He slips into the house party unnoticed, wearing a fedora and a bright pink handkerchief in his suit pocket. He is dressed like the other men, just as the invitation had specified. The women’s shawls shimmer and champagne flutes seem to float from their upheld arms, the liquid sloshing like high waves in a tiny storm. In the kitchen, he immediately spots three knives safely in their wooden slots. One slot empty. He shouldn’t, perhaps, have drunken so much, but sometimes he needs whiskey to steel himself in these situations.
The women all have black plaited hair and their makeup is worn the same exact way: charcoal shadow above the eyes, blood-red lipstick, pale powder. This is why it takes some time to find the woman he came here for. The chatter, also, is distracting; they are talking about dogs, about ice cream, snow, sunny days on a boat, the threat of a light rain.
She is conveniently in the kitchen, slicing a large orange with one of the knives. Her limbs are exquisitely long, her cutting precise. Slip. Her back is to him, but he can tell it is her because of her sapphire ring, which he had admired hours before when they sat on the park bench, where they’d met and where, as if it were planned, she had handed him an invitation on thick woven paper.
“Richard,” she says just then, the oranges falling over onto the board in thin, equal circles. Slip. “Do you know why you’re here?” Slip. The music suddenly stops. And then the chatter. As if everything has frozen. Slip.
He focuses on the orange. The orange gives very little resistance to the blade. The slices impossibly thin. “No.”
She places the knife down on the counter and calmly walks over to him. “Open your mouth and close your eyes.” Lavender perfume.
“No,” he says.
“Eat.”
He does as she says.
He feels something small curl and collapse inside his mouth, like a creature. He tries to spit it out but it latches on to the roof of his mouth with its tiny legs. He tries to grab it but it slips and twists into different shapes to escape his hands. He runs into the living room to find a mirror. Everyone is standing still. When he finds a mirror behind a hutch, he sees himself split into three different men in the glass, and on his tongue lies a black hairy spider. It moves quickly and morphs into any shape it wants: a ball, a stick, a cube.
His eyes bulge as he swallows it whole.
She emerges from behind him in the mirror. “There, darling.” Tap tap on his shoulder. “Now you’re fine. Enjoy the party.” The music resumes, more resounding than before. Someone hands him champagne, and the chatter starts up again, about the fair weather, about snow, about dogs, the delicious flavor of vanilla ice cream.
__________
Cheryl Pappas is the author of the flash fiction collection The Clarity of Hunger, published by word west press (2021). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Five Points, Swamp Pink, Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 MacDowell Fellow.