She walked briskly to the clinic door, opened it, and glanced briefly at Nurse Buttkiss, who gave her a sweet look. It was a once-over, shiver-me-timbers and knock me over the head with a sloth on steroids moment. Natasha was a Harlequin girl. Had to go through hell before she could get her grubby paws on the family jewels, meaning, secret Swiss bank accounts.
Then the Nurse said, “Go right and you can’t go wrong.”
During her short walk, her whole life had flashed before her.
Even though only twenty, she had been a child spy progeny named Metropolis, able to sneak about and eavesdrop on everyone and then sell their secrets to the highest bidder. It was a gift she had. Her foster parents were also spies who had found her frozen in a cave while spelunking, had thought she was a bargain: free mechanical domestic slavery.
They were a spy family with each member a double, triple and quadruple agent. There were secret cameras, listening devices, and other surveillance devices installed, un-installed and re-installed by each family member. During infancy, parents had bugged their children’s diapers extracting information during the changing of it. That’s the spy business: a dirty business at best.
And it wasn’t going to change. Not anytime soon. She was lost in a cruel world of incessant deception where the gap between appearance and reality incessantly haunted her mind. She had to be present now for the sake of her un-dead hamster. Vlad needed her. Who knows what country he would invade next?
Natasha was now back in the examination room opposite the doctor and both looked down into the cage where the un-dead hamster was resting ready to begin his reign of terror against gerbils. Wanting to be alone with her paramour, Natasha had quietly but firmly closed the door. The click of the door handle echoed in the still room as they waited for the portentous unfolding of the next act.
They had continued where they had left off.
“If you did not make that little cape and dinner jacket then it must…” the doctor stopped, horrified.
“Yes, yes,” Natasha cried out, “speak, what is it!”
“Be the very clothing the hamster wore when it was not undead.”
“You mean alive?”
“Yes.”
“Stop speaking in riddles,” she admonished him. Oh, she thought, if only I could meet a man for whom existence is not riddled with riddles.
Gazing upon the un-dead hamster, they could feel the pulsating cosmic significance of good Swiss cheese gone bad or bad Swiss cheese gone good. It was crazy. Love is crazy, and they were in love with Swiss cheese, with the very riddle of existence. Is that what the undead hamster is telling them?
They looked into each other’s eyes and saw Swiss cheese. But not only. The Swiss Cheese had bat wings!
That broke the spell.
“There is a great mystery here, one so horrid and terrible that I can scarcely believe it,” exclaimed the vet.
