A Dark and Stormy Knight

by Bridget Essex

  “I can’t complain. Hey, I work at a comic book store. Dream job, right?” She cocks her head thoughtfully. “Though there was this guy today who had no idea that there was any difference between the Marvel and DC universes, and I had no idea how he’d survived this long on planet Earth.” She gulps down a big bite. “Who took Nemo out of the bathroom?” she asks then, nudging the goldfish bowl with her elbow.

  “His name is Vladimir Futon now,” Iris declares, and Emily shrugs her acceptance.

  “Cecile says he’s your new, um, pet project…” I begin, raising a worried brow. “What does she mean by that?”

  Emily shrugs again and toes off her platform shoes, kicking them under the kitchen island and sighing happily now that her feet are free. “I bought him for a performance art piece,” she says dismissively. “Little guy just has to survive until tomorrow, and then he'll die honorably. For a goldfish.”

  I stare, and Em groans.

  “See, I knew if you found out about this you were going to be like, ‘Em, you can’t swallow a goldfish onstage. He’s a living being with feelings.’”

  I blink at her, and then I’m shaking my head slowly, trying to put words to my thoughts. “And...why are you going to swallow a live goldfish onstage?”

  “Art!” says Em with a wide grin, waggling her purple eyebrows playfully. “Obviously.”

  “Okay. But why?” I press, and Em waves her hand.

  I mean, I love Em to death, but sometimes she gives us artists a bad name.

  “I figured I’d come up with a reason at the show,” she tells me with a little frown. “Do I even need a reason? Everyone’s going to be like, ‘Whoa, that chick just swallowed a goldfish,’ and then I’ll say something like, ‘America!’ and give a bow. It’ll really screw with them, make ‘em think!”

  “God.” I groan, rocking back on the counter. “First off—wait, I don't even know where to begin,” I start, flustered.

  Toby’s leaning beside me on the counter, an exaggerated frown on his mine-painted face. “Seriously, Em, I’m all for art for art’s sake,” he says, gesturing to his makeup and black bodysuit, “but if you don’t have a reason for swallowing a goldfish, don’t swallow a goldfish. It’s common sense.”

  “Common sense is the bane of all art,” pronounces Emily loftily, but Cecile is listening in to our exchange, and she rises up from one of the couches in the living area to come over and grab herself another piece of pizza.

  “What’s this about swallowing a goldfish?” she asks Em mildly. “You didn't mention that to me earlier, dear.”

  Emily glares at me and then shakes her head, a petulant expression on her face. “I need a really cool gimmick for the show tomorrow, Cecile,” she says, her tone wheedling. “I mean, what’s cooler than swallowing a goldfish?”

  Cecile seems to consider this, and then slowly—and a little dramatically—she points up to the sign welded to the wall in the kitchen above our much-abused oven (I say “abused” because we use the oven for art, like clay work and melting plastic, rather than cooking).

  The sign reads: “Do no harm, but take no shit.”

  “It’s the one rule we’ve got here, honey,” Cecile says sympathetically.

  Em groans for a solid minute.

  “And swallowing a goldfish for no reason,” Cecile goes on, “is doing harm.”

  “But...but...you don’t always have to have a reason in art,” Emily says heatedly, dropping her piece of pizza onto the counter in frustration.

  “Were you doing it to be sensational, dear?” asks Cecile sweetly. Em grumbles, crossing her arms, but then—begrudgingly—she nods. “Then that’s not really art, dear. That’s sensationalism,” says Cecile, patting her arm. “Rule of thumb: don’t swallow anything onstage that would fight back.”

  “We should get that made up into a sign!” says Iris brightly.

  Em is still grumbling, but she’s eating her pizza again. “So what am I going to do onstage? Last week, it was the American Whore piece, and I’ve done that one way too many times.”

  “People love it, though,” I smile at her. And it’s true—they do. Emily dresses herself as the Statue of Liberty, goes onstage, and recites porn scripts for an hour. It definitely makes a point, although…I’m not sure what that point is.

  I’m not even sure that Emily’s sure.

  “Hmm, yeah, they do love it. I got a standing O last performance. Oh, okay,” she tells me with a grin. “If you insist, Mara. Hey, now I can even say, ‘Back by popular demand!’”

  “You do that, honey,” says Cecile, patting her arm.

  I stare down at the goldfish in the bowl, and the goldfish stares back at me. He’s not thankful—he’s a goldfish, after all—but I do feel kind of like I did my good deed for the day, saving the goldfish from Emily's stomach—and saving Emily from the goldfish, too. I’ve never swallowed a live goldfish (or a live anything) before, but that can’t be a pleasant experience.

  “So,” I say, clearing my throat and picking up my own slice of pizza; it is, much to my sadness, already cold. “We have a pet goldfish?”

  “Vladimir Futon,” Iris says, nodding, and I chuckle.

  “Em, do you have goldfish food?”

  Emily stares at me as if I just asked her if she owns Antarctica. “Why would I buy goldfish food?” she asks, shaking her head. “I was just going to toss a pizza crust in there and call it good. Fish like bread, don’t they?”

  “That’s…um…I don’t think they do…” I trail off.

  “Whatever!” Em rolls her eyes. “If it’s not going in my belly, it is no longer my problem,” she says, giving me a wink, grabbing three more slices of pizza, and making her way toward the couch.

  Emily isn’t a bad person. She just has her priorities, and this goldfish is not on that list.

  Vladimir Futon opens and closes his mouth, and a little bubble blows up, rising to the surface.

  I’m assuming this is Fish for, “Feed me.”

  And that is, after all, what I do: I take care of people. And dogs. And fish...I guess. I groan a little, smiling ruefully as I set the cold slice of pizza back in the box and head toward the door. “I’m taking Sammie out to pee,” I call over my shoulder, “and I’ll pick up some goldfish food at Wiggs.”

  An errand for a goldfish.

  It’s a perfectly normal excursion in a “house” like the Ceres.

  Chapter 2: The Unexpected Rescue

  Wiggs is our corner store—though it's actually several corners away—and you might think that your average corner store wouldn't be well-stocked with fish food. But then you’ve probably never been to Wiggs.

  When I first moved to the Ceres, we were out of toilet paper pretty much right away, and I volunteered to go to the convenience store I’d noticed to pick up some TP. Wiggs, much to my sadness, did not have toilet paper (that first time), but it did have a parrot for sale behind the cash register, hand-poured candles, Halloween masks (two types, werewolf and Frankenstein’s monster, even though we moved to the Ceres in May), books, fabric (sold by the yard) and homemade brownies—along with all of the normal stuff you’d find in a gas station mart. There’s a running joke in the Ceres that when you really need something, Wiggs will never have it. But if you go next week, they’ll have ten.

  I'm really hoping that won't be the case with the fish food. Last I checked, the store had every type of pet food you could imagine, including live crickets. So I hope I'll find a dusty bottle of fish food stuffed somewhere on a back shelf.

  “Take the katana!” calls Cecile, as Toby hops over the back of the sofa to sit down next to her. Miyoko is attempting to sit on the other side of Cecile, but her hoop skirt is giving her grief. Every time she tries to sit down, the hoops come rushing up toward her face.

  “I don’t need to take it—I’m just walking to Wiggs!” I say over my shoulder as I grab Sammie’s leash from the hook by the door. The hook is a plastic pirate’s hook from one of Toby’s old Halloween costumes; he melted
it to the wall. “It’s not even that dark out yet,” I protest, but when I peer into the living room, Cecile is glaring at me over her crossed arms, and I sigh, shaking my head. “Okay, okay. A two-hundred-and-fifty-pound dog clearly isn’t enough protection,” I chuckle, resigned. “I’ll take the katana.”

  “Good girl,” Cecile beams, and then she picks up the ratty pack of playing cards from the coffee table and begins to deal everyone in. They’re starting the poker game early tonight, so I'll have to get back quickly if I expect to play a hand or two. We’re using M&Ms in the place of cash, and I really, really like M&Ms.

  I clip the leash to Sammie’s collar, and then I scoop my keys up from the floor and deposit them in my purse. On my way out the door, I reach above the door frame and take down the katana from its resting place.

  A katana is a Japanese sword. Emily bought ours on eBay about a year ago for a performance art piece; she thought she could teach herself to swallow swords. Turned out she couldn’t, and disgusted that her five dollars wasn’t being put to better use, she offered the sword up to the Ceres as a weapon we could use to “hunt down corrupt politicians.” Ever the diplomat, Cecile came up with a better idea: we could carry the katana with us whenever we needed to walk outside at night. Sort of like pepper spray. But a little more…pointy.

  To Cecile's credit, I’ve taken a bunch of walks alone at night since we got the katana, and I’ve been jumped exactly zero times. So, hey, it works.

  I place the silk ribbon attached to the scabbard over my shoulder, and away Sammie and I go—through the door, down the front cement steps of the grain elevator, and onto the street in front of the river.

  The Ceres is located on this little peninsula that juts out into the Buffalo River, which sounds lovely, but the Buffalo River is connected to Lake Erie, and we locals joke that, unless you want to grow an extra head, swimming in Lake Erie isn’t a wise idea.

  Since the peninsula is home to nothing more than a series of abandoned, rotting grain elevators, the place is a little spooky at night. Our closest neighbors are on the “mainland,” and that’s where all of the streetlights are, too.

  Here, outside of the Ceres, it’s practically pitch black.

  Cecile keeps promising that she’s going to install an outdoor light, if only to make poop pickup easier when I walk Sammie at night, but there are other, more important issues for her to deal with when it comes to building maintenance. Creating an artists’ residence inside of a grain elevator is a romantic concept, but it comes along with some logistical and mechanical problems that Cecile always has to keep on top of—despite the fact that about half of the residents aren't even paying her rent on a regular basis. So I would feel like crap if I reminded her about the outdoor light; she's busy enough.

  Besides, I’ve never been afraid in the dark. I’ve got Sammie, after all, and no stranger intent on doing me harm would realize that Sammie, big as he is, is the nicest dog they could ever meet. I'm pretty sure Sammie would escort any would-be rapist, serial killer, or corrupt politician into the Ceres enthusiastically, provided there were impending treats for him.

  So, Sammie, paired with the katana and my little flashlight keychain, make me feel pretty safe.

  I flick the flashlight on now and walk in its tiny beam, Sammie tugging at the leash to go pee on his favorite spot. I let him do his business, and I rock back on my heels, glancing up at the stars with a contented sigh.

  Buffalo is bright at night, but we’re in a disused area, so we get better stars than the rest of the city folk. Overhead, I can make out the constellation of the Big Dipper—and there's Cassiopeia, that pretty constellation in the shape of a W that ancient peoples thought looked like a queen. Nope. It looks like a W. Whatever the ancient Greeks were on when they decided the letter W resembled a seated queen—well, it must've been some powerful stuff.

  I smile as I stare up at the constellations, basking in the glow of the familiar stars. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve really loved them. There’s something comforting about gazing at millions and millions of years of light. People say that most of the stars we can see right now are already dead, their light long extinguished, exploded. And maybe that’s true. When I look up at all of the bright lights, so far away, I like to think that I’m looking at the ghosts of stars. And that, for some reason, gives my heart peace.

  If stars have ghosts, after all, maybe we do, too.

  “Come on, buddy,” I tell Sammie, tugging on his leash after a long moment. I thought he was still peeing, but I quickly realize that he isn’t, not anymore.

  Instead, Sammie is staring toward the river.

  And his hackles are raised.

  I…don’t think I’ve ever seen Sammie’s hackles raised—he's always so friendly and trusting—and it’s disconcerting, so much so that the hair on the back of my neck rises as I stare down at the spiked-up hair on his neck. He isn’t looking at me, not even when I tug on his leash again. He won’t stop staring at the dark river some twenty paces away from us.

  And then he starts to growl.

  I’ve had Sammie for two years. Originally, Toby adopted him after he broke up with his last boyfriend. But then Toby got together with Rod, and he learned that Rod was allergic to dogs… So Toby, after owning Sammie for about a week, decided to return Sammie to the shelter.

  However, everyone in the Ceres had already fallen head-over-heels in love with that ungainly pup (he was a couple of months old at the time), and there was no way that Sammie was going anywhere.

  And no one had fallen deeper in love with Sammie than me.

  Side note: this story might make Toby sounds like kind of a jerk, giving up his dog for a boyfriend he'd just met. And, trust me, I love the guy like a brother, but Toby can be a jerk. Still, his heart is usually in the right place. When he met Rod, he had cartoon birds swooping around his head, and he just couldn’t acknowledge anything but love—and his libido. Two years later, their relationship is still in the cartoon-birds stage, so everything turned out for the best in the end.

  After all, I got Sammie out of the deal. And Sammie has never, not once, growled. Not even for good reasons. He didn’t growl when that little Welsh Corgi bit him at the Elmwood Arts Festival. He didn’t growl when the kid on the scooter ran into him at the Allentown Arts Festival. He didn’t growl when that Pride parade float almost fell on top of him. (Now that I think of it, the local festivals are kind of a peril for my poor dog.)

  Sammie is one of the most stoic, most loving, most wonderful dogs on the planet, and there’s not a violent or aggressive bone in his body.

  So seeing his lips drawn up over his pointed teeth, seeing his hackles raised, hearing that low, deep growl emanate from his throat—it’s just weird.

  And it makes me realize that there is something very, very wrong.

  I stare at the river, and I shiver a little, a tiny tremor of fear moving through me. Sammie hasn't finished his walk—he ate a lot of pizza—but I’ve got to be honest: there’s a part of me that wants to head back into the Ceres, even though I need to get fish food…

  For a moment, I stand frozen in place, wracked with indecision.

  I’ve got a bad feeling, but I shake myself out of it. Honestly, Wiggs isn’t that far. And though Sammie has never growled before, there’s a first time for everything, right? He probably just smelled a squirrel.

  I reach up and nervously tug my pendant out from beneath my shirt, brushing the pad of my thumb over the back of it as I swallow.

  Sammie tugs on his leash, still growling, and he pulls me forward about a yard before I dig my heels into the cement and tug back.

  “Come on, buddy,” I tell him, using my most soothing voice. “Let’s head over to the bridge. There’s nothing over that way.”

  But Sammie isn't in the mood for placation. Again, he tugs me toward the river.

  “Sammie, no, boy—come on,” I tell him, pulling in the opposite direction. I drag him back toward the bridge.

  Then everythin
g happens at once. I’m facing away from Sammie, and even though my hands are wrapped tightly in his leash, Sammie is, after all, two hundred and fifty pounds; between the two of us, he kind of has the upper hand in the muscle department.

  He pulls so hard and so fast, darting away from me in an unexpected direction, that I'm taken by surprise. Sammie backpedals, shrugging out of his collar.

  And he dashes toward the river.

  I stand there for a split second, my heart in my throat, as I hold the dangling end of the leash. I thought Sammie's collar was tight enough. Granted, I never imagined he'd attempt to run away—

  “Sammie!” I yell at the top of my lungs, but he’s not listening to me. His paws hit the cement with frightening speed, and he’s running as if the hounds of hell are behind him, aimed for the edge of the river.

  There’s about a ten-foot drop-off from the “bank” of the river into the river itself. When the Ceres and the rest of the grain elevators were built on the peninsula, the river’s edge was shored up with metal walls, so Sammie’s racing toward what amounts to, more or less, a cliff. If he doesn’t stop, he’s going to plunge over the edge and into the water.

  I race after him, my heart thundering. From my point of view, it looks as if my dog is going to hurl himself into the river, because he's still growling, and he’s running faster than I’ve ever seen him run before.

  But he stops: he skids to a halt right at the edge, his claws skidding on the top of the metal wall.

  I run up beside him and loop the collar around his neck in one fast motion before dropping to my knees and throwing my arms around him, heaving a huge sigh of relief. A single tear leaks from my eye as my adrenaline falls, and I squeeze him tightly, kissing the top of his head.

  “You stupid dog,” I whisper. He leans against me, and—for a moment—his growling pauses. “I love you so much, and you could have been so hurt, buddy,” I tell him, burying my face in his fur.

  But Sammie is only half-listening to his terrified mother berate him for running away. He’s focusing most of his attention on the river.