A Dish With Bite
by Ron Davidson
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
In a moment, through the soft babble of conversation, he heard Irene excuse herself to use the bathroom. Parting branches, he watched her go inside. A minute later, he saw the kitchen door open and close, and a figure slip from the shadow of the house and disappear behind the ficus. Soon after he heard an approaching rustle of leaves. He turned toward the sound, a wolfish smile turning his lips as he anticipated the scent of rose perfume and the crush of cherry lips.
* * *
As she moved along the darkened path behind the ficus, a smile turned Lisa Bergen’s lips for a different reason. She was enjoying the thought of kicking Jack Banesworth in the balls. In his sagging, deliriant, serially-cheating balls. She was really going to do it. She was going to fix the bastard. For more than a year, she had been begging Daisy to divorce, or — second best, and way, way back there — at least confront her husband over his philandering. And tonight, finally, with the vile sparks flickering between him and Irene, she had seen the light. Enough was enough.
While smoking a nice, centering joint of granddaddy purple, Daisy had said she couldn’t do it, but Lisa was free to. For years, Daisy had blamed herself for Jack’s behavior. She’d made one very stupid, horrendously stupid mistake, a long time ago, but Jack had exploited that mistake ever since, helping himself to an endless string of affairs as payback for her original sin.
At least, Lisa guessed that had been his excuse. It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be his excuse anymore. Not after she aimed the tip of her pointy-toed flat at his scrotum and went for a sixty-yard field goal. Her message would get through. She rounded the palo verde and headed for the spot where he’d disappeared behind the jasmine.
* * *
Jack squinted, but in the darkness saw no one. Could she have stopped short, gotten confused? It was pitch dark in the shadows. He whispered: “Irene?” The rustling started again. Then he heard Irene’s voice. Not from a yard away, but from across the lawn. From the patio. “Art,” her voice said, “can we go?” The voice sounded sober and steady, but kept steady by all kinds of barely-holding springs and supports. Multiple alarms went off in Jack’s head. He stared across the yard in time to see Daisy slide open the patio door and hurtle Irene’s purse out at her. The purse clipped Irene’s side and tumbled onto the patio, contents scattering. A hush fell over the party.
Jack gaped, then hissed a curse.
* * *
Lisa Bergen, now only a few feet from the jasmine, was oblivious to events unfolding on the patio because she was stoned and trying hard not to stumble in the darkness. She would only get one shot at this, she knew, and she didn’t want to give herself away. She wanted the element of total surprise. Only then could she deliver a lesson he’d never forget. She paused, focusing. She imagined the kick in her mind. The shifting of her weight onto her left leg. The swing back with the right. The kick. The squeal a bull’s-eye would unleash. The high-pitched, life-altered-in-an-instant, Ned-Beatty-in-Deliverance squeal. She almost giggled at the thought. Then she took a breath. It was showtime.
* * *
Jack heard another rustle, very close to him in the dark, but paid it no mind. He was thinking fast. Had Daisy taken offence to Irene’s flirtation? Had she seen beneath its surface? Daisy had been wonderfully oblivious to every aspect of his affairs before. Or acted wonderfully oblivious, which, from a practical standpoint, he thought, was the same thing. Had something changed? Why?
He took his phone from his pocket and speed-dialed his brother Tom in New York. He was supposed to be out here talking on the phone, after all. He could make the damned call and evaporate everything else. He’d done nothing wrong. Irene had flirted outrageously with him, but he’d never even winked back at her. To all appearances, he’d been the perfect, loyal husband, backing off from a tipsy, would-be seductress. He would stick with that story.
He felt no pleasure in throwing Irene under the bus, but what was he supposed to do? She’d run her own side of the risk. Live by the décolletage, die by the décolletage, he thought. Another dictum. Damn it, though! As he considered what he was being deprived of, a flash of rage at his wife burst over him. But the emotion died out abruptly, for an odd reason. He had noticed a stench. The revolting stench of the compost bin. It was suddenly overpowering.
* * *
“Take your things with you,” Daisy commanded softly. For all her quirkiness of style, her career close to the Hollywood limelight and her taste in conversation-piece furniture and clothing — such as the shimmering, gold, kimono-inspired dress she wore with great dignity just now — Daisy was not one for theatrics. She gave off a soft, if colorful light. And so, having decided, to Lisa’s great joy, to stop putting up with Jack’s philandering, she did not yell or curse or sob or punch the bitch in the nose. She simply spoke, sounding tired. “Take your things and don’t come back.” She slid the patio door closed.
* * *
Lisa stepped quickly around the screen of jasmine. Jack was standing right there, all right. She could discern the pale orb of his fat head in the glow of the phone he held in his palm, but his lower half was buried in darkness. Damn it. She would have to approximate her target. She swung back her right leg. It struck her as she swung it forward that the bastard’s gas was as foul as his character. The reek was astounding.
* * *
Daisy had taken two steps towards the almost-full bottle of wine on the dining table with the intention of taking it back to her bedroom and finishing it when she heard the scream. It was Lisa, off supposed to be giving it to Jack. Daisy spun around, flung the door back open and paled at the shrill, hysterical sound. Jack’s voice was saying something she couldn’t make out. Dear God, what was he doing to her? She started across the yard in a short-stepped sprint.
* * *
Jack had been startled by the sudden approach of someone in the dark, but before he could react, the person had begun to scream.
“Lisa?” He was more than familiar with the voice of his wife’s bitchy best friend. He saw her fall, then get up and hobble onto the lawn, splitting the air with shriek upon shriek. Something encased her right thigh. It was as if she had jammed her leg through the middle of a beehive and was getting stung by its enraged inhabitants.
Her screams burbled into barely intelligible words: “Get it off! Get it off!” She fell to the grass and rolled.
Jack moved cautiously forward, trying to see. “What is it?” he asked. “Lisa, calm down. What is it?”
Her scream rose an octave. Jack squatted beside her and punched on his phone light. It revealed a sight that he could not understand. There was a whitish, jellied substance wrapped around Lisa’s thigh. It reminded him of the flesh of the pulasan, the Asian fruit he’d served with Buton Kirsch a few times over the summer, but gone soft and semi-translucent with decay. It was filled with crud and leaves and... were those enoki mushrooms? The beam triggered a reaction from a spot on the quivering surface of the muck. A great squid eye swiveled towards him.
Jack jerked involuntarily backwards. At the same instant, a tendril shot from the thing and slithered up his pants leg. The phone bounced on the grass. The faint voice of his brother’s voicemail greeting said to leave a message and he would call back as soon as possible. When Tom played his messages the next morning, one would consist of hysterical screams and shouts.
Daisy arrived, ready to grab a rock and pound Jack over the head with it, screaming, “Stop it, you bas-!” but she stopped short. Jack wasn’t beating Lisa for kicking him in the nuts. He was hopping about and kicking and... What the hell is that thing on Lisa’s leg?
Daisy snatched Jack’s phone off the grass and aimed the light at it. As she stared, a crease appeared in the center of the jelly-like thing and a row of slimy, whitish phalluses emerged, bristling like goo-covered thorns. She recognized them. Brazilian ginseng. Jack had bought twice as much as he’d needed for the Choctaw Taco Rice he’d made last week, and thrown the rest into the compost bin. Good God, she thought, has the granddaddy purple been laced with acid?
By now more guests were crowding the scene, shouts of horror and confusion filling the air. Herb dropped to his knees beside Lisa, bawling, “Help me get it off her!” He grabbed it and began to pull. His fingers sank to the knuckles in the jellied flesh, which stretched but did not detach from Lisa’s leg. The squid eye swiveled to look at him.
At the same instant, Jack screamed, his usual baritone replaced by a soprano that ran and leapt and trilled with operatic agility as he clamped his hands to his crotch and doubled over. The tendril whipped out of his pants leg and hovered briefly in the air, like a cobra. Then it spun three times around Herb’s neck. Herb reflexively tried to grab the slimy noose, but his hands were stuck in the flesh of its body, which had congealed around them. He yanked his arms futilely, gasping.
Lisa, being violently jerked up and down by the leg, screamed, “Ah! God! No! Stop!”
Herb did stop. His tongue protruded from his mouth, and his body began convulsing.
“Somebody help him!” cried Alice Finch.
It was then that Daisy saw the barrel of the handgun jut from the dark mass of onlookers into the cellphone light. She shrieked and jumped back, dropping the phone. Art Langstrom began firing 19mm parabellum shells into the sudden darkness, hoping to hit the tendril. Alice Finch joined Daisy in screaming as bullets pinged off a boulder close by.
And then, from the midst of the chaos, came an otherworldly, terrifying, wet snarl. When it finished, there was a thoroughly shaken collective silence, except for the sounds of Jack writhing on his side and quietly moaning.
The stillness only lasted for a second. Then there was a gasp, and Herb clambered to his feet. His hands, liberated from the jelly-like thing, scrabbled about his neck. The noose was gone.
“Are you okay?” asked Alice.
His face, suddenly bright in the beams of several phone lights, was a mask of horror and disgust. Blood ran from his nose. But he nodded jerkily.
“Help me.” Lisa was getting up. Her right pants leg was torn and matted with slime and debris, and blood ran from a score of puncture wounds in her thigh, as if she had been stabbed repeatedly by a pencil. But the thing that had been wrapped around it was gone. Joan Connors stepped forward and helped her up, keeping a gap between herself and the slimy patch.
Art ejected his gun’s spent magazine. “Where is the son of a bitch?” he said, punching in a new one. He was certain he must have hit it.
“I don’t know,” said Lisa, scanning the ground. “It just...”
“Melted away,” said Herb. He was still running his hands around his throat.
“Let’s get back to the house,” said Daisy, short-stepping to Lisa’s side and taking her arm. “Come on! Everyone! There’s a freaking demon out here. Go! Go!” And then, over her shoulder, “Somebody get Jack.”
Pete Wilcox lit the path to Jack with his cellphone and trotted cautiously over. Jack lay crumpled face down, moaning softly. “Come on,” he said. He seized Jack’s shoulder and rotated him so he could grab both of his arms and lift him to his feet.
From under Jack’s body it came at him. Pete felt it slam into his chest like a medicine ball. He heard his ribs crack and he fell backwards, the air knocked from his lungs. The great squid eye leered at him. Pete rolled away, his chest on fire, blind with panic. But Art and Lisa saw what happened next, saw the thing vanish into the ground, as if a trap door had opened up.
As he ran with the others, screaming, towards the house, Art fired five bullets into the ground.
* * *
Jack spent his days alone in the silent house. He mostly stared at things: magazines, the tv, the internet, the backyard, his stomach, which, after months of physical inactivity and a diet of takeout food, now sagged over his belt. The dark purple scars over it appeared to him like a map. Not a route finder, but a memento from some mythical place, a lost kingdom, an amusement-park world he had once been the king of. But he wasn’t anymore. Maybe he never really had been. Maybe it had all been a fantasy. But it didn’t matter. He was here now. Living by himself. Assuring his dad that he was “getting back on his feet” and returning to the office soon. Staring at things. And when nature called, peeing, as his doctor had put it, like half of the human race already did.
The yard had changed as well. He had let go of the gardeners and the pool cleaner and shut off the automatic sprinklers. The jasmine vines resembled brown kelp, attached upright to exposed wooden stakes. Oleander leaves lay thickly under the naked branches of the tree itself. A mat of twigs and leaves covered the pool. The lawn was yellow.
Only one place in the yard seemed alive. It was the spot where.... where the “mountain lion,” or the “angry raccoon” — Jack had nodded on his hospital pillow at the police officer’s suggestions — had last been seen. Things were growing there. Mushrooms. Pulasan. Ginseng. Herbs and lettuces Jack couldn’t recall the names of, but remembered using in various recipes. Without water, the little forest grew.
A few times, he caught it watching him.
This mocking was something he could not abide.
* * *
To all who heard of it, it was a most bizarre suicide. The man had obviously lost his mind but, even so, the details were hard to make sense of. The Rancho El Dorado HOA had tried to keep the details quiet, of course, but they could do nothing to stop the police report from being made public.
The press got hold of it, and the story caused a brief sensation and something of a scandal. A middle-aged resident had prepared himself an eccentric meal, a smorgasbord of exotic ingredients that had no culinary relation to one another, including ginseng, cordyceps, kaffir lime leaves, Romanesco, choko chutes, and kopi luwak, baking them into five, nine-inch pies. He then gorged himself on the pies until his stomach burst. Bacteria spread throughout his body at a speed and with an aggressiveness that would stun the coroner. He suffered internal hemorrhaging as stomach acid dissolved his tissues. He survived only two-and-a-half hours after his stomach ruptured.
Still, the man could have called 911. He could have tried to save his life. The fact that he didn’t, but made a different, inexplicable choice, is why the coroner ruled the case a suicide.
The choice he’d made was discovered by his ex-wife three days later. She had stopped to check on him, as he had been depressed by a recently-acquired disability and their divorce, and she was concerned. When he didn’t answer the door, she used her key to enter the house. After discovering the remains of his meal in the dining room, she searched the house for him, to no avail.
Then she went into the yard. She caught the smell from fifty feet away. She followed the scent with mounting dismay to the source. The compost bin had streaks of dried blood running down from the hatch. Dozens of flies buzzed in and out of the slits along its side. She called 911 without even opening the lid.
They found her out front, in her car with the doors locked. She refused to get out. She only wept and told them where to find his body and to be careful. To be very, very careful. The remark made no sense, but she insisted upon it. It’s in the report.
Copyright © 2023 by Ron Davidson
