Ksenia puller her upper lip
toward her teeth to cover her incisors. Almost instantly, the small pool of
moisture, which had trickled over her lower lip, evaporated. At the same time,
the corners of her mouth, which met her cheeks, hardened.
A single stream of clear
phlegm dribbled from her left nostril after both portals to her nose flared
open. Ordinarily, they flared only when Vjenceslav forgot to put the toilet
seat down.
Ksenia sucked in a breath.
She tasted sour milk. She remembered that she had yet to use her toothbrush
after throwing up her breakfast of cottage cheese and sliced peaches. Ksenia
noted to herself that sucking on one of her ginger and peppermint lozenges
could help, too.
Exhaling, Ksenia felt pain.
Her mandibular ligaments, she was sure, were strung tighter than a
violinists bow. Dr. Gooden, the family dentist, had warned her that her
worsening TMJ might destroy her enamel faster than could her recycled stomach
acid.
A gob of eye gunk fell from
one of Ksenias tear ducts. That yellow-greenish speck proved that her
liver was again swollen. Ksenia blew, with her lower lip, at the displaced
detritus and felt her face tighten even more.
On her brow, horizontal
creases amassed like infantry squadrons. While her best girlfriends had double
chins, droopy eyelids, and sagging jowls, Ksenia had impossibly tight skin. She
sighed from pain.
A few hairs fell forward,
escaping their elastic binding. They wafted past Ksenias eyebrows and
then settled on her nose. Another bead of nasal mucus dropped from one of her
nostrils. She neither righted those hairs nor wiped away the slime as she was
suddenly overcome by another wave of nausea. Ksenia almost made it to the
toilet.
Elsewhere, at work,
Vjenceslav was seeking means to rid Lake Michigan of Asian Carp. Regardless of
whether those interlopers were Silver Carp or Bigheads, he had been hired to
identify and mete out natural predators specific to carp or to find some other
means to rid the water of them.
He was prohibited from
using habitat degradation to kill the fish since poisoning the water would:
kill other animal life; destroy the lakes ecosystem, in general; and
cause serious health problems for the residents of lakefront towns and cities
such as Milwaukee, Chicago, and Gary. Furthermore, Vjenceslav couldnt
make use of species known to eat carp fry because those critters did not
discern among carp and other fishes young. There would be trouble if the
lakes perch, trout, and bass also disappeared.
Vjenceslav weighed that he
might be able to significantly reduce the number of carp while boosting
regional tourism if he tried a different tactic. His research team had revealed
that various Asian communities cherished carp flesh. Maybe Michigan, in
partnership with Taipei, Beijing, Hanoi, Seoul, and other relevant centers,
could create an ecotourism program in which Asians would come to the States to
harvest the lakes carp.
Campgrounds complete with
dedicated grilling and cooking sites could be built, culinary competitions
could be held, and licenses for limitless fishing exclusively of carp, could be
given out for free. Vjenceslavs program could make the infamous harvest
of salmon in Kenai, Alaska look like a Little League effort.
There was just one problem
with that way out; Vjenceslav and Ksenia did not live in the Midwest. In fact,
they did not live in the United States. Rather, Vjenceslav was a member of a
Zagreb civil engineering firm that specialized in constructing facilities in
Europe, Russia, North America, Southeast Asia, and Australia for
unidentifiable or otherwise problematic
critters.
Because of the carp
project, Vjenceslav was temporarily stationed in Muskegon, Michigan, but he did
not want to permanently relocate to there. Whereas the citys amenities,
primarily its grocery stores and laundromats, bettered those of their hometown,
Zadar, Vjenceslav and Ksenia could not figure out any quick and inexpensive
means to meet Ksenias intense craving for white truffles spread thickly
on Pogača bread.
Vjenceslavs boss did
not consider Ksenas cravings to be part of any moving allowance, and the
one American source Vjenceslav had found for Ksenias desired delicacy,
Urbani Truffles of New York City, was charging more than fifteen dollars, not
counting shipping, for little more than two ounces of not truffles, but
truffle-flavored cookies. The pair had yet to find a supplier for truffle cream
or truffle oil.
At least, Vjenceslavs
mother-in-law was shipping the wanted bread from Zadar. It was due to arrive,
assuming it passed successfully through customs, in a few short
weeks.
Vjenceslav sighed. It had
been much easier for him when he had been assigned, a decade ago, the task of
finding a chemical agent that would disrupt the lamellar part of the gills of a
shiver of hidden megalodon sharks swarming the Caribbean Sea. When those giants
died, he was touted as a hero from the Cayman Islands to Bogatá. At the
time, he hadnt been married, so Vjenceslav indulged in all manner of
tropical hospitality. Elsewhere, his bosses drank Champaign.
However, at a different locale, cloistered others fretted.
There had also been the
case when Vjenceslav had been charged with rounding up the herd of
hippocentaurs that had descended from Mt. Pelion to Volos, a Greek city of
intermittent importance and a hot spot for monsters such as Scylla and
Charybdis (the Pagasetic Gulf is a favored breeding ground for those
species.)
The trouble with the
horsemen was that they dined on living humans, eating the fatty and fleshy
bits, but throwing the bones into the ocean. More than once, the hippocentaurs
had made chow out of research teams, and, more than once, they had disrupted
the delicate mating rituals of the local sea monsters. Moreso, the situation
was complicated by the presence of the badgers, hedgehogs, boars, ferrets, and
foxes that lived on the mountain. They had to be preserved while the invaders
were terminated.
In the end, Vjenceslav
hired members of several of Athens polyamory societies to bait the
hippocentaurs with hemlock-spiced wine. Although a few additional research
stations were ravaged as were several people on Vjenceslavs staff,
eventually, the man-horses again ascended the mountain. That time, too,
Vjenceslav indulged in physical manifestations of gratitude offered to him by
the natives. His supervisors, similarly, partied with vials of caviar, and,
similarly, sequestered forces vexed darkly.
Shortly after the Volos
Project, Vjenceslav met Ksenia. She was enrolled in the same folk dance class
as he. Almost always, after completing an assignment, Vjenceslav returned home
to enjoy his bonus vacation time. It was during one of those holidays that he,
Ksenia, and nearly two dozen other young people were brought together by kolo
and furlana lessons.
Weekly, Ksenia invited
Vjenceslav to join her for a beer after class. She confided that she liked the
brews of Zmajska pivovara best, but time and again, he demurred, saying he was
too tired to join her. One night, however, Vjenceslav agreed to accompany
Ksenia to a bar, telling her that his favorite sip was rogačica, that is,
carob brandy. Despite their differences in drink preferences, they fell in
love.
While Vjenceslav traveled
the world to tame brutes, Ksenia sat in cafés, sipping wee cups of
Turkish coffee and composing poems. A beatnik, like herself, needed to create
verse to express her protests. Her chief tools were her budding indignation and
her five year-old laptop. At worst, if she tried to write while uninspired,
which was most of the time; she kept time to whatever music was blasting from
her earbuds, drank cuppa after cuppa, and chewed on breads spread with thick,
creamy cheese. No self-respecting nonconformist would record their ideas on
mere paper or in the privacy of their home.
Increasingly loathing the
geographic distance that his work put between him and Ksenia, and,
alternatively, being restrained by fidelity to miss his usual triumph-related
carnal fruit harvests, Vjenceslav proposed. Ksenia accepted. Their
friends and parents cried briefly and then got busy planning the nuptials. In
hidden chambers, though, shadowy beings plotted.
For two weeks after the
wedding, the pair boated along the Adriatic coast. Theirs was a pampered
journey as their small ship came equipped with a cook, a skipper, and a maid.
By the end of their honeymoon, Ksenia was pregnant.
Vjenceslav was a fan of
hump and bump, but Ksenia preferred interactions that were more refined. She
insisted that they slow their interfaces down as they would have an entire
lifetime in which to engage in them. Whats more, any man as
intellectually endowed, emotionally fine-tuned, and attractive as Vjenceslav
ought to have no trouble complying.
Hence, when Vjenceslav,
initially, was assigned the Lake Michigan carp problem, Ksenia chose to remain
in Croatia. Shed stay home and cultivate both their baby and her beatnik
roots.
Vjenceslav objected. Ksenia
could be both a critical consumer of worldly ways and a vanguard for
truths binding value from any port. She could gestate anywhere. She could
not keep his bed warm, however, if they were thousands of kilometers apart.
Besides, it was unlikely, given her radiance, that she would suffer a cold bed
if left behind; he, alone, had vowed loyalty Ksenia had merely: muttered
something about being fairly dependable, given Vjenceslav his ring, and kissed
him so passionately that he forgot about that caveat until weeks after they had
celebrated their nuptials.
Reluctantly, the new bride
agreed to entirely alter her life. In hindsight, she often told herself, she
ought to have remained in Zadar. Her days and nights in Muskegon were
filled with little more than watching her nails grow. As well, just two months
after her and Vjenceslavs arrival, her pregnancy symptoms worsened. Had
the chichevache not come knocking on her door, she figured that she would have
expired from a combination of hyperemesis gravidarum and boredom.
The morning in question,
after cleaning up her vomit that had splattered around their toilet, Ksenia
heard a knock at the door. For the first time in days, she laughed. Her life
was becoming one cliché after another.
The young married looked at
the peephole, but saw nothing. Cautiously, while keeping the chain attached,
she opened the door. A scrawny, cow-like beast looked up at her from the
hallway. It addressed her in Ruthenian. When Ksenia failed to reply, the beast
switched to Croatian. Simply, it informed Ksenia, it had arrived at her
threshold to devour her. It fed, the creature told her, on good and virtuous
women.
Ksenia felt more ill winds
gurgle up from her stomach. She chocked back a reflex. It would be impolite to
vomit on a visitor. Needing to temporalize, she invited the beast in for
tea.
The monster appreciated the
Pampa-tea Smirko tisane that Ksenia prepared for it and was grateful that its
host had bothered to pour the hot mix into a large bowl from which it could
easily drink. Accordingly refreshed, the freakish thing again told Ksenia of
its intention to gulp her down.
Ksenia shook her head and
pointed to her belly. While the chichevache was sipping a relaxant, Ksenia was
sipping an anti-nausea drink consisting of red raspberry leaf, peppermint, and
ginger root. She had twice left her guest alone in order to puke up the limited
contents of her stomach.
The chichevache shrugged.
There were no rules against also swallowing unborn humans.
Ksenia scolded; the baby
was not Vjenceslavs. All Croatians knew that chichevaches were only
permitted to eat honorable women.
The monster bellowed. Tea
did nothing to fill its belly, and it was, as evidenced by its protruding ribs,
very hungry. Nonetheless, it was a principled brute.
The next day, Vjenceslav,
too, received a visitor. An enormous bicorn knocked on the door of his
temporary office. At the time, Vjenceslav was in the midst of a conference call
with the Japanese minister of trade and with that mans American
counterpart.
Both officials hear
Vjenceslav scream; while on the phone, he had opened his door and had
encountered a two horned panther with a human face. His visitor was plump and
salivating.
To no avail, Vjenceslav
tried to shut the door on her. She pushed into his office, bit through his
media systems wires, and then snorted. She salivated a little more,
too.
Like the chichevache, the
bicorn had been part of the legion sent to disrupt the work of the hunters of
strange and frightening creatures. Ksenia had not mentioned the incident with
the chichevache, so Vjenceslav had neither anticipated his unwelcomed guest nor
prepared himself to properly greet it.
But Im not
henpecked, Vjenceslav protested.
And I dont
follow the rules, answered the beast. Not even bloodstains were left by
the time she had satisfied herself.
Whereas Vjenceslavs
company made no profit on the Lake Michigan containment problem, the carp
invasion was successfully curbed by the ecotourism idea that Vjenceslav had
been touting in the phone call that preceded his demise.
Taxes from Asian carp
hunters tourist visa were routed to The United States National Tourism
Office with agreed upon kickbacks being channeled to tourism offices in,
respectively: Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and South Korea. On both sides of the
world, a certain per cent of those funds were deposited in private accounts
held by ranking officials.
As for Ksenia, she took up
the cause of chichevaches, the world over. Their plight was more interesting,
than were the various forms of human suffering against which she had earlier
voiced disapproval. Until she delivered her spawn she spent long hours, once
more, in Zadars coffee house. What she did and for whom she did it,
thereafter, is another story.
Meanwhile, the seven lean
and seven fat cows, which had been alluded to in the worlds main
monotheistic religions, were venerated in houses of worship - the chichevache
and the bicorn had been sighted around the globe. Ironically, womens
attendance at religious services dropped because female attendees were getting
eaten. It was suggested that Hindu adherents were safe from that scourge,
nevertheless, since those evil critters knew that such coreligionists eschewed
animal products, especially bovine-sourced comestibles and leather.
Most eerie was that the
majority of the globes eradication experts, namely people like
Vjenceslav, had been preyed on and that formerly secreted, horrific creatures,
again, surfaced. A renaissance of cryptids conquered city after
city.
Months into that incursion,
the American President picked up the receiver of his turquoise-studded phone.
His call was answered in a faraway galaxy. He was inviting tourists from the
Horseshoe Nebula, plus sentient lobsters from Jupiter to harvest all of the
unwanted Earthly fauna.
Unfortunately, neither the
president nor his Russian comrade thought ahead about what to do with the
subsequent invasive species. Thats why, today, in our underground
communities, Vjenceslav is lauded as a martyr and Ksenia is regarded as a
villain of the worst kind.