took his arms and breathed softly on either side of him, he stood for what felt like a very long while watching them.