Chapter One

Isaiah Benton, Iz to friends, sat on the couch stroking his prized possession — a green anaconda named Sarasota, Sara for short. Twenty feet long and eight inches wide at her thickest, Sara’s cantaloupe head lay on his lap and her body stretched off the end of the couch, her tail curling around a spindle of the stair railing.

Iz was a conman who took advantage of rich widows. He had a killer headache because the night before he’d been celebrating with a friend and fellow pillager of the aged rich, Dieter Schmidt, whom he’d met long ago in Germany. Diets had travelled to Canada at some risk to visit, which had touched Iz deeply.

Vee live once, Iz, und it shouldn’t always be amongst ze blind and ze tight-arsed. Dieter had said this the night before in his thick German accent which got thicker with drink. He’d looked incredible, cleanly shaven, minus a good twenty pounds.

Iz lived in an abandoned hunting cabin near the southern border of CFB Suffield, one province over from his British Columbia hunting ground. Some might have found it odd, a criminal hiding out beside the country’s largest military barracks. But all access to the base was from the north so traffic along the south was minimal, and the small path that had once led from the highway had been erased over time by forest growth. In five years no soul had entered Iz’s area uninvited, and he’d taken precautions so anyone foolish or unlucky enough to try would pay a steep price.

“Excuse me, sweetheart,” he said, lifting Sara’s head. He needed some hair of the dog; this headache wasn’t giving up. Sara studied him for a moment with her marble eyes before slithering away.

Iz headed to the kitchen for a beer. His place was a disaster. When he was on a job his personal hygiene was immaculate but holed up he lived like an animal.

He got his beer and grabbed a large bong from beside the stove, figuring he’d use it later, and that was when he saw Dieter’s phone on the counter. “You’re losing your touch, buddy,” he said as he slipped it into his housecoat pocket.

He headed back to the couch. Sara’s muscular midsection blocked his progress.

“C’mon,” he said, nudging her with his foot. “Back to the couch girl.”

Settled again with Sara half on his shoulders and half on the back rest, he turned to an episode of Pawn Brokers.

She flexed and he gave her a light slap. “Watch it or get down.”

She began to slide away, then did something she never had before – she dropped her full weight on his shoulders. He slumped forward, his breath exploding from him, his beer dropping from his hand and foaming as it rolled across the hardwood floor.

“Christ, Sara, get off…”

She spun her body like a whip and dropped another loop of herself across his lap. She squeezed harder and he sat up like a jerked marionette.

Sometimes they play wrestled. This wasn’t that.

“Get… off!” He wanted to shout but could only croak. “Get…”

She squeezed harder still and he stopped talking because he could no longer breathe. His midsection was on fire. His head pounded like a bass drum.

One more squeeze and all his ribs collapsed with the crisp sound of snapping twigs. He opened his mouth and a glut of bright blood slopped out, splashing an abstract pattern over the front of his shirt.

The snake’s head spun around and locked its gaze on his rictus face. Its creamy green eyes transformed to portals through which he witnessed a desiccated landscape with a burnt sky and skeletal trees. A mad monkey danced and flailed in the distance, large as a man, its long teeth glinting like sharpened kitchen knives in the dim light.

Far away, drawing near.

The couch, the television, the cabin, all gone. he shivered in the dusky woods of a desolate other world, the terrible monkey man before him, its grinning face inches from his.

“Thoth,” it grunted before unhinging its jaws and burying its fangs in his face.

~~~

Their bus stopped in front of a ragged structure at the end of a mud road. Egyptian tourist shops were usually clumped near sites like the Sphinx or the Tombs of the Kings but this one was in an open field and could have been mistaken for abandoned if not for the colourful rugs on display out front, their tiny white price tags spinning in the breeze.

Their tour guide — also their bus driver — was Amon, and this was his favourite stop. Not to be missed, he’d told everyone back at the hotel. Everything authentic and one-of-a-kind. No toilets, so go before we leave.

Brenda hadn’t wanted any of this. She had neither the cash nor the emotional stamina for this trip, having recently been swindled out of her life savings, but Paul and Amanda had insisted, going so far as to buy the tickets behind her back.

The bus door accordioned open. Amon got up with a long groan, cursed in Arabic, then lowered himself down the stairs into the hot sun. A short man in a white robe and turban – Brenda guessed the shop owner – appeared out of the small structure. The two men shook hands and kissed one another on the cheeks.

“They’re friends,” Paul said. He’d been dozing the whole drive but now he gazed out the bus window with his mother. “That’s a good sign, right? It means we probably won’t get ripped off.”

“Or they’re in cahoots,” Brenda said.

“Why do you have to be so negative all the time?” Brenda knew his tone intimately. Annoyed with solid undertones of pissed. An echo of Paul’s father, Manny, God rest his soul.

“Sorry.” She wasn’t, but she didn’t want to fight.

They were the first ones off the bus after Amon and as soon as their feet hit the ground the shop owner was on them: “Friends, come inside! I’m sure to have something you like!” He led them over an intricate rug so abused by foot traffic it was impossible to tell where its edges ended and the ground began. “Where you from?”

“Canada,” Paul said.

“Canada Dry!”

“Yes indeed,” Paul answered in the voice Brenda always thought of as his sales voice, the one she could never reconcile with the bashful boy she’d raised. “I bet you say that to all the Canadians.” A little joke. Egyptian vendors had a catchy greeting for every nationality.

The shop was tiny, the ceiling so low that Paul ducked on his way in. It smelled of incense and damp earth. Oil lanterns burned in the corners, which gave the place a cavernous glow. Rickety shelves full of ceramics lined the perimeter. A wide-faced woman in a dark robe and purple hijab sat on a low stool on the far end of the room, bare feet set on the dirt floor and an ornate metal cash box cradled in her lap.

“What do you think of this?” Paul said, holding up a ceramic cup with the Eye of Horus on the side.

“What would I use that for?” Brenda asked.

“You don’t use it, it’s a souvenir.” His eyebrows furrowed, he smiled. “You haven’t bought a single thing so far. I’m afraid you’re going to go home with no proof you were ever here.”

“I have time. I’ll pick something, just not that.”

Paul sighed and put the cup back.

A few minutes later they left to let others squeeze in and shop. Outside Brenda sat on a log positioned to stand in as a bench, while Paul took a selfie. She had the feeling he was going to sulk the rest of the day. He was impatient and didn’t understand how much she still hurt. How could he? He’d witnessed her tragedy; he hadn’t lived it.

A half hour later small clutches of people stood talking outside, while more peered from the bus windows.

“Things are wrapping up,” Paul said, putting his phone in his pocket. “Should we get on the bus?”

“Sure,” Brenda said, standing, flinching as her arthritis flared.

Amon and the shop keep, near the bus door, stopped talking and turned to them as they approached.

“Miss Brenda,” Amon said, “may Chisisi speak with you a moment?”

“What about?” Paul asked, stepping between the men and his mother.

“I want you to have this,” Chisisi said, handing Brenda a small wooden statue of a squatting baboon about eight inches tall.

Paul plucked it from his mother’s hand and pushed it back. “I know this trick,” he said. “I suppose this is a priceless statue we won’t find anywhere else in the world. It will bring us untold wealth and happiness and we would be foolish not to buy it. We’re not interested.”

“Please,” Chisisi said, looking mortified. “You don’t understand, it is not for sale, it is no charge.”

Paul stared at him. “Why?”

“It belongs with her.”

Paul stared at the little man as if he were insane. Chisisi handed the statue back to Brenda.

“What do you think, Mom?” Paul said.

Brenda looked at the statue. It was ugly but there was something appealing about it as well.

“I guess this can be my souvenir,” She said. She turned to Chisisi. “Thank you very much.”

“Great,” Paul said, tugging at his mother’s arm. “Let’s get on the bus.”

~~~

Later that evening, after some delicious Kushari in the lobby restaurant, they reclined in the living room of their hotel suite to watch TV before bed. The suite was something else. Brenda guessed it had to be close to fifteen hundred square feet, which would have been excessive even if Amanda had come along. The hardwood floors gleamed. Every room featured a different chandelier and if they weren’t crystal they looked it. The balcony, large enough to accommodate a party of ten, gave them a breathtaking view of downtown Cairo. It was such extravagant overkill for a mother and son on a short vacation that for the umpteenth time she wondered how much it cost, only she wouldn’t dare ask. If she did Paul would reprimand her then act hurt and probably remind her how well he was doing financially these days, ask why he shouldn’t spoil her after all she’d been through. Some conversations were best avoided.

Paul paused the show while Brenda got up to pee, and when she returned he pointed at the monkey statue on the table.

“What do you think about that?”

“What do you mean?”

He gave her the are you serious eye roll he’d sometimes flashed her as a child, and it made her want to slap him just as it had back then.

“Mom, have you noted the look of desperation on everyone here? This is an impoverished nation. They rely on two industries for their livelihoods, rug manufacturing and tourism, and a decade ago political strife nearly wiped out both. People in these circumstances don’t give things away.”

“You’re thinking about it wrong, honey. Nations aren’t people. We didn’t meet the nation of Egypt today, we met a shop vendor with a family who gave me a gift out of the goodness of his heart.”

 “You could look at it that way.”

“I do.”

“That crap about the statue belonging with you was pretty creepy, don’t you think? Like some Monkey’s Paw shit.”

“What does a monkey’s paw have to do with it?”

Paul stared at her. “You’re kidding me. You’ve never heard of the movie The Monkey’s Paw?”

She shrugged and her son’s eyes flashed. He was an enigma, a buttoned down professional one moment and an excited child the next, spouting trivial details about movies and TV shows as if they held the meaning of life. She was struck by his generation’s ability to be both child and adult simultaneously. In her day you were one or the other.

“It was originally a short story,” he said. “It didn’t become a pop culture phenomenon until Norman Lee turned it into a movie in 1948. There have been remakes since, but the original is still the best. It’s a three wishes tale. A woman is sold a monkey’s paw that has magical powers. She wishes for her son, who died in the war, to come back to life, and he does, but he’s a walking corpse. There’s more, but… well, it’s not your type of movie. The moral is to be careful what you wish for.”

She glanced at the statue. It looked harmless enough.

“You don’t think it’s dangerous, do you?”

He laughed. “Of course not. I just think the way that vendor gave it to you was like a scene from Gremlins or something.”

“Another movie reference I should understand?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”

They watched Storage Wars in silence for another hour before going to bed.

~~~

Being sent in unarmed sans backup was sheisen as far as Dieter was concerned. He was a disposable, a canary down the hole ahead of the constable and his boys, yet he couldn’t complain. He wouldn’t have caught any breaks back in Germany where the Bundezpolizei had been sleeping in their cars for months on his account and wouldn’t rest until he was dead or doing long time. The Canadian R.C.M.P calling for a plea bargain in exchange for his help with Isaiah Benton had been a miracle. He would take their shit all day because he could tell Constable Wallace wanted his cooperation but didn’t strictly need it.

He broke the tree line, careful to step between two leaning pines forming a V as he had the night before; it was the only safe way to enter Iz’s property. The crazy bastard had spread booby traps all along the perimeter, stuff like bear traps that had the power to snap your leg off at the shin or coiled spikes attached to pressure plates that would shoot up and turn your balls to shish kebab. The man was insane, which might have been why the cops were having so much trouble apprehending him. He didn’t think or act like any criminal Dieter had ever met.

As Dieter approached the front door he heard a series of low snarls. The wolverines in the back yard. Iz kept a menagerie of illegal animals, an eccentricity Dieter had never appreciated. Dieter had been mauled by a dog as a child so didn’t trust animals all that much. He wouldn’t even enter the room when that fucking giant snake of Iz’s was around.

He rapped the front door. “Iz! It’s Dieter! I come to get my phone!”

The constable didn’t believe Dieter could leave his phone and pick it up later without suspicion, but there’d been no doubt in Dieter’s mind. Iz had modeled his entire criminal life after Dieter’s. He’d flown to Germany in the first decade of the millennium and paddled around in the underground social scene for months only to find out where Dieter holed up. He idolized Dieter as much as anyone had ever idolized another human being which made taking advantage of him almost embarrassingly easy.

“Iz!” Dieter shouted again. He went to the side of the cabin. Most criminals habitually closed windows to avoid intruders looking in but not Iz; he maintained visuals, which was why the police had kept their distance.

The bright sun made it hard to see, so Dieter cupped his hands and pushed his face against the windowpane. What he saw made him stand up and back away to recover his composure before peeking in again.

Iz was on the sofa with a TV remote in his purple, swollen hand. Sara the snake was wrapped around his midsection. She’d clearly crushed him to death; his torso looked like a carnival mirror special effect, pinched so dramatically where it disappeared into Sara’s coils that it couldn’t have been more than five inches across. Blood had spattered over Iz, the snake, the walnut coffee table, the floor. Sara had jimmied her gruesomely distended mouth over Iz’s entire head and neck, stopping at the shoulders, so it looked like Iz was wearing a fat opaque stocking over his head made of reptile skin which trailed off the far arm of the couch. A stocking with bulging green eyes.

“Jesus fuck,” Dieter whispered.

It would have been far better for Dieter if Iz had run. His death shot Dieter’s place at the constable’s bargaining table all to hell.

A movement inside the cabin caught his eye. He cupped his hands on the window again and peered through.

 Impossibly, it seemed Iz was still alive and pawing at the snake’s mouth, trying to free himself. Hi biceps bulged as he wrenched up on the snake’s snout with both hands.

Dieter, stunned that anybody could still be alive in such a state, thought about how the bodies of most animals – people included — experienced rigor mortis shortly after death. Even if Iz managed to lift the enormous snake, he wouldn’t get free of the jaws, which were surely locked in place by now.

Yet Iz was making progress. The snake’s jaws suddenly slid up and over Iz’s lips; only there were no lips anymore because razor teeth had ploughed through and sheared them off. Instead there were ribbons of ruined flesh, bone, and the occasional tooth peering through, all obscured by the gouts of blood streaming from Iz’s mangled stump of a chin.

Dieter felt like he might be sick, yet he was unable to move. The horror before him gripped his mind and cemented his limbs.

Iz doubled down on his efforts and amid some terrible ripping and squelching that Dieter wished he hadn’t heard he forced the snake’s head up and off, along with the rest of his face. The thing that had once been Isaiah Benton, its face shorn off, heaved the snake carcass to the couch, where it bounced and flopped ingloriously to the floor.

“Thoth,” it said through its ruined features. It seemed to be looking right at Dieter despite possessing no eyes. “Thoth.” It sprung at the window and that was when Dieter found his senses, turned, and ran for the woods.

An icy torrent of realization struck him a fraction of a second before he breached the first trees, but by then it was too late. There was a hollow, airy woosh like one of those shirt cannons used at football games, and then pain rippled like an exploding supernova through his mid-section.

Dieter Schmidt had stepped on one of Iz’s pressure plates.

He’d been ball-kebabbed. 

~~~

Brenda had to pee. She looked at the clock to see she’d only slept a few hours. The extra glass of apple juice before bed meant she’d be up at least one more time before dawn, maybe twice.

Paul snored down the hall. The fact that he was in another room reminded her again of how absurdly large this place was. She grabbed her glasses from the nightstand, slid into her slippers, and toddled down the hall. She’d finished her business and was shuffling back when she stopped in the hall.

A while back –she was startled to realize it had been nearly twenty years ago – her husband Manny had slipped in the garage and knocked himself unconscious on the edge of his work bench. She’d been out working in the garden at the time. She had known something was wrong, not because she’d heard anything – the cars driving by had drowned out any noise – but because she’d felt something thump solidly on her chest, as if Manny’s guardian angel were saying, hey, come with me. She’d heard of premonitions; that day she’d learned what one felt like. To this day she had trouble accepting the supernatural, but that thump on her chest had been as real as the sun beating down on her handkerchief-covered head.

Now she felt it again, and the small hairs stood on the back of her neck. She wondered what the monkey statue was doing in the other room.

Nothing,she told herself, feeling stupid. Inanimate statues don’t do things.

Still, she went to the living room. If Paul woke up and found her standing here in the dark she would claim she was sleep walking. One benefit of old age, people rarely question your infirmities.

The statue was on the table where she’d left it. Of course it was. She switched the light on.

Something had changed. The statue hadn’t had any teeth before, but now there were two bumps at either edge of its upper lip.

Chisisi had told her the statue was hers. His voice and mannerism had insinuated it was hers long before she ever showed up at his shop.

She thought about her son’s story of the monkey’s paw. Placed her hand on the statue’s head.

This is your fault, Paul. What did you think your stupid story would do to me?

She closed her eyes and made a wish: she wished she would never see Noel Bailing again. She’d spent the past six months telling herself there was one upside to losing half her worth to a romantic thief: she would never again fall for the likes of Bailing or men like him because she knew all their tricks now. That sounded good but it wasn’t true. All the logic in the world couldn’t silence her wounded heart, and if Carl walked through the door this moment she would betray everyone and everything to be with him.

The monkey wriggled under her hand.

She shrieked and stumbled back, nearly falling. managing to pinwheel her arms and stay on her feet. In that moment she was certain the monkey would scramble off its pedestal and come after her and if that happened she would lose her mind.

It didn’t. It sat there in the dim light from the chandelier. She didn’t have the nerve to touch it again so for several minutes she stood motionless, the patio curtains open and all of Cairo shining at her. She finally convinced herself she’d imagined it and went back to bed. She looked in on Paul as she passed. He hadn’t stirred.

It took her a long while to get back to sleep — she kept hearing the shuffle of little claws on the hardwood floor.

~~~

She woke again, blinked sleep from her eyes, rolled over to grab her glasses. It was morning, as evidenced by the slant of dim light through the window. She’d been wrong about having to pee during the night, but now she did have to go, like a racehorse, as the old saying went.

She peeked in on Paul. He hadn’t moved.

Moments later her teeth were brushed and her hair tidied. She’d slipped on some loose slacks and a yellow top with navy blue polka dots. She’d been dressing more adventurously since her run-in with Noel, one of the very few good things to come from it. The black-and-white wardrobe she’d hidden in for years had gone to charity.

As she slipped on her shoes she glanced back at the monkey. She grabbed her reading glasses from beside one of the chairs and moved in for a closer look. After a little scrutiny she decided the incisors had been there all along.

“You’re not so scary in the light of day,” she said to nobody.

She wrote a note to Paul telling him to meet her downstairs for breakfast. She left it on the table beside the monkey. She knew her son, knew he held a child’s fascination for the statue, and would examine it the moment he was up. Then he would see the note.

On her way out she decided that at the next tourist shop they visited she would buy herself a ceramic cup or scarab scroll to take home and tell Paul the monkey was his.

~~~

In the lobby restaurant Brenda ordered a waffle and a coffee from the same Egyptian girl who’d taken her order the night before. She was maybe nineteen and, aside from the caramel skin and sharp nose line, was indistinguishable from any teenagers Brenda knew back home. She took Brenda’s order as if she had somewhere else to be and sauntered, loose hipped and unhurried, toward the kitchen. Like the white floor tiles and the photographs of generic beaches and sunsets hung on the walls, she bore no voice of local authenticity. Brenda suspected she was the hotel owners’ kid.

It was only five-thirty, the restaurant still empty, so Brenda propped her iPad on the table and started CBC news. Paul had put a link to it on her home screen.

The female anchor announced: “On the stranger side this morning, police in southern Alberta made a gruesome discovery last night of a man killed and partially devoured by his pet snake. You heard that right, folks. A criminal recluse according to police, he owned, among other illegal species, a twenty-foot-long reticulated python, which squeeze their prey to death and are capable of eating mammals as large as goats.

“The deceased was identified as Isaiah Benton. Police believe he may have been responsible for a string of fraud cases perpetrated against elderly women across British Columbia over the past decade.

“The snake, arguably Mr. Benton’s final victim, did not survive.”

An age tinted photograph came up showing a gawkishly skinny man at a kitchen table. He sported a thick head of copper red hair. He was maybe thirty.

Brenda set her cup down, sloshing an ink blob of coffee on the table. He’d had white hair and more of a paunch when she’d known him, but there was no doubt she was staring at Noel Bailing.

“Police are aware of six women Mr. Benton may have defrauded over the past ten years by masquerading as a wealthy businessman. They are doing their best to determine the whereabouts of the stolen money in hopes of returning what they can to the victims.”

Brenda didn’t care about the money. Noel had gotten what he deserved, and she sincerely hoped he knew what was happening as the snake squeezed the life out of him.

The restaurant was filling up as she polished off her first coffee and began to wonder where Paul was. Telling him about Noel might turn this trip into something they might both actually enjoy.

By the time she finished her second cup she was genuinely worried. She left five dollars on the table, not because the waitress deserved it but because Brenda and Paul would be down there many times in the following week, then she headed back upstairs.

~~~

The monkey’s gaze was on her the moment she entered. She turned the thing around so it could stare out the patio doors at Egypt, where it would stay. Paul could find himself another souvenir.

“Paul?” No answer, so she went down the hallway, stopped at his door. His back was to her; he hadn’t moved. “Honey?”

Her mind was spinning into a dark tunnel, but she reminded herself Paul had no serious health issues. He made it to the gym occasionally and watched what he ate. Soon he would roll over and ask her why she was staring at him in his sleep and she would feel like an idiot.

“Paul.”

She sat beside him, touched the side of his face. It was cold, too cold. Her heart did a quick and painful little tap dance in her chest. She remembered the snippet of story he’d told her the night before about the woman who had wished on a monkey’s paw that her dead son would come home to her, and in her mind’s eye she saw the corpse arriving at its mother’s door, grey and bloated, moss and dirt clinging to its hair, a bouquet of rotten flowers in its desiccated grip.

“Paul,” she said quietly, desperately, and when he didn’t answer: “PAUL!”

~~~

In a small employee’s room nestled behind the hotel front desk, a cold compress on her forehead, a young woman from reception sitting beside her wearing the same put-upon, so tired of these tourists look on her face as the waitress. Another staff member gone upstairs to confirm Paul’s death. Brenda silently prayed he would return with Paul by his side but instead he came back looking pale and faint and nodded somberly at the girl and Brenda knew this was no mistake, Paul was gone.

The girl told her the owner of the hotel had called the Canadian embassy. A representative was on their way. They would explain to Brenda the process of getting her and her son back home.

God, she thought, staring at the bare walls. How is Amanda going to deal with this? What is she going to tell the kids?

A man from the embassy arrived twenty minutes later. Tall, thin, his gaunt face offset by a welcoming smile. “Ms. Hanson, my name is George Till,” he said, shaking her hand. “I am so sorry for your loss. I’m here to make the next twenty-four hours as anxiety free for you as I possibly can.” He spoke a few words in Arabic to one of the hotel employees, who hurried off and returned with a glass of water. Mr. Till took it and handed it to Brenda.

“Do you need anything else before we begin?” he asked. Brenda shook her head. “If you need anything at all, just let me know. I’m going to ask you to endure some unpleasantries for which I apologize ahead of time. I’m afraid it’s protocol.

“The local police are going to be here any minute to investigate your room. They’ll be followed by an officer from the embassy who will do the same. They look for any signs of foul play. Once they’re done, a coroner will remove Paul. You won’t be able to enter the room until they’re finished.” Brenda nodded. None of this felt real. “The local police and the embassy rep will want to speak with you to establish what happened. Are you up for that?”

“Yes.”

“I would like to inform next of kin while we wait. What other family does Paul have?”

“His wife Amanda and their two children, Riley and Amber.”

“Where do they live?”

“Near me in Abbotsford, B.C.”

He looked at the ceiling as if figuring math in his head. “It would be around midnight there. Do I have your permission to call them now?”

She nodded.

“I would like to have you in the room in case I have any questions.”

She nodded again. Tears gathered so she grabbed a tissue from the table. Mr. Till pulled out his cell phone and patted her hand reassuringly.

“Number?”

She recited the number from memory. Before he could hit send she said: “There is one thing you can do for me.”

“What is that Brenda?”

“There’s a statue of a monkey in my room. On the living room table. Can you please have someone dispose of it before I go up there?”

Mr. Till smiled. “Consider it done.”

Chapter Two

They’d never been close. It wasn’t like they had a hostile relationship, they just had little in common, avoiding small talk over the years to the point where they didn’t really know one another, so Brenda was shocked when Amanda invited her to stay with her and the kids until the funeral. She said yes out of sympathy more than a need for company.

Amanda was ordered to take the week off, so she and Brenda visited in the kitchen while the kids were at school. It was awkward at first but Paul’s death served as the topic of discussion they’d always lacked, and soon they grew comfortable with one another.

Amanda worried about her kids’ mental states. Amber only expressed mild concern over her father’s death, acting, in Amanda’s opinion, as if her dad were on an extended business trip he would soon return from, while seventeen-year-old Riley had stomped to his room and slammed the door and informed his mother he hated her and wished she’d died instead.

“Just be there for them,” Brenda said. “They’ll work through it in their own way.”

Amanda nodded and sipped her coffee while Brenda burned with guilty for having waxed wise. What did she know about navigating life and death? Less than a year ago she’d played the fool to a snake owning hermit who’d stolen everything she ever cared about.

~~~

Two days before the funeral Brenda sensed Amanda was unsettled.

“You look tired,” she said from the kitchen table. “Have you been having trouble sleeping? I can give you something.”

Amanda stopped putting away the dishes. “Paul’s stuff arrived yesterday when you were out. Two boxes, downstairs. I haven’t had the nerve to open them.” She wiped tears with the back of her hand. “I’m scared, I guess. Part of me thinks he isn’t really gone until I open them.”

“I get it, hon, but the funeral’s Saturday. We all have to face the truth soon.”

“I know. Listen, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re here. We’ve hardly talked about how hard this has been on you.”

Brenda hadn’t allowed herself to think too much about Paul. They had been distant the last few years, which wasn’t entirely due to his work schedule or her time with Noel. The truth was that they’d never been very close. Early on Paul had distanced himself from his violent father and from her as well.

“Why don’t we go down there and open them together?” Brenda suggested.

 Amanda set her cup down. “Not sure I’m ready.”

“You never will be. Come on, it’ll be good for the both of us.”

~~~

Amanda split the first box open with a carpet knife and Paul’s black nylon suitcase dropped onto the dusty cement floor.

“You do the honours,” Brenda said.

“Jesus, My hands are shaking. Isn’t that stupid?”

“Not at all.”

Inside they found Paul’s shirts and socks and a small scroll of an Egyptian scarab Brenda remembered him picking up their first day in Egypt. Under that were his shaving kit and his cell phone.

“Why don’t we look at the pictures on the phone?” Brenda suggested. “Maybe it will be therapeutic.”

“I don’t know.”

Brenda held the phone out to her. “Are you never going to look at these?”

“Good point.”

Amanda swept a finger across the phone and entered what Brenda assumed was a secret code. Brenda and Manny had never been so trusting with one another. Near the end, when he’d been too ill to raise up and hit her, she’d fought with him about switching his bank account to joint, lost, and fought with the bank just to get at her own money.

Amanda pulled a rocking chair from under the stairwell and a nylon camping chair from a hook on the wall.

“Sit,” she said, patting the seat of the rocker as she took the fold-out.

All the pictures were from Egypt and they were almost all selfies featuring Paul in front of pyramids, Paul near large stone sculptures, Paul amid bustling Cairo streets. There were a few of Brenda, and she looked pained in all of them. She hadn’t realized how blatantly her inner emotions had shown on her face.

One picture gave Brenda a nasty start.

“What is this?” Amanda said. “Doesn’t look like something Paul would have taken.”

The monkey statue stared at Brenda from the table in the hotel room. She didn’t remember Paul taking this shot, yet there it was. He must have snapped it when she was in the bathroom. And something far more mysterious than the picture’s origin had grabbed her attention.

The statue had changed.

The monkey had been squatting before. Now it leaned forward as if about to leap. The mouth was slightly open and canines showed prominently where there hadn’t been any before.

Amanda turned the phone, cocked her head, bit her lip. “This is interesting. I think I may be able to use this…”

Brenda plucked the phone from her and Amanda stared at her, shocked.

“Are you okay? Give that back.”

Brenda handed it back. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me.”

“Don’t be sorry. I understand. We both want to hold onto our memories. Grief can manifest in some pretty weird ways.”

Brenda nodded and smiled, though that wasn’t  it at all.

~~~

The kids got home from school in the middle of The Price is Right. Brenda heard Amber’s pixie voice in the kitchen asking if she could go to a friend’s later, the siren scream when she was told yes, followed by the soft thumping of small feet up the stairs. A moment later Riley shuffled in front of the TV and dropped into Paul’s La-Z-Boy, snapping the footrest just as his father always had, even crossing his legs the same.

“What’s new, kid?” she said, trying to sound nonchalant.

Riley sighed. “So how long are you staying with us?”

“That’s a fine thing to say to your grandmother. Do you want me to leave?”

 “No. Can we watch something else though?”

“Sure. You know, Ri, we can talk about whatever’s on your mind.”

Instead of answering he pressed a button and the Netflix logo took over the screen. Brenda hated when he changed stations because it usually left the TV in a bad state which forced her to ask Amanda for help.

“I’m good, Grandma,” he said after a moment of silence. “Sorry for snapping. I’m tired from school.”

She left Riley to stew in the living room and went upstairs, where she found Amber on her bed staring at her iPad. From the sounds of it she was watching TikTok, a phenomenon Amber had recently introduced to her grandma. Brenda pretended to like the short videos Amber shared with her when in truth they drove her nuts. TikTok’s agenda seemed to be to drive older people insane with grating sounds and pulsating lights.

“You want to see my new video?” Amber asked.

“I sure do!”

“Woo hoo!” The young girl swung her legs out and sat beside her grandma. She turned the device’s volume up, swished a finger, and the video she’d been watching restarted. Amber in black leotards dancing to a repetitive techno beat, her hips snapping back and forth as she punched her fists to the rhythm. Brenda pretended to pay attention to the dancing when she was really drawn to something else in the video, on the dresser behind Amber.

The video ended and Amber shouted: “What did you think, Gam Gam? Am I a good dancer?”

“Very good.” Brenda pointed to the picture on the dresser. “Where did you get that, honey?”

“I made it myself!” Amber exclaimed. The simple wood frame was covered with complex paisley patterns coloured with pencil crayons. “It’s a Colour Me Frames.”

“I mean the picture, sweetie. Where did you get it from?”

“Mommy gave it to me. It was on her desk and I asked if I could have a copy.”

It was the monkey from Paul’s phone, leaning a little further forward now on its pedestal.

“Honey, I know you aren’t going to like this, and I want you to know it’s not because of your dancing. I loved your dancing. But you should take that video off the Internet.”

Amber looked devastated. “You don’t like it? You just told me you liked it.”

“I do, sweetie, but you shouldn’t put recordings of your bedroom on the Internet.”

“Why not?”

“Hasn’t your mom ever told you not to do that?”

“No.”

“Dinner!” Amanda called.

Amber squeezed her iPad against her chest.

“I’m NOT deleting it! It’s MINE!”

~~~

Following dinner, Brenda and Amanda sipped iced teas at the kitchen table. Brenda knew that when Paul was alive he and Amanda had spent most of their evenings in front of the television after dinner, and she wondered whether Amanda would ever go back to that comfortable habit. Once I leave, she thought. Which would be soon. After being spoken down to by her grandson and then upsetting Amber, she considered whether she might have overstayed her welcome. She planned to head home after the funeral.

“I’m going to the bank tomorrow morning,” Amanda said. “I thought you might want to come along. I could run you by your place so you can pick up whatever you’re going to wear to the funeral. Save you burning your own gas.”

“Thanks, that would be great.”

Amanda gave her a studious look. “Are you okay?”

Brenda set her glass down. “Amanda, have you ever talked to Amber about the videos she puts online?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, should she be filming herself in her bedroom dancing around in leotards and putting that online?”

Amanda smiled and shook her head, a snippet of body language familiar to Brenda. She associated it with every man in her life including her deceased son. It effectively stated: You’re an innocent. You don’t understand what you’re talking about. You wouldn’t understand if I explained it to you slowly.

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Amanda said. She pushed her chair from the table and crossed her arms. “I mean, I appreciate your concern. I do. But let me take care of my own daughter, okay?” She cleared her throat. “Amber told me before dinner what you said to her upstairs. I don’t think you should come in here and lecture my kids. Until all this happened you were hardly even a part of their lives.” Her eyes grew huge. She clamped her hands over her mouth. “God, Brenda, I’m so sorry! I don’t know where that came from!”

 “It’s okay.” Brenda thought it was more than okay, it was fitting that Amanda call her out for thinking she could be a significant part of this family again, a family she’d all but abandoned for the past two years. Worse, she’d stolen Paul from them. She was certain now, no matter how illogical, that her wish in Egypt had killed her son.

“It’s not okay,” Amanda said. “It’s the grief talking. I don’t think I could have gotten through this week without you.”

“Amanda, you know as well as I do that I wasn’t involved in the kids’ lives when I was with Isaiah. I want to make amends. I don’t want to take your place as a parent, I just want to be a proper grandma again.”

“I would like that,” Amanda said in a soft voice.

“There is one other thing,” Brenda said. “And I know it’s stupid, but I’m hoping you would humour this old woman.”

“What is it?”

“It’s about that picture of the monkey statue on Paul’s camera. I saw you gave Amber a copy. It bothers me. Every time I see it, I’m pulled back to that morning at the hotel. I was wondering if you would get rid of it.”

Amanda blinked. “What do you mean? Delete it from the camera?”

“And destroy any copies. It would give me peace of mind.”

Amanda crossed her arms. “Look, I can make sure the picture isn’t out while you’re around, but I’m not going to take it away from Amber. It reminds her of her dad.”

“Just the original then.”

Amanda didn’t answer for a long time. Finally she said: “Did it occur to you that I might want to keep it? That I have as much right to it as you?”

“Paul’s not even in it. Just that ugly monkey. I’d appreciate if you got rid of it.” Brenda understood the offence. Amanda had an equal right to Paul’s memories, but she didn’t have any right to that monkey; for better or worse that was Brenda’s and Brenda’s alone.

Amanda took their dishes to the sink. “I’ll think about it” she said, her back turned. “My offer for tomorrow still stands. I’ll take you by your place after I go to the bank.”

“Thanks,” Brenda said.

“Then I think you should give me and the kids some space,” Amanda said before slipping quickly past Brenda and out of the kitchen.

Chapter Three

The day of the funeral was sunny and bright, not a cloud in the sky, as if nature herself were mocking Paul’s passing with cheerful weather. Brenda struggled to hold her sorrow and rage in check as she studied her son’s pale face at the open casket. Their relationship was strained before his death and now the universe had robbed her of any reclamation.

What stood out more than the hymns sung or the kind words shared were her grandchildren. Amber was so pale that Brenda wondered if she was ill. Reality has settled in on her, she thought. Riley just looked rageful. Everyone avoided him, even his cousins who had flown in from Saskatchewan and hadn’t seen him for years. Brenda hugged Amber in the parking lot after the service but could only bring herself to nod at Ri. Like his father, he was an unpredictable soul, gentle one moment, a cocked trap the next.

Brenda had packed that morning before anyone was up. Now she walked to her Hyundai once Amanda and the kids had driven out of sight, careful to avoid any stray mourners who might want to stop and talk.

~~~

She climbed the stairs to her condo around four that afternoon, gripping the thin metal railing with one hand and lugging a suitcase with the other. She stopped halfway up because the arthritis in her knees throbbed something terrible. At the top she took a moment to catch her breath before fishing her keys out. She opened the door, looked down at the car, and realized she’d left her trunk open with her other suitcase in plain sight. If someone happened by and wanted to take it they could; she wasn’t capable of stopping them. How vulnerable she’d become. Normally Paul would be there to help her, but not anymore. Not ever again.

A surge of heat smacked her when she opened the door. She’d left a key with Rhonda Hutchins across the street and asked her to open the windows once a day and water the plants; clearly she’d forgotten.

She did a round and found all her plants were, unsurprisingly, dead. Oh well, they hadn’t been expensive. Outside her bedroom door she heard buzzing that fell silent as she approached. There was a fly swatter in the kitchen, but she hated killing bugs. Paul had always done that for her; before that, Noel; before that, Manny.

She entered the room and then slowly backed out, almost tripping over her own legs.

Her bedroom window was carpeted in house flies. She’d never seen so many in one place; it reminded her of the huge swarms she’d seen on the Bee Rescue show that engulfed trees or the back end of a car. They undulated like a belly dancer’s mid-section if it were made of thousands of shiny black buttons. Occasionally a few flies broke from the pack to buzz aimlessly for a second, before diving back into the parent mass. A larger group took flight and descended onto the night table, where they spun like a mini tornado before settling into a perfect likeness of Brenda’s Egyptian monkey statue. Some of the flies shifted their iridescent bodies and the monkey winked at her.

A scream whistled out of her as unexpected and unplanned as sick, and the flies spun into the air all at once, turning the room into a black tempest. Within the madness Brenda saw something flash on the dresser, where the winking monkey had just sat. Fighting her fear that the dive-bombing insects would cover her face, clamber into her mouth, go up her nose, she stumbled forward and grabbed the object before clamoring back into the hallway and slamming the door.

It took her several minutes to catch her breath. She held the object up and examined it.

It was Noel’s ring, the big silver one with the grey stone he’d once told her his mother had given him. She’d learned he’d stolen it from a woman from Kamloops who had once been married to a rich news mogul.

What was it doing here? Noel had taken it when he left. Now that he was dead, shouldn’t the police have it in an evidence room somewhere, tucked in a plastic baggie? It couldn’t be here, that was for sure, and yet here it was, solid and cold between her thumb and forefinger.

She slipped it into her pocket. Cursing at her aching hips, she managed to make it back down her front steps and into her car, slamming the trunk shut on her way by.

She would call an exterminator in the morning. Until then she wanted to be as far away from this place as possible.

~~~

Sitting by the window in the Sunrise Café off the hotel lobby, she wondered how many of the rooms upstairs she and Noel had made love in. They’d gone there four, five times a week for two years, so odds were she’d just checked into one of them.

The ring lay like a silver rivet in the center of the table. She was still trying to figure it out, a riddle she had to solve, or she wasn’t going to get any sleep that night.

She’d decided the flies had been natural. She’d once seen a massive army of ants invade her mother’s porch, some of them – the queen ants she’d assumed – over an inch long. Over a few weeks the fly population in her apartment had simply grown out of control; gross but completely explainable.

The ring was a tougher nut. She’d tried to convince herself Isaiah might have forgotten it when he’d left. It hadn’t been on her end table before she’d left for Egypt, she knew that, so maybe Rhonda came over after all, snooped, found it, left it on the end table. This theory didn’t hold much water because Rhonda was no snoop and Noel never would have left an expensive ring behind. That meant someone must have come into her apartment and put it there on purpose. In the corny TV movies she sometimes watched, the twist would be Noel faking his death to drop the ring off as a message; but that was even more far-fetched since the police had found his body in rural Alberta part way down the gullet of a snake.

Then her mind served up a terrifying thought. Chisisi had told her the monkey was hers, which she’d taken to mean she and it were connected in some profound way. Was that connection still binding, even from halfway around the world? Did the picture from Paul’s camera somehow strengthen it? She still missed Noel despite what she told herself. She knew those feeling of loss and yearning might never leave her. Had they been enough to constitute a wish in the monkey’s unnatural logic? Had the monkey brought Noel back to life, in the manner described in Paul’s terrible Monkey’s Paw story?

She closed her eyes, watched Noel’s reanimated corpse place the ring on her nightstand at home. In her imagination a grave-bloated version of him stumbled past the front desk, unnoticed by the skeleton staff. She saw him outside her hotel door, scratching to be let in, his yellow ruined eyes staring straight ahead, bereft of life; she swore she could smell his putrefaction.

She was being foolish. The flies in her apartment had sent her into a downward spiral of paranoia and fear. She had to get a grip on herself.

The restaurant was empty other than the solitary waiter, who was setting tables. He stopped and asked if she needed anything else. She said no, settled her bill, and walked out into the lobby.

The hotel lobby was far brighter than the cave-like restaurant, more exposing. There was a sitting area to one side with a stuffed leather couch and two matching recliners arranged around an artificial fireplace. Above the TV, a television played a gardening show on mute. Brenda took off her shoes, stretched out on the couch, and turned her head so she could watch people come in and out of the front doors.

There was no way she was going to sleep tonight. Even with the lights on, she would be a nervous wreck. But there was no way she was going back to her apartment either, and she wouldn’t beg Amanda to let her back in.

There was an open-plan lounge on the far side of the lobby with a floor-to-ceiling mural of a glamour girl dancing at a night club on the back wall. Bathed in the full exposure of the lobby’s lights, its vibe was more clothing store vestibule than bar. Brenda slipped her shoes back on, fixed her hair, and sauntered over.

“Welcome to the Regency Lobby Bar,” the young bartender said. “I’m Jeff. Would you like a drink?”

She would indeed. She wasn’t a drinker — Manny had held that title in their marriage. In the years before cancer put him to rest, when she refused to buy him his regular cases of whiskey, he had screamed the most terrible obscenities at her while suckling at the rims of empty bottles like a deranged baby. Now, despite knowing the damage it could do, she wanted something to numb her senses. She might end up sick, but she had witnessed enough with Manny to know it would solve her current problem, one way or another. The only pressing question was what to order.

“Gin and tonic?”

“Sure,” the young man said. He straightened his shirt and got down to the business of making her drink. “You’re a welcome change from the usual Saturday crowd here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we don’t get many…” he paused for a moment and Brenda knew he was picking words. “…mature people in here on a Saturday night. Give it an hour and this place will fill with clubbers. It’s been that way since they opened that new dance place across the street, Thrill Bang.” His pale face reddened in embarrassment. “I’m sorry, that’s just what it’s called.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Most of us old timers aren’t as innocent as you think.”

He set her drink in front of her. She took a sip and shook her head.

“Is it alright?”

“Yeah. Just surprised at the bite. I’m not used to drinking.”

“May I ask why you’re starting now?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Fair enough.”

Brenda asked, “Are you going to be here all night, Jeff?”

“Yes ma’am. My shift ends at four.”

“Could you do me a favour?”

“Depends on what you’re asking.”

“Careful there, I’m old enough to be your grandmother.”

This made him chuckle and blush all over again.

“My room number is 412. Could you call up if you see a man walk into the lobby who looks like this?” She fished a picture of Noel out of her purse and held it up. Nobody knew she still carried it and she wanted to keep it that way.

Jeff studied it. Smiled. “Sure.”

Brenda could tell he thought Noel was the reason she was drinking, and that was alright with her. He probably figured Noel was potentially dangerous, and that was even better.

~~~

Up in her room she experienced a moment so profoundly out of sync with the paranoia she’d felt downstairs that it made her dizzy. She recalled standing at the window in a room nearly identical to this one – this might be the very room for all she knew — wrapped in Noel’s arms by the window. It was early morning. They were watching folks pull from the parking lot while the sun broke over the trees.

“I’m not sure I can leave everyone behind,” she’d said. She hadn’t meant it, she was sure. Resisting was simply her way of saying goodbye to everyone and everything.

“Who are you leaving behind?” he said, with the gentle cadence of a mentor. “From what you’ve told me your entire existence was with your husband. The way I see it, your family will barely notice you’re gone.”

Later those words would sound foolish to her. Dangerous even. That day they had freed her.

She left the windowsill and went to the bathroom where all her warm memories melted away, for sitting on the edge of the tub was a white towel folded in the shape of an animal. Hotel staff did that sometimes — swans and rabbits were popular bath towel origami subjects. This one was in the shape of a monkey, and its resemblance to the statue from Egypt was uncanny. Its face was blank, but she could imagine the details well enough. She wanted to shake it, transform it into a harmless towel, but something stopped her, the same something that had stopped her from throwing Paul’s camera to the ground and crushing it when she’d seen the monkey photo.

She placed the towel monkey out in the hall, had a shower, then ordered room service. She tried to watch television but couldn’t find the stations she liked. The sheer number of channels gave her a headache. She remembered a book in her suitcase, dug it out, started reading. The phone rang when she was on page 25 and she nearly shrieked.

It could only be Jeff from downstairs. Nobody else knew she was there.

The phone rang again, and she seriously considered not answering it. But what was her plan, then? To cower in fear of her dead ex-lover coming up to claim her and drag her into hell? That was insane.

She answered, and to her surprise it wasn’t Jeff but Amanda, who was panicked.

“Brenda, thank God! I need your help. I had a fight with Riley and he’s taken off. I think he might do something stupid. You saw how he was at the funeral. I need you to watch Amber while I go look for him.”

“Slow down,” Brenda said. “How do you know he’s in trouble? Maybe he just wants some time to himself.”

Amanda sighed in a way that made Brenda want to grind her teeth.

“Don’t you think I thought of that? Are you suggesting I don’t know my own son?”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Listen, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Thanks. Look, I’m sorry…”

“Don’t,” Brenda said. “Just hang in there. I’m on my way.”

She hung up, then considered how it was that Amanda had known where to call her. The answer came to her immediately, both obvious and embarrassing: Amanda knew all the intimate details of her and Noel’s trysts, because she and Paul had sat in on the fraud investigation, insisting on being in the room whenever the police spoke with Brenda, as if she were too mentally feeble to testify on her own.

Struggling with discordant emotions – both concerned for her grandchild’s safety and smugly satisfied over her daughter-in-law’s panic — Brenda thought Amanda was right to be concerned. There had been more than simple rage in Riley’s eyes that afternoon; there had flashed a promise of dire consequences. It was that promise everyone had shied from.

On her way out she glanced down at the monkey towel, considered touching its head and wishing for her troubled grandson’s safety. Instead she scooped it up and took it along.

~~~

Amanda paced briskly through the kitchen.

“I’ve texted and called him repeatedly and gotten nothing, which tells me he’s either in trouble or ignoring me.” She stopped long enough to look beseechingly at Brenda. “Which do you think it is? Be honest.”

Brenda hadn’t spent nearly as much time with her grandson as she should have the past few years, so her opinion could be off, but she’d never seen Riley as a victim. He was a smart kid, a natural leader. If there was something going down he probably helped instrument it.

“I think he’s ignoring you.”

“Right,” Amanda seemed buoyed by the insight. “Amber doesn’t know where he went. I’ve called all Riley’s friends I have numbers for, and they either aren’t home or are denying they’ve seen him. I think it’s time I go out and find him.”

“You go,” Brenda said. “I’ll see Amber gets to bed. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

“He’s been seeing a new girl lately, he’s probably at her house.”

Amanda’s cell phone buzzed.

“Hello… yes, this is his mother.” She glanced at Brenda with a look of terror on her face. “Is he okay?”

~~~

Riley had taken a corner too quickly and slid his car into a light post at high speed. As Amanda had suspected, he’d crashed near his new girlfriend’s place. The airbags had deployed, but since it was a side collision his head had smashed against the window. The doctor had already stitched up a five-inch gash above his temple by the time Brenda, Amanda and Amber arrived at emergency.

“He’s stable,” the doctor informed them in the lobby. The doctor glanced at Amber and then back at Amanda, which made Brenda’s heart sink. “Do we want to continue this conversation away from young ears?” he asked. Amanda shook her head, so the doctor continued: “There’s been cranial swelling. At this point we’re not sure what brain damage may have occurred.” The doctor stopped, licked his lips. “I wish I had better news, folks, but I don’t want you having unrealistic expectations either. We don’t know when – or even if — Riley will wake up.” He closed the file he’d been holding as if he’d just completed a recitation. “You’re free to go up and see him.”

Amber, inconsolable on the way over, was the first to her brother’s side. She squeezed his hand, careful of the IV catheter, as her mom had told her. She kissed his arm and declared that he had to wake up, that she would never forgive him if he didn’t.

Amanda approached next, took her son’s limp hand, stood by him silently. Tears worked their way down her cheeks.

Brenda hugged them both and reflected on how important family was when life led you through dark storms.

Only this storm is manageable, a voice in her head reminded her. The solution is sitting in the back seat of your car.

 After a few moments Brenda excused herself to get some fresh air.

~~~

Out in the parking lot she knelt on the back seat of her car and stared at the towel monkey, its blank face reflecting the ghostly light of a nearby lamp post.

There was at least some chance Riley was never going to wake up. If he didn’t recover – if, God forbid, he died – would she forgive herself for not doing everything she could to help?

She reminded herself that the one time she’d done something like this the fall out had far outweighed the benefits. But what if she specified who would be affected? Last time she’d left it up to the monkey; but the monkey was hers, she should be telling it what to do.

She closed her eyes, laid a hand on the towel monkey’s head, and said, in a shaky but determined voice: “Let Riley make a full and speedy recovery. Let the consequences fall on Jeff the bartender.”

Shocked by her own words, she gasped and stumbled back. The monkey didn’t move. There was no thunderbolt from the sky. She had no idea if anything had happened.

She scrambled forward, grabbed the damn thing by its pointed ears, and shook it into the night air until it was nothing but a harmless bath towel once again.

On her way back in, she dropped it unceremoniously into a garbage bin.

~~~

The three of them held a silent vigil by Riley’s side for another two hours.

“Take Amber home,” Amanda said to Brenda. It was nearly midnight. Amber squeaked that she didn’t want to go, but she was flagging.

“Okay,” Brenda said. “Try to get some sleep. I’ll call you first thing in the morning.”

Brenda and Amber were nearly to the door when Riley emitted a weak moan – the first sound he’d made since they’d arrived — around his breathing tube. Amanda rushed to his side; Brenda and Amber were close behind. Riley made a few more weak noises before settling back into silence.

A nurse poked her head in. “You folks staying the night?” she asked.

“He made a sound!” Amanda told her. “I think he might be waking up!”

The nurse smiled and tilted her head in a way Brenda took as patronizing.

“Probably not, I’m afraid. Even patients in deep comas make noises occasionally.”

Amanda sighed deeply. Amber’s shoulders slumped and her eyes dropped.

The nurse, still smiling, said: “You’re welcome to stay if you want. I’ll bring some pillows and blankets.”

~~~

Riley wouldn’t spend the rest of his life in a coma. That day at the hospital had been the start of a slow but certain recovery.

A week later Amanda asked Brenda to move back in. She said she needed an amateur therapist to talk with, her only other option being Amber, whom she joked lacked the requisite experience.

Brenda said yes. She was still staying at the hotel, refusing to go back to her condo despite assurances by the exterminators that the flies were gone. They’d called her the day following the hospital visit.

“But there weren’t any flies, ma’am,” the guy on the phone had said.

“They were all over the bedroom,” she said. “It was the biggest swarm I’ve ever seen. Do they go away on their own sometimes?”

The man sighed. “Not to my knowledge, ma’am. Afraid we’re still gonna have to charge you for the call out.”

 The doctor predicted Riley needed another month or so of recuperation and would suffer few to no long-term effects, a much rosier picture than he’d offered up before.

Meanwhile, Brenda had worried constantly about Jeff the bartender, always expecting him to be absent for his shift or at least to show up damaged in some fashion, but the week she spent in the hotel he was always at work on time and looking fine.

The evening of her first day back at the house she showed Amanda the ring.

“I’m no expert, but this might be worth something,” Amanda said, eyeballing it with fascination. “Why didn’t you tell me and Paul about it?”

“I haven’t had it long. I just found it on my dresser when I went home after the funeral. It wasn’t there when I left. I can’t explain it.” Then, before she could stop herself: “I think it might be a gift.”

Amanda stared at her. “A gift? From whom?”

“I don’t know,” She shouldn’t have said anything, but it felt so good to get the thought out of her head. “Anyway, I can’t accept it.”

“We should get it appraised,” Amanda said. “It could be worth something.”

“I’m sure it is.” Noel never owned cheap jewellery, although this ring didn’t impress Brenda much with its large, muddy brown gemstone. “But we need to take it to the police. They know it’s stolen. They showed us a photo of it once. You were there.”

“That was a long time ago,” Amanda said. “I think there are statutes of limitations on these sorts of things. Let’s get it appraised before we make any decisions.”

~~~

The gentleman behind the counter of Regal Jewellers studied the ring in silence. Eventually he dropped his eyepiece into his hand, scanned the room — which was empty of customers other than Brenda and Amanda — and called to the only other employee in sight, who was busy dusting a display case.

“Michael, lock the door for a moment and go to the break room. I’d like to speak with these ladies privately.”

Michael nodded and left.

Brenda felt a cold rush. This man knew the ring was stolen. He was going to call the police, and her alibi was going to make her sound like an absolute lunatic.

But the man didn’t call the police. He smiled and set the ring gently on top of the display case.

“Listen, if you two are police officers, then this is entrapment, and I won’t have it.”

The ladies stared at each other, then back at the jeweller.

“We’re not police officers,” Amanda said. She glanced at the closed door. “I’m a graphic designer. This is my mother-in-law. We just want this ring appraised.”

 “Neither of you know Detective Price? I told him he wasn’t going to get a second shot at destroying my business with his unsubstantiated insinuations, and I meant it.”

“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amanda said. “Are you telling us this ring is worth something?”

“You honestly don’t know?”

Amanda shrugged. Brenda did the same.

The little man leaned over the counter, the ring balanced carefully between his index finger and thumb, his pinky as if he were enjoying tea with the Queen. His eyes remained laser focused on the ring.

“This, ladies, is a musgravite gemstone, arguably the rarest stone on the planet. There are fewer than a dozen this size and condition in existence. In my two decades of studying rare stones, I’ve seen but one of this quality, in Switzerland in ‘98. If you came across it by accident, as you’ve told me, then you’re two of the luckiest people alive.”

“How much?” Amanda said, the uncertainty in her voice transforming to giddiness.

The jeweller looked up. His eyes sparkled. “How do you ladies feel about a cash transaction of one hundred?”

Amanda looked confused. “A hundred dollars?”

“One hundred thousand, my dear.”

Amanda gasped. “We’ll take it!” she shouted.

“Hold on…” Brenda said. Amanda and the jeweller turned to her.

“Hold on?” Amanda said. “A hundred grand, Brenda! That’s at least half of what Noel took from you. It won’t make you financially whole, but it’s a hell of a start!”

Brenda still didn’t know how the ring had gotten on her dresser. But since her time at the hotel, she’d concluded that the monkey was somehow involved in its appearance in her bedroom. The ring was a gift, a bribe, however one chose to view it. Selling it would be finalizing a pact.

“No,” she said, more forcefully. “No deal, sorry.”

“Brenda…” Amanda began, but Brenda had already scooped the ring from the jeweller’s hand and was hobbling determinedly out the door.

“Come back if you change your mind,” the jeweller called after her, sounding for all his polished showmanship like a broken-hearted teenager.

~~~

She shaded her eyes against the early afternoon sun, leaned against a sign to give some relief to her throbbing back. Amanda burst out after her a moment later.

“Why the hell did you turn that down? Do you have any idea how lucky you are to have that ring?”

“I told you, it’s stolen.”

Amanda’s hands balled into fists. Her face clenched. Brenda thought she looked like a wild animal clad in a sundress and Birkenstocks.

“That doesn’t matter,” Amanda said slowly, as if scolding an ignorant child. “He was going to pay us cash. He was going to sell the ring out of country. Nobody would have known we ever had it.”

At that moment Brenda yearned for her dead son. Her relationship with him hadn’t been stellar, but at least he’d tethered her to her family. Once upon a time he’d stopped her from going off with Noel, which would have been the worst decision of her life. Now he was gone and she was adrift.

“I just want to go home.”

“Oh, okay,” Amanda barked, tossing her arms out, letting them slap back to her sides. “Well, you know what I would like? I would like some stability. I would have liked not to financially bail you out of your stupid delusional fling with Noel!” Spittle gathered at the corners of her lips. She wiped it away aggressively. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, not sounding sorry at all. She stared into the sky for a moment. “Things are really fucked up for us right now, aren’t they?”

“They are,” Brenda said. She was not surprised by Amanda’s tantrum. It was in line with the driven professional she knew, the perfect mom, the woman she once hadn’t wanted her son to marry. She lifted herself off the sign and stretched her back. “I think we just need to cool off.”

“You’re right,” Amanda said. “This guy’s offer will still stand tomorrow.”

Brenda wasn’t coming back here tomorrow or any other day, but she didn’t see the point of saying so.

Amanda sighed. “Amber needs picking up from school in twenty minutes. Can you drop me off at home and take her to dance class tonight?”

~~~

Amanda’s family were infamous for dining on packaged food and take-out so it was a surprise when Brenda and Amber returned from dance class to a roast beef dinner with all the trimmings on the kitchen table. Brenda wondered whether this was an apology dinner. If it was, she was hungry enough to accept.

“I want to show you something in my office,” Amanda said once the table was cleared.

As they walked down the hall, Brenda caught snippets of the news from the living room TV. Amanda ran the TV all day. She said it helped fill the void left by Paul, who’d worked out of his own office downstairs and used to drop in and chat with her regularly throughout the day.

The newscaster’s voice peaked as she announced eleven more deaths in Ontario from a new illness out of China they were calling the Coronavirus.

“Isn’t that horrible?” Brenda said.

“What?”

“That new disease.”

Amanda shook her head. “Don’t get too worked up. Remember SARS? This’ll blow over.”

“I don’t know. They’ve been announcing new deaths every day.”

“It’s media fodder, Brenda. Meant to keep people eating up the video feeds.”

The office was small and heavily cluttered, dominated by a wall-to-wall easel-style desk plastered in dog-eared pages of hand-drawn art. To the right of the big desk was a minimalist desk on wheels with two thirty-four-inch curved monitors side-by-side on its surface, attached to a laptop tucked into a lower shelf.

Brenda stopped at the doorway, for plashed across the large monitors was a grotesque version of her monkey. At least she assumed it was her monkey – the resemblance was passing. Rendered in flat pastels like a child’s cartoon, it stood erect on hairy oversized feet, its arched back testing anatomical correctness, its face upturned, eyes bulging, mouth agape and bursting with oversized incisors.

“This is my most recent version,” Amanda said, looking proud. “What do you think?”

“What is it?” Brenda asked, trying to sound casual.

“It’s your monkey from Egypt, silly. I presented it to my executives yesterday. They went nuts. They already have a buyer in mind – a company that wants to use its likeness on their summer clothing line.”

“I asked you to get rid of it.”

“I know, and I’m sorry, Brenda, but this Bad Monkey account is huge.”

“Bad Monkey?”

“That’s the name our think tank came up with. I think it’s pretty good. Do you like it?”

“What does this mean?” Brenda asked.

“It means everything, Brenda. Not just for Crystal Designs, but for me personally. Hon, this could make me a rich woman. My artwork is going to be advertised everywhere.”

Amanda felt faint. The monkey wasn’t Amanda’s, it was hers; she alone controlled it.

“We’ve been gathering initial reactions. Let me show you.”

Amanda opened a section of the Crystal Designs website called Your Feedback and Brenda read the following:

Love the new Bad Monkey logo guys! I think its good luck, cuz after seeing it I found a twenty in my coat pocket! Coincedents? Dunno…

…

Forgot I had a test on Monday! Did NOT study! Wished on Bad Monkey and think I did OK! Will post and let yall no

…

Moms in remission!!!! I know its because I prayed on bad monkey the other day…

Brenda felt faint. The wishes on the screen – and that’s exactly what Brenda considered them, veiled wishes — were innocuous enough, but still, what sort of horrific karmic blowback would the monkey dole out in compensation for a thousand strangers’ wishes? How about a million?

“How many people use this site every day?” Brenda asked.

Amanda frowned. “I.T. might know, but I would guess it’s in the tens of thousands.”

On the living room television, loud enough to be heard in the office, a focus group discussed the Coronavirus. One man proffered the term pandemic. His colleagues dismissed him with groans. A naysayer suggested the mystery disease would be gone by the end of the month, which was met with a smattering of applause.

“You can’t use the monkey like this, Amanda,” Brenda said. She very nearly called it her monkey before correcting herself.

Amanda’s expression fossilized. Her eyes darkened. “What is wrong with you? What is your obsession with this monkey?”

Instead of answering, Brenda asked: “Why did you draw it all crazy like that?”

“What do you mean? It’s modelled after the picture.”

“The picture doesn’t look anything like that.”

Amanda grabbed Paul’s phone from the pencil well of her drawing desk, found the picture, held it up.

“It looks exactly like that, thank you very much.”

In Brenda’s memory, the statue Chisisi offered had been of a sitting monkey with a somber face, its front paws settled on its knees.

What was before her now could only be described as a monster.

~~~

That evening, once everyone else was asleep, Brenda slipped her clothes on – slowly, since her hip joints were acting up again – and snuck out of the house. She walked a half block before stopping at a sidewalk grate, into which she dropped Noel’s ring. It barely fit through the rusted bars. There was a satisfying plop when it hit the water below.

She snuck back to the quiet house, changed, climbed into bed, and lay staring at the ceiling. She was feeling the same way she had felt during her final few weeks with Noel – as if she were being duped, yet unsure how and by whom. In her mind’s eye she saw Amon and Chisisi standing in the Egyptian sun, insisting she take the statue.

What had Chisisi and his family been through by the time she’d shown up that day? Where had he gotten the damn thing from? How many lives had it touched – possibly destroyed — before that?

Her mind drifted to the man from the Canadian embassy who’d helped her the day Paul died. She couldn’t recall his name, but remembered she had his card. She dug it out of her purse.

George Till.

Hadn’t he told her to call him anytime? It was a little past midnight, almost the same time Mr. Till had called Amanda to tell her about Paul’s death. In Egypt it would be late morning.

Mr. Till answered on the third ring.

“George Till, Egyptian Embassy to Canada. How may I help you?”

She hadn’t considered what to say.

“Mr. Till, I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Brenda Hanson. My son Paul passed away when I was in Egypt last month and you helped me through it.”

“Brenda, of course. What can I do for you?”

Brenda paused, then remembered Mr. Till’s reaction when she’d asked to have the statue removed from her room; in short, he hadn’t reacted at all.

“It’s about the monkey statue I asked you to remove from my room that day.” This was met by dead air, which strengthened her suspicion he knew more about the statue than he’d shared with her. “Do you know what that statue symbolizes?”

“Ms. Hanson, are you calling for general information on the statue? I don’t mind the call, but you could have consulted the Internet for that.”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m no good on the computer and I don’t have anyone to help me.” This was partially true. She really was terrible with computers, but she had enough know-how to perform a Google by herself. The only computer she had access to was Amanda’s, which was locked, and she wasn’t going to ask Amanda for help.

“I understand,” he said. “My grandmother is the same way. Life moves so quickly these days, doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

“That statue represents the god Thoth,” he told her. “He’s a moon god in Egyptian mythology — the god of knowledge and the afterlife. If you’re thinking of getting another one shipped to Canada, I’m afraid we don’t do that sort of thing.”

“No, nothing like that. Besides, I still have my original statue, in a manner of speaking. My son took a picture of it before he passed. My daughter-in-law works for a large advertising studio and they’re planning on using it for merchandising.”

After a pause he said: “I would be careful about distributing the likeness of any artwork from Egypt for commercial gain. That could be a legal morass.”

“Is that the only reason?” It was cool in her room, and yet she felt sweat trickling down her side, under her nightgown.

“Well, no.” He was being cautious. “I don’t know if you’re superstitious, Ms. Hanson. I’m ashamed to admit I am. After two decades in Egypt, the local mythology has seeped into my bones. Some Egyptians believe Thoth wants to cleanse the human race; balance from chaos if you will. You see, Thoth is also a god of reckoning.”

“Like the biblical story of Noah and the Ark,” Brenda said.

“Something like that,” Mr. Till said. He uttered a hollow laugh. “Of course, we’re talking about a myth. Your daughter-in-law should consider the legal consequences first and foremost.”

Brenda considered asking him about Chisisi and any others who might have been touched by the statue, but knew that line of questioning to be a dead-end.

“Thank you,” she said, and hung up before he could respond.

~~~

She was straightening the bed in Riley’s room a few days later, in preparation for his impending return, when she heard about Jeff via the living room television.

“A tragedy unfolded yesterday evening right here in downtown Kamloops when a twenty-four-year-old man named Jeff Crozier was struck and killed by a bus on his way to his job as a bartender at the Regency Hotel. The driver told police he’d been distracted by an unruly passenger and hadn’t seen the young man until it was too late. Word is still out on whether any charges will be laid. In other news…”

 Brenda dropped onto the bed, causing the headboard to crack against the wall. She covered her face. There was no doubt in her mind she’d killed him. Manny had always told her then without him around she couldn’t manage to walk a straight line, and how right he’d been.

“Everything okay?” Amanda called from her office.

“Fine,” Brenda responded, her voice hoarse. “Just sat down to take a break.”

Wiping tears from her eyes, she turned back to straightening the quilt.

Chapter Four

The next three months spun chaos.

The disease Brenda heard about on the news — initially referred to as Coronavirus, then Covid-19, and eventually just Covid — spread across the globe at an obscene rate. Historians compared it to past pandemics until it was clear it would outpace any disease in recorded history, save perhaps the Black Plague, and even that was a race too close to call. Eventually the news stopped reporting the deaths. The Canadian government declared martial law at the end of the second month, one of the last first-world countries to do so. Everyone was forced into strict home arrest. Doctors made house calls in the direst of circumstances, under military chaperone. Provisions were delivered to people’s doors by officially sanctioned volunteers folks took to calling the Covid Angels. Their deliveries came with makeshift news tracts, presumably to keep people minimally connected with what was happening outside their doors. These amateur local papers contained pictures showing the sad state of the neighbourhood: abandoned streets, food rotting in shops, scroungy-looking abandoned pets wandering the streets. The feds bought up huge tracts of empty industrial land all over the country to serve as mass graves.

TVs went dark as the cable companies closed their doors. Internet providers were limited, on threat of paralyzing fines for non-compliance, to virtual meeting channels run through government-controlled server farms. Amanda’s company was allotted a mere six hours of meeting time a week, which she claimed was a bald attempt at limiting the spread of information to control the masses. Cell phone service was cut back to 911 until further notice.

Brenda slept until noon most days. When awake she watched the birds – unaffected by the pestilence – flit through the front yard. She hadn’t been back to her condo since the day of the flies, and sometimes she wondered if there would be anything left to go back to. There had been an awful lot of looting according to the flyers.

The kids were coping in the barest sense. Riley slipped through each day like a zombie while Amber, more demonstrable in her agony, threw daily tantrums, during which Riley liked to poke her ribs with his foot as she wriggled on the ground and howled. Eventually Amanda would storm from her office and sent them both to their rooms, a futile gesture given the circumstances.

Brenda feared Amanda was losing her mind. She spent every waking hour in her office, surfacing only to announce how her company was riding the storm. According to her they’d pivoted from general ad campaigns to online educational material. Amanda still spearheaded the Bad Monkey brand which had become the most popular avatar among children ages five through fifteen. In remote focus groups young kids said Bad Monkey’s warrior stance gave them hope for the future. Older teenagers had caught the Bad Monkey bug too, using it as ironic meme fodder with captions such as Be a Bad Monkey – snort Covid and This is ANYTHING but FUCKING fine, folks!

Amanda’s reassurances garnered dead stares from her children and the odd obligatory nod from Brenda. Amanda always ended her speeches by ushering the family into the washroom where she took everyone’s temperatures. When it was determined nobody was ill – so far nobody had been – she scurried back to her office and shut the door. Brenda sometimes heard concerning noises from her office – crying, banging, the occasional curse. She never intruded. Manny had always told her not to stick her nose into other people’s business unless she was sure she wasn’t going to make things worse.

It was under this blanket of oppression and death that Brenda came to terms with what had happened to Jeff. She’d been wrong to throw him under the bus – literally — as she had, but she’d panicked. She was only human, after all. Besides, she didn’t really know if it was her fault. It might have been a coincidence, she told herself. Scratch that, it was almost certainly coincidence.

Life went on this way for a very long time, amid a disease which threatened to set the world’s population back to pre-industrial numbers by the time it was over, if it ever ended at all.

~~~

One day, around seven-thirty in the evening, Amanda came out of her office wearing a dour expression. She gathered everyone in the kitchen and informed them she’d been unceremoniously kicked off the Bad Monkey account.

“Didn’t you invent Bad Monkey, Mommy?” Amber asked.

“I did,” Amanda said. “But Harold Dempster convinced the board he was a better pick moving forward. There’s nothing Mommy can do.”

“Are we going to have enough money?” Amber asked. This was a very grown-up question from the little girl. Until that February she probably hadn’t really grasped the concept of money, let alone her family’s financial stability. But Amanda had been reporting profit numbers daily, which had clearly left an impression.

“Don’t be stupid,” Riley shot back. “Nobody needs money in the pandemic.” He wasn’t wrong. The government, as well as other public and private entities, had been supplying most food and medicine for free. Nobody was allowed out to shop, and non-essential supplies were banned.

“Hey, don’t talk that way to your sister,” Amanda said. “Listen, kids, Mom is still doing okay. I’ll get on another project. Maybe something more profitable than Bad Monkey. By the time this pandemic ends we’ll be in a good position, I promise.”

Her words were inspiring. Her harried expression less so.

~~~

Amber’s fever struck a week after Amanda’s work demotion. Early that afternoon she complained of feeling funny and asked if she could take a nap, which scared Brenda badly, since Amber was the last kid in the world to volunteer to sleep in the middle of the day. By dinner time she was burning up. Brenda given her all the pills she could safely administer but her fever wasn’t breaking.

Amanda had been holed up in her office all day with the door locked. Brenda called to her from the hallway, stressing Amber was sick and needed help. When she got no answer she pounded on the door, panic fluttering through her like a razor-winged butterfly. Her head and hips throbbing, she gave up, fetched a glass of water from the kitchen, and took it upstairs to Amber.

“Thanks,” Amber croaked, her eyelids half closed. She took a small sip, set the glass on the end table, and rolled back into a fetal position.

“You’re welcome, sweetheart,” Brenda said. She kissed the child’s sweat-covered forehead. “I’m going to call the doctor, okay?”

She went to her own bedroom down the hall and dialled 911, got a busy signal, and realized that she’d been mad to expect otherwise. No government anywhere had a practical plan for dealing with an event of this magnitude. Overcome by rage, she threw her phone against the wall, where it exploded in a shower of glass and plastic.

Mr. Till had agreed the monkey’s motives were like those of God in the Old Testament when he’d flooded the world to wash away man’s sin. The implication of that, as far as Brenda could tell, was that this pandemic and the flood were both necessary corrections on some path to enlightenment. She couldn’t believe that. She saw nothing positive in this predicament, and it seemed almost sacrilegious to suggest as much.

 She’d considered wishing the apocalypse away, but whad stopped her – what should have stopped her from dooming Jeff – were the potential consequences. What would happen if she wished an entire pandemic out of existence? Perhaps an asteroid the size of a city would drop out of the sky, or some far worse disease would swoop down and finish off the human race. God’s flood had been unstoppable. Noah hadn’t had any say in the matter.

Then she thought: Hadn’t he? What if he’d denied God?

She went back to Amber’s room. The child had kicked her blankets off and lay uncovered in her nightie, shivering, her eyes squeezed shut and her blond hair stuck to her forehead in damp clumps. Brenda covered her back up and placed a hand on her forehead.

“Can you promise me something, sweetheart?” she said. She didn’t think the girl was hearing her but she continued anyway. “Promise me that if you make it through this you’ll live your life on your own terms. Don’t ever let someone tell you who you are.”

Amber, teeth chattering, shuffled closer to her and hugged her side. Brenda kissed her granddaughter on the forehead.

Then she stood up, walked to the picture on the dresser, and recited her final with to the monkey.

Chapter Five

The funeral proved a brutal return to normalcy. People meandered about the air-conditioned church in their dark suits and skirts as if lost. Amanda couldn’t help thinking that every one of them had recently pondered, in the most brutal of pragmatic senses, how long they had to live. Amanda had done the same, and now she wondered how she was ever going to slide back into her old life as if nothing had happened.

The pandemic had changed course. Scientists around the world were scrambling to explain it. So far they had no definitive answer, but they all agreed on a few key details: the world had gone to sleep riddled by arguably the worst disease to ever infect mankind, and had woken the next morning cured. Millions of people world-wide who had tested positive the day before were suddenly, inexplicably testing by the light of dawn. Every petri dish in the world showing evidence of the disease had been swept clean overnight by some unknown force. Scientists were calling it the turning event. They refused to call it a miracle.

A camera crew set up feet from where Amanda and the kids stood in the receiving line partially blocked incoming traffic. They chuckled to one another as people shuffled around them.

Nobody lingered in the receiving line, not even the people Amanda had known her entire life. Everyone offered brief condolences before moving quickly on, looking like spooked mice yearning to scurry to the safety of their holes.

The day Amber had gotten sick, Amanda had suffered one of her fugues. She remembered staring at the image of Bad Monkey on her computer screen and trying to formulate a plan to wedge her way back into the account. One moment daylight had been streaming into her window, and the next it had been dark, her office lit by the weak glow of her computer monitor. She’d gone upstairs to find Brenda and Amber laying side by side in Amber’s bed, both sweating profusely.

Less than twenty-four hours later Amber was back to her old self and Brenda was dead.

When news broke of the turning event a few days later, McCormick’s Funeral Home called. The mayor had contacted them about redirecting Brenda’s body, which lay in storage awaiting dumping in a mass grave, for a proper service instead. It would be the first funeral service in the city since the start of the madness. The mayor hoped it would underline how life in the city was returning to normal. The city would pay all expenses.

Amanda was stunned and a little scared. She wasn’t sure she was ready to be around people again. Had she known what a media spectacle it would become, she might have said no.

“Can I go outside now?” Amber asked, tugging at her mom’s pantleg.

“Go already,” Amanda said. She turned to Riley. “Watch her, please. Don’t talk to any reporters. Make sure your sister doesn’t either.”

Riley nodded and took his sister to play.

As Amanda watched them take to the swings, she wondered whether their childhoods could ever be reclaimed. It seemed to her this savaged world wouldn’t allow such a miracle.

~~~

 Yet a miracle was in store. Things did return to normal for the family, and it didn’t take long. Fall tourism was a bust in most places because people were still too spooked to travel, but by September – six months after the last mass grave in British Columbia was filled in, paved over, and marked with an onyx marble memorial stone – the streets were full of people and things were plugging along pretty much as before.

Once the smoke cleared, the World Health Organization announced the disease had killed roughly 3% of the population of Canada and 4% of the world population. Amanda did the math one day on her desk calculator and stared in disbelief at the number.

What if Amber or Riley had died instead of Brenda, she thought. What if it had been me?

But as she resumed face-to-faces with her co-workers and her kids reintegrated at school, her panic faded. Her children hadn’t died. Life was settling into a familiar groove.

She’d taken a U-Haul truck to Brenda’s condo a week after the funeral. Brenda hadn’t left a will, so she sold what she could and deposited the proceeds in an education fund for the kids. She searched for the musgravite ring, both at her place and Brenda’s condo, but hadn’t found it.

Amanda still missed Paul but by winter the pain, like the memory of the pandemic, was fading. The kids still talked about their father but they did so less and less, which Amanda considered a good sign. The family was struggling financially, as Amanda had predicted. She’d been assigned to a new account for a store-bought coffee brand which only occupied a quarter of her days. She had no clue what, if anything, she might nab after that. At least Paul’s life insurance had paid off the house.

The Bad Monkey account was going strong under the helm of the ever-cheeky Harold Dempster. He sent Amanda daily emails detailing his successes on the account. His messages were congenial on the surface but overtly cruel in their frequency. They made Amanda consider whether the man was a sociopath.

At least people weren’t wishing on the monkey anymore. That fad died hard, for reasons the researchers at Crystal Design were still trying to nail down. These days the main revenue for Bad Monkey was coming from clothing and backpacks for grade school children. Amanda didn’t know what she was going to say when Amber inevitably asked for something with the Bad Monkey logo stamped on it, but it would equate to a firm no.

This afternoon she was folding clothes in the living room, while Derry Girls played on the TV. The kids wouldn’t be back from school for a few hours. While she ironed she thought about Brenda, particularly how Brenda had been convinced that the monkey statue was changing over time. It was sad how elderly people sometimes lost their grip on reality. She wondered whether she might lose her mind in a similar fashion someday. Her mother’s mind had been sharp to the end but her father had spent his twilight years drooling and crapping his drawers, so she supposed it wasn’t out of the question.

She heard a noise down the hall. A deep, low buzzing sound. She wondered whether she’d left the printer on. Sometimes documents didn’t print at the moment, only to come shooting out of the printer hours or even days later.

As she headed down the hall she realized the noise was far too loud to be the printer. She opened her office door. Her breath caught in her throat.

Her draftsman desk was carpeted in flies, as was her computer desk and her office chair. She couldn’t see the furniture at all, only millions of bugs crawling and squirming in endless, undulating motion.

Run, a voice screamed in her head. She stayed put, her curiosity overriding her instincts.

Some of the flies on her draftsman table moved. They revealed a manilla envelope. She stepped forward, grabbed it, and stepped back into the hallway.

Inside were ten printed pages of an online text conversation between two people. One went by the moniker katerpillar and the other calling himself alpha_dude_56. A brief scan told her katerpillar was a young girl, maybe thirteen, maybe slightly younger. Her real name was probably Kate. Alpha Dudewas clearly an older man.

A few pages in Alpha Dude expressed an interest in meeting Kate in person. Kate wasn’t so sure. Her parents were going away for the weekend and a neighbour would be checking in on her and her older brother every day. Alpha Dudeassured her he wouldn’t let her get in trouble. He was a grown-up, he knew how to talk to other grown-ups.

When Amanda turned to the fifth page, a huge grin cracked her features. Alpha Dude’s idiocy was more than a match for his arrogance. On the top of the page was a photograph — a headshot of Alpha Dude.

It was Harold Dempster. He was in a suit and tie, his smile small and prissy, his wispy thin hair brushed across his bald scalp. The idiot had posted his picture from the Crystal Designs online directory.

She looked up at the swarm.

“This is a gift,” she said.

The swarm was silent but Amanda sensed a horde of tiny eyes assessing her. Brenda had once told her the ring had been a gift she couldn’t accept. Amanda hadn’t understood at the time but she did now. Brenda had been well-intentioned but weak-willed. Accepting this swarm’s offer probably would have killed her. Amanda was stronger.

“I accept.”

The swarm lifted. She felt the wind of a million wings beat against her face. They swept around her like a cyclone. It was glorious.

I bet this is how Harold feels when he sends me those cocky emails every day, she thought. Not anymore, motherfucker.

The flies blocked the sunlight from the window, reducing the room to a black void. They crawled all over her, wriggled up her nose, jammed themselves in her ear canals, They beat at her lips until she opened her mouth and let them in. They scrambled down her throat in a mad stream, packing her lungs until she could no longer breathe. Her body spasmed in its panic to draw air, while tears of joy streamed down her purple-veined cheeks.

The remainder of the swarm spun to rest in the center of the room and assumed the form of Bad Monkey.

“Thoth,” the fly creature uttered, its insectile voice far older than the Tombs of the Kings or the Pyramids at Giza, perhaps older than the universe itself.

Amanda thought one last, terrified thought — What’s going to happen to my children! — before the flies chewed through the soft constructs of her inner ears and hit her brain, and then she thought no more.

“Thoth,” the creature grunted again as it pushed Amanda’s inert body out of its way and stumbled from the room. “Thoth.”

It had a world to conquer.