***

Violet listens to the Boss’ voice rambling on, with the receiver held an inch for her face. She always does it, when he calls. It’s not a matter of personal hygiene: it’s more of a matter of preventing contamination: of stopping that rusted nail voice from scraping against her brain.

Outside, a little boy is playing with his pokemon toys, crashing them against each other, preparing himself for trainerhood.

The Boss rambles on and on about big things, important things. He talks about ‘jobs’ and ‘word on the street’ he talks about his ‘man over in Lavender’ in a manner that he’s certain it makes him sound threatening. He spits some half-hearted threat about her ‘not keeping tabs on her partner’. The idea of Violet taking a fall for Vincent’s sake loosens her tongue some.

Next door, the little boy goes over the fence, to roll around in the tall grass of his neighbours’ back yard, left untended for weeks.

“Think it’s got something to do with the guy in the diner.”

“Who’s that?”

“Vincent messed up a guy in the diner we went to. After the job? He had a gun.”

“And you tell me this now?”

“Think the guy was a hitman. Wasn’t such hot stuff though, if Vincent could mess him up.”

The little boy stumbles on an old, rotted fruit cellar door. It doesn’t hold his weight. He tumbles down into the dark before he can make a sound. The sound echoes like thunder underneath Violet’s floorboards.

The Boss sighs from the other end of the line and Violet can almost hear the gears in his skull grind together, piecing the information. She thinks of connections being made between bits of gossip, overheard recordings from phone taps. She thinks of the Boss holding a stethoscope against a wafer-thin wall of the room where Vincent’s life is set on display, turning gibberish into a coherent story.

Violet thinks of Vincent finding himself in a world of trouble, so she helps the Boss on his way. She thinks of the boy in the cellar, all quiet, all ugly.

“Vincent mentioned a Mister Fuji.”

There’s a moment of silence. Violet thinks of the gears in the Boss’ head stopping, a tiny bell ringing somewhere out of sight. The thought of it makes her smile. The boss says:

“Thanks, doll.” and hangs up.

Violet stands completely silent, listening in to the call tone, the Boss’ voice lingering in her ear. Her lips curl up, her eyes narrow. She looks at her face in the mirror and she watches the frown grow more pronounced, harder.

Easy there, doll. Don’t you move a muscle something slithers up from a dark place in the furthest reaches of her brain, in the dank, damp place where secrets nest.

She clenches her teeth and her lips pull back as she clutches the receiver hard enough to turn her knuckles bone-white.

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Papa’s gonna make it all better now the things hisses.

Violet smashes her fist at the mirror, shattering the glass, reducing the hate into a maelstrom of eyes and mouths, cheeks orbiting them like distant planets. She looks at the munsell-red blot in the center of it and the thing in her head, it rattles its tail, whispering:

Papa’s gonna make you all pretty.

The Boss tries Violet’s home a couple more times that day, but there’s no call tone. The receiver has never been set back into place. He tries her mobile phone number, tries to get her to come over to Lavender town, help sort the mess out. No answer. Then, the Boss gets two of his men to go over to her house and try to get her, but they come back empty-handed.

Come Monday, Violet’s back to work, all prim and proper. The little boy never gets back home. They never find the little bundle that Violet’s buried beneath the tall grass in her back yard either.

***

When I open my eyes, all I can see is half a dozen halogen suns, staring down at me. The gas mask is off my face, but I can still feel the anesthetic hissing against my lips. My tongue feels like a dead thing, weakly flopping around inside my mouth.

“It’s okay, you can get up now” the Chansey’s voice comes from my right. It sounds distant and ridiculous, like a cartoon cricket.

I turn and look at the pink little ball with the black-on-black eyes nudging me. The tips of her extremities send pinpricks across my arm. Something inside me feels loose; something moves the wrong way as I try to get up.

As soon as I’m off the slab and my feet touch the ground, my knees turn to jelly and I flop to the floor. It’s coated in something that smells like tarnished copper and antiseptic, but I decide not to dwell on it.

“Take it easy now, you’re still weak.” The Chansey says, as it drags my sorry ass off the floor and puts me on its back. Under the soft, pink exterior I can feel a set of muscles flex and the next moment, the Chansey’s dragging me out of the surgery room effortlessly, like I’m a ragdoll.

“She’s gone now. She went away. And the other thing, it went away too.” The Chancey says as it drags me through a long, white corridor framed by empty cages. I’m barely conscious, but I can tell that there’s more to this room that just straw bedding on the cages and the artificial scent of pine cones.

There’s fear here. There’s sweat and waste and the smell of tiny, hurt things that have been abandoned. There used to be discarded things here, which knew they’d been tossed in the trash. The Chansey drags me past that corridor, to a small room, furnished with nothing but a bed and a nightstand.

“You need a hospital.” it says, leading me through a door into the Pokemon Center proper. “I don’t know how to fix people.” Little shit thinks it’s helping, when in fact it’s just about to get me killed.

I try to speak, but something wells up in my mouth and dribbles through my lips. The Chansey stops short of the doors to the street, putting me down.

“No hospital” I mutter between mouthfuls of blood. “Please.”

The doors creak open. The sound of a car speeding past the Pokemon Center thunders inside the waiting room. The Chansey leans over me, as it’s fidgeting for something in its egg pouch. I watch as it produces a dog eared leather wallet that it places in my breast pocket.

“There should be enough in here. I think.” it says, as it sets my pokeball belt across my chest.

“No hospital.” I let out, as the Chansey drags me out into the sidewalk, through the empty street and leaves me in an alley by a trash bin. The entire time I try to fight back, but my hands are just dead weight at my sides.

You’re killing me. I try to warn it. The Chansey only looks at me and smiles.

“They’re going to be here in no time.” It says as it makes its way back to the Pokemon Center. Somewhere in the distance, an ambulance’s siren is closing in.

You’re giving me to Mister Fuji on a silver platter, you stupid bastard I try to warn it, as the red cross at the side of the vehicle blocks it form view.

It’s only as I’m being carted into the ambulance and to the hospital, with an IV needle in my arm that my mind clears and I’m able to process the information of what happened back there. I think of the thing I’d glimpsed crawling out of the pokeball:

“What the hell was that?” I say then make sure to stay quiet, at least until I get to see an attorney.