Free Malus Domestica by S. A. Hunt Page B

behind a shelf, motionlessly waiting to snag any customers unfortunate enough to step into range of its throat-jaws.
    In the back of the store was an open area with booth seats and folding-chairs. Arcing over the heads of two dozen people and a small squad of children was a cone of light casting the opening sequence of horror classic Evil Dead on a projection screen.
    “Fish on that keto diet.” Joel put the pizza boxes on a booth table and squirted some sanitzer on his hands, wringing them.
    The kids immediately got up and came to the table, standing at his elbow quietly like hungry hounds. “He try to tell me it’s good and good for ya, but I see that look in his eye when I bring in these pizzas.”
    “What’s the keto diet?” asked Robin.
    “Zero carbs. None. Zero, zip, zilch.” Joel made that zip-it gesture across his face and started putting pizza on paper plates, handing them out. “He don’t hardly even eat fruit. He’s always been a fitness nut, but this year he’s goin balls to the wall. I don’t know how he does it.”
    He gave one to Robin and she slid into the booth, sitting against the wall. “What does he eat?” she asked, placing her camera against the wall to capture the table and its occupants.
    “Meat. Vegetables.” He wagged his hand. “Bacon all day erry day. He cobble together regular food outta irregular bullshit. And the man fry everything in coconut oil. I tell you, one time he talked me into comin down to his place, and he made pizza with this dough made outta pureed cauliflower.”
    “Was it good?”
    “As good goin down as it was comin up.”
    She made a face.
    Fish, his tiny girlfriend Marissa, and a big white biker-looking guy named Kenway came to sit with her in the booth. She helped them destroy the pizza and an army of craft beers while they ignored the movie and played a game of Cards Against Humanity.
    Kenway held up a black card in one tattooed hand. A riot of color and lines ran down his huge arms in sleeves. “We never did find blank, but along the way we sure learned a lot about blank.” His Sasquatch frame was crammed into a black T-shirt and he had a massive beard that made him look like a lumberjack having a mid-life crisis. A piercing in his eyebrow twinkled in the projector’s glow.
    Robin smirked and plucked two white cards— the tiniest shred of evidence that God is real, and tripping balls —from her hand, putting them face down on the table next to the others.
    Marissa’s cards won the round. “We never did find passable transvestites,” Kenway recited out loud, and a huge grin gleamed through the dark cloud of his beard. “But along the way we sure learned a lot about Grandma.”
    The table roared with laughter, and a couple of the people watching the movie glanced at them.
    As the evening progressed toward midnight, Robin became more and more glad that she’d agreed to come. Several dozen hands into a Halloween marathon, she looked up from her beer and realized that all the movie-watchers had disappeared. Michael Myers stared blankly out of the screen at a roomful of empty chairs.
    “I think it’s about time I head home,” said Kenway, and Marissa let him out. Robin was taken aback at how tall he was as he unfolded himself from the booth and stretched six feet of broad muscle.
    She polished off her beer. “Got work in the morning?”
    “…No, ahh—”
    Fish stiffened. Robin scrunched her brow at him in confusion.
    “I don’t really work,” Kenway said, jamming his fingers into his jeans pockets. “Well, I do—” He gestured with a big craggy hand. “—But it’s not really your usual nine-to-five.”
    Marissa smiled. “Kenny is Blackfield’s local artiste.”
    “Is that so?” Robin beamed. The smile felt alien and uncomfortable on her face even after laughing at the card game, and as usual it faded quickly. “What kind of art do you do?”
    “A little of this, a little of that.” The hulking man folded his arms. It should have