The frog started to take a mild interest in the love triangle, one of the corners. He could feel the Nurse’s great attraction to him and sense Natasha’s interest in the doctor. The un-dead hamster, however, remained a great mystery.
Natasha kept firmly in mind the rumours of the doctor’s impending celebrity-dom. She had been hacking the emails of TV and film producers, writers, and writers for months. The purported medical-paranormal show many industry insiders were saying would have the box-office potential of the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises combined. It had STAR power.
She wanted to be Miss Harlequin of the 21st century and for every century after that until the end of time. The only way was to tap into that star power and find a man worthy of being the object of her grift. Some otherwise worthless, feckless two-timing meat head she could cut into bits of shish-kabob and roast over chestnuts while boning a fresh-faced adolescent yet to grow a beard: the dream of Harlequin romance.
She looked longingly into the doctor’s eyes as he looked longingly into the Nurse’s expansive, generous bosom and she longingly at the frog more and more excited by the undead hamster. Spy-machine – crooked vet – buxom nurse – green frog – undead hamster.
L’enfer, c’est les Autres.
“All actors in this inexplicable drama of animal urges, larcenous motives, and undead indifference, could feel the weirdness bonding them to each other,” croaked and ribbetted the frog whose batrachian sagacity was, unfortunately, lost to the humans in the room.
“Thank you for the tea, Nurse Buttkiss,” the doctor replied genially, saying her name because of its symbolic importance. By saying her name, he was kissing her butt in his mind. Buttkiss, he thought, not Nordic.
It wasn’t.
He never could summon the courage to ask her why and the Nurse did not volunteer any information. She would only tell the code-breaker helping her unearth the dreadful secret of her parent’s coital catastrophe.
“Yes. Thank you,” Natasha added, her fingers now disentangled from the cage, as was the doctor’s. For a moment, the two women stared at each other. Blood, snow ice, the destruction of the world: these are some of my favourite things they telepathically shared.
After the Nurse left the room, the doctor said, “May I pour you some tea?”
“Thank you.”
“Black or with sugar or cream?”
“Black.”
It was now late afternoon.
“About poor Vlad,” she said. “What can you do?”
“We need to discover how this hamster came to be what it is, undead or otherwise. I mean he could be a Halloween party animal going out at midnight. There is only one way of finding out.”
She was afraid to ask but steeled herself to do so. “How?”
“There are two things we must do: check the registry of hamsters to find out where it came from and then we must allow Vlad to turn into a bat where we will follow him to discover his associates.”
“I didn’t know that there was a registry for hamsters.”
