Revenge is a take-away served cold

Miriam went into a trance the moment Martin sat down at the kitchen table in front of their Ouija board. The table was cast in shadow from a single light bulb above them that harshly lit the room. Miriam placed her fingertips on the edge of the Ouija planchette and rolled her eyes up until her irises were under her eyelids, but not before she saw Martin roll his eyes. She gave him a solid kick under the table.

Miriam’s body began to quiver and tremble. Martin’s mind drifted to an image of a circus clown stumbling around the carriage of a subway train holding a large pink blancmange on plate. The other passengers shrieking and cowering as the clown tottered towards them as if they were all on a ship tossed around in a storm. Another kick bought him back to the table. He looked at Miriam and forced a smile.

Miriam had been a large woman from birth and so her youth had been scarred with insecurities about her physical appearance. It was to exact revenge for being called ‘dumper truck’ for the best part of fifteen years that Miriam had decided to become a witch. She did once read a book about witches actually being women who bring healing and goodness to the world, but for Miriam it was pure evil all the way. She was convinced that throwing a voodoo doll of Tamsin Turner against her bedroom wall had caused Tamsin to crash her car and have to re-sit her final year of high school.

Miriam referred to herself as an Adept. A person skilled in the esoteric arts, the ancient craft of potion making and contacting people on the other side. Her weekly podcast on spells and hexes had seventeen followers, twelve excluding immediate family. Martin thought she was adept, but at manipulating people even more gullible than herself. However, he kept such thoughts to himself. While he was pretty sure her spells didn’t work, several of the potions brought him out in a rash.

‘I can see it clearly,’ said Miriam in a voice that fluctuated between a high-pitched squeal and a deep boom. ‘Fragrant rice, number twenty-three, two number forty-eight and spring rolls,’ she said whilst spelling out Korean take-away with the planchette.

‘One day I’m going to get run down by a truck,’ said Martin, as he grabbed a shopping bag and stormed out of the kitchen, ‘And then I’m going to come back and haunt the shit out of you.’

Before leaving the house, he popped into the bathroom, lifted up the toilet seat up .

Out on the street the chilly air revived him. With each step he stood more up-right. He stopped looking at his shoes. He even thought about whistling, mulled it over and then gave it a try. All he managed to do was to blow spittle down his jacket. Martin didn’t walk quickly. He was in no hurry to get back to the house. He wondered if he might bump into the girl with the blue coat again, although it had been a few months since he had seen her last. He loved the nervous little smile she gave him and the way she crossed the street when she saw him. Forbidden love was such sweet agony.

With the take-away food collected Martin headed home. He decided to walk the long way back as Miriam hated cold food. As he turned the corner of the block, he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his side as a man in a baggy hooded top grabbed his arm and swung him into the wall between two large garbage bins.

‘I want your wallet and your watch,’ said the man.

‘And I want a large cock and a house on the beach,’ replied Martin.

The man pushed the nozzle of his gun harder into Martin’s ribs and stared at him with soulless, red-rimmed eyes. Martin resentfully slipped off his wristwatch, took his wallet from his back pocket and handed them over. The man loosened the grip on his arm and softly felt the sleeve of his jacket between his thumb and forefinger. He sized Martin up.

‘And the jacket,’ said the man.

The man smiled as he zipped up the jacket and stood the collar up around his neck. Then he grabbed the takeaway, turned, tripped and fell into the road. The first truck caught him flush on its grill. He flew in the air like a well-struck baseball and landed ahead of the second truck that rolled over him until he flipped out of the back. The third truck caught him under its wheels and as it skidded to a halt the man skidded with it, scraping the skin from his face over the tarmac. Martin stood on the sidewalk, and saw his jacket darken as the man’s blood drained from his body. It wasn’t clear where the man’s intestines stopped, and spilt noodles started.

'Well that's a coincidence,' said Martin.

The police arrived on the scene remarkedly quickly considering the heavy, early evening traffic. They cordoned off the street and a small crowd gathered, cursing the dumb arsehole who just got runover and making them late for some place they didn’t really want to go.

Martin stood with his belly pressed against a thin plastic tape the police had stretched between two lamp posts. He watched as the ambulance arrived, and two men jumped out with a gurney. He watched as they ran towards the body, then slowed, exchanged a glance with the police, poked the body with a toe and lit up a cigarette.

Finally, some plain-clothed police arrived and gave the ok for the street to be cleared. As the ambulance men scraped the body into a bag with a shovel, the officers stripped the watch from the wrist of the corpse and folded the blood-stained jacket into a clear plastic bag after taking the wallet out of the pocket.

Martin had the feeling he was floating above the scene as one of the police officers knelt next to the body, slipped Martin’s driving licence out of his wallet and compared the picture to the skinless face poking through the zip of the body bag. After a moment he shrugged his shoulders and nodded to the other officer to zip up the bag.

‘I am dead,’ thought Martin. ‘Or rather I am undead.’

A few minutes later Martin was hiding behind a shrub in his back garden planning his haunting. He watched through his rear window as the police showed his watch and wallet to Miriam. Because of her exaggerated gestures, Martin felt like he was watching an old silent black and white movie, but in colour. Miriam pretended to faint at least three times and each time the police officer stepped to the side and let her crash to the floor. As she lay wailing into the carpet banging her fists into the floor, one of the police officers nudged the other, pointed to his watch and then waved a thumb in the direction of the door. The two men bent down, took an arm each and hauled Miriam back onto the sofa, gave her a calling-card and left.

As soon as they had gone, Miriam sat up-right, saw a book of Martin’s on the coffee table and pushed it with her foot until it tumbled into the wastepaper basket. A few minutes later, as he watched through the window with his face reddening, she had filled two large bin-bags with his belongings. He clenched his hands into fists until his knuckles turned white. When she took a hammer to the porcelain vase he had picked up at a garage sale a couple of days ago, his body spasmed involuntarily, his left leg shot out and kicked over a flowerpot. There, shining in the dirt, he saw the spare key for the back door.

Martin waited outside in the back garden until night had started to fall. He would have waited longer but he didn’t have a jacket. He eased open the back door and silently crept along the hallway, listening, trying to work out where Miriam was. An upstairs floorboard creaked, and he could just about hear singing. Then an upstairs door opened. Martin froze and stepped back tight against the hallway wall. A black plastic bag sailed over the upstairs banister. It landed with a thud at Martin’s feet causing its side to split and the cuff of Martin’s favourite shirt to flop out.

Martin tip-toed into the kitchen, saw the Ouija board, took three steak-knives from the drawer and placed them on the board with the tips pointing to the letters, D, I and E. Then he hid in the cupboard under the stairs, but not before going into the bathroom and flipping up the toilet seat.

It felt like hours before he finally heard Miriam’s plodding steps on the boards above his head. Miriam flicked on the kitchen light and stumbled backwards. Martin felt the whole house tremble.

‘Edi,’ she said staring at the Ouija board. She picked up one of the knives and gently caressed the handle. ‘Is it really you?’

Martin burst out from the dark cupboard and ran into the kitchen blinded by the sudden bright light.

‘Die, you stupid witch. It says DIE!,’ he said bumping solidly into Miriam. And then he felt a warm trickle run down his chest. He felt his shirt dampen and cling heavily to his chest. He didn’t look down; his eyes were locked with Miriam’s, but his hand frantically searched across his chest until it came to the hilt of the steak knife.

Martin fell backwards into the hallway, his back hit the wall, and he slid to the floor. His eyes closed, his chin fell to his chest and his body slumped like a rag doll. Stunned Miriam sat down at the kitchen table. She was numb, her mind blank until an odd thought popped into her head.

‘I wonder if he brought back the takeaway?’ she said in a faint voice.

The planchette on the Ouija board slid slowly, all on its own, to the word “No.”