Danger / Black

A short story by Josh Allen.

I rappel down onto the thirty-foot statue of Phadis, get a stabilizing grab on her giant left tittay, unsheath my trench knife and go to work on the glowing sapphire embedded in her navel. Just as it pops out with a nice ch’ding! a nine-pronged shuriken hisses out of the darkness and into my hand.

(Say, do you guys remember the time I was in a machete fight with Donny After Dark in El Salvador and he flung a goddamn viper at me? Well this hurt like ten times worse.)

The jewel and knife go clattering to the floor of the undersea mausoleum and I’m trying not to cry because I recognize the cherry tree logo on the throwing star and I definitely don’t want to be crying in front of, in front of her.

Voletta Black.

She slinks into the chamber, wetsuit still wet, hair like spilled ink, eyes like twin jabs to the gut. She bends over to pick up the Blue Omphalos and I get a nice long look. She takes my knife, too, sliding it inside her utility belt.

“Hey now,” I say through gritted teeth. “My mother gave me that as a reward for killing my father.”

“You never had a mother,” Voletta Black says.

“I’ve seen pictures.”

“No man with a mother would ever do the things you’ve done to women.”

“I do awesome things to women!”

“A night of terrible pleasure, and then I awake to find myself handcuffed to a hungry panther and a hundred thousand euros poorer.” She produces a cigarette from somewhere. “Does that sound awesome to you?”

“Kind of.”

“This,” she says, showing me the sapphire, its glow lighting up her smoke, “is the second of a hundred things I will take from you.”

This made me think of Daria, the old MTV show. In the episode I’m thinking of, Daria’s class raises money to build a new coffee house. Since she didn’t raise any money—she refused to sell chocolate bars to an obese hypoglycemic woman—instead she has to read something at the open mic night. Jane says to write something that will have her classmates “drinking in her words like an elixir or knowledge”. Here’s the episode, Daria’s story is at the very end: Cafe Disaffecto