Tizita by Sharon Heath

Author:Sharon Heath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contemporary fiction, young adult fiction, literary fiction
Publisher: Thomas-Jacob Publishing via Indie Author Project
Published: 2017-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Fleur

EVEN THOUGH IT barely took ten minutes, the drive home from Caltech after Bob dropped me off felt interminable. I still couldn’t believe I’d slept with Bob Ballantine! But my mortification paled in comparison with my continued state of shock that Assefa had discarded me like some used plastic bag.

Thanks to Bob, I now knew where those bags ended up—in toxic swirls like the 270,000 square miles worth of horror called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located midway between Hawaii and California. And in the stomachs of marine birds and animals. The image was so voidishly nauseating that when I arrived back at the Fiskes’, for one brief second I thought that the smell assaulting my nostrils was my imagination.

“Hello? Is anybody home?” No Stanley. No Gwennie. No Jillily—bad girl, she was undoubtedly hiding. The previous year, on my way to giving a talk on the Higgs Boson at Paris Descartes University, I’d passed an ancient urinal on Boulevard Arago whose stench was unbelievable. This was worse. Who knew that female cats could spray at all? It had happened the first time back in November, when we babysat Sammie’s Midge here at the house for a week while Sammie and Aadita flew to Delhi for Aadita’s mother’s funeral.

The name Midget was the ultimate misnomer. These past years, the butter-colored creature had put on even more weight, and as soon as we brought him home with us, he put paid to our delusion that he and Jillily would get along by actually lumbering over to sit on top of her. Jillily had barely managed to ooze out from under Midge’s rump like a slow-moving black turd.

Since then, I’d been trying to explain to Jillily that lifting her tail to let loose a great arc of foul-smelling liquid was no longer necessary to persuade us to evict the uncouth intruder from the house. But alas, spraying turned out to be an attraction that, once discovered, had an atavistic life of its own.

The thing was: the stench was so pervasive that we had no idea where it was actually coming from. Closing the front door, I flung my backpack onto Stanley’s favorite leather chair and—not for the first time—dropped to my knees, sniffing my way from the book-cluttered living room to the book-cluttered den to each of the three book-cluttered bedrooms. The good news was that Jillily didn’t seem to have sprayed the books. The bad news was that I (a) banged my head as I came up from a knot of old Christmas ribbon and a ratty catnip ball under my bedside table, (b) managed to snag my favorite jeans on a nail protruding from the hardwood floor in Stanley’s bedroom, (c) and still could not find the source of the smell.

It was only after I’d showered, changed into a fresh pair of pants, and opened the freezer to get some ice for my head that Jillily deigned to make an appearance, winding her way in and out of my legs and making enough eye contact to guilt me into a little snack of Ritz Crackers and cheese.

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