“Don’t make us come in there!” Moiré yells at the front of Three-Finger Jenny’s house. The porch gleams dully under the afternoon sun, wrong. The mind knows when the materials it’s looking at can’t actually fulfil the role they’re in; done cunningly, it can provoke wonder and curiosity. This house, squat and threatening on an overgrown suburban lot, provokes neither.
“Yeah,” Bell mutters, hiding behind Moiré. “Don’t.”
“Shut up,” Moiré hisses at her, then raises her voice again. “We know you’re in there!”
“Fuck off, pigs!” the witch inside the house shrieks, and throws an empty glass bottle out of one of the windows in their general direction. It smashes in the rubble-strewn yard, well short of them.
“We’re not cops!” Moiré screams back, enraged. “African-American Annis is paying us to rough you up because you owe her, like, four thousand bucks!”
They see a glimpse of rapid, indiscernible movement through the window. “Fuck you and fuck my fucking ex!” Three-Finger Jenny shrieks.
“Oh, they’re exes,” Southbridge says cheerily. “This is just like my stories!”
“Thanks for contributing, abuelita,” Moiré fumes. “When I want to hear about telenovelas—”
“She means her podcasts,” Bell says, rising on tiptoes to risk a look over Moiré’s shoulder at the house. A door slams inside, and she ducks down again, flinching.
”…Your true crime shit?” Moiré demands; Southbridge nods enthusiastically.
They all contemplate the house.
“I don’t wanna,” Moiré says glumly.
“I’ll have a turn,” Southbridge offers. “Hey! Jenny! Come out of the gingerbread house with your Hans up—!” and breaks off as Moiré thwacks the back of her head with the baseball bat.
“I’m not getting you uncursed because of puns!”
“Hi Sarah,” Bell says meekly into a payphone. “We’re, uh, we’re going to be back late. Don’t worry about it.”
There are immediate noises: Sarah putting things down and preparing to get up. “I’ll come get you,” she sighs. “Are you all okay?”
“No no you don’t have to — we’re at the car wash on Fifth, it’s fine, we’re just — we’ve had to send Southbridge through a third time and I don’t think we’re gonna have any cash left from this job by the time we can bring her back in the house—”
“I’ll come get you,” Sarah repeats.
“She’s still too sticky to get in your car,” Bell says, shuffling her feet in the puddle of water still leaking out of her leg seams. She flicks the pile of “REJECT SMARTPHONE — BECOME FUNGUS” religious pamphlets on top of the phone with her finger, so that they tumble off onto the floor to soak up the wet and slowly amalgamate into a shapeless mat of wood pulp.
“What happened?”
“You know the blood scene from The Shining?” Bell says. “…Like that, but maple syrup.”
“What were you even doing?”
“A job!” Bell protests. “A client paid us to hassle some witch called Three-Finger Jenny—”
“‘Three fingers of Scotch and you can have her on the pool table’ Jenny?” Sarah sighs again, and mutters something indistinct about that explains maple syrup. “Bell, I’ve told you, it’s very sweet, but it’s okay for you to find your feet before worrying about contributing, and if you take some time to settle in first maybe you’ll stop getting yourselves into trouble....”
“We can handle ourselves!” Bell says stubbornly. “We’re not freeloading like some kind of browser toolbar—”
“Bell—”
“I gotta go,” Bell says. “Gotta help turn Southbridge upside down so her torso drains,” and hangs up to slouch back over to the others.
“Aw, you’ve got a face like the back end of a Fortran compiler,” Moiré says. “Is Sarah mad at you?”
“No,” Bell says glumly.
“Don’t worry,” Moiré says, “she likes you too much for you to die with your Remove Before First Use stickers intact.”
“Shut up!”
“You want in on betting whether Southbridge gets clean or leaks and shorts out first?” Erin says. “Losers have to buy the sack of rice we’re gonna have to dump inside her head.”
Bell sighs and kicks at the asphalt. “Can we give her a bumper sticker tramp stamp while she’s offline?” she says.
