misc.

Playing with Fire -NBR April Challenge

Geoffrey stripped down and turned on the new electric water heater. When he stepped under the stream, he relished in the hot drops and curling steam.

He groped around for his girlfriend's organic goat-milk soap. Slick with moisture, it slipped out of his hand and landed somewhere below in the clouded abyss of the tub.

He made a second voyage for another wash item when his fingers landed on the razor.

His girlfriend's. He held the pastel blue device in his hand with its pricey gel grip and lotioned, swiveling blade and pressed it to his arm, curious.

"That's a girl's razor," came a voice from outside the glass shower door, "although you probably already knew that. Christ, I'm so boring."

"Jesus! You scared me."

"Not Jesus. Jikininki."

The glass door slid open. Jikininki's face appeared from behind the frosted panes. His stringy black hair and beard fell limp over his bony, hairless chest. Jikininki lifted his leg over the lip of the porcelain tub and stepped in. Geoffrey moved over to make room.

"Now? Seriously?"

"I feel like such an asshole, but yeah, it's now. I'm sorry. I've never had good timing."

Geoffrey clutched the razor in his hand and despite the scalding water and cloud of steam circling the man and the demon, he still shivered.

"Let's go, buddy. Eternity goes by quicker than you think."

"Not so fast, Jikininki, you worthless gas," came a low, grainy voice from the bedroom. Jikininki and Geoffrey looked over the top of the glass door to find Agares, old, enormous, and stinking of sulfur, riding his prehistoric crocodile into the bathroom. "Geoffrey is settling with me today."

"No, I've been wrong before, but not today, Agares. Geoffrey is mine."

Agares hobbled to the shower where he slid the door open and stepped in.

The huge demon hunched over the two others. "Since we can't both leave here with this mangled meat-pack, what do you say to a game, Jikininki?"

"I'm terrible at games."

"Do you know the rules for Jan Ken Po?"

Geoffrey's gaze volleyed between the two demons.

"I never win Jan Ken Po."

Agares' black eyes whirled. "Then let's begin, chest cheese. Or are you too whippet-willed to play?"

"I'm so bad at this," Jikininki tentatively held his fist out. Agares followed suit.

Geoffrey flinched as their battle began.

"Jan!" Agares thundered from his blackened throat. The lights flickered and the heat of the steam streaked around their heads like the whirling souls of the damned. The two demons raised their clenched fists to the fevered air and brought the mallets down to the hot middle of their opened palms.

"Ken!" Agares continued, the cracking sounds of hellfire slipping from under the bathroom door as the inglorious dead shrieked around them.

"Po!"

Geoffrey tentatively cracked an eye open to see flat handed Agares staring in startled defeat at the cutting attack of Jikininki.

"I won," Jikininki gasped in surprise, "I actually won!"

"For now, Jikininki, you lucky son-of-a-turkey." Agares stepped from the shower, his hair wet and sticking to the furrows in his ancient face. He mounted his crocodile and left in a cloud of smoke.

Smoke?

"How do I die, Jikininki?"Geoffrey asked, the razor still clutched in his hand, the forgotten soap barely inches from his foot, and the jerry-rigged heating device crackling above his head.

"You forgot to replace your smoke detector batteries. You burn alive in about twelve minutes. Until then, I, ugh, I hate this part."

Baring his row of jagged teeth, Jikininki apologetically dismembered Geoffrey.