Esquire Quagmire

By Dalia Grigorescu

Joe Enza was a practical optimist. Not in the way other people defined the term as they met with life coaches and plastered their walls with motivational posters. No, he was truly practical. He made his clients look at the proverbial glass as not half empty or even half full, but 100 percent full. Full of poison. And then, they could take a step back and feel good, because, after all, they didn’t drink it.

“You still wish your spouse honored her wedding vows, till death do us part? She could have! But then you wouldn’t be here, getting half of your bonds and your entire Hot Wheels collection back. And I wouldn’t either, because I do divorces, not wills and stuff.”

That always put things into perspective really quick. It was why Joe Enza, Esq., prided himself on closing divorce cases fast and with high client satisfaction. That success allowed him to daringly sport his peculiar physique, marked foremost by long hair flanking his expanding bald spot, without worry. Because when you’re successful, you’re not weird. You’re eccentric. And when a pretty girl says she loves your looks and wants to marry you, well, you just won the lottery.

For Joe, that pretty girl was Estella. After a long string of incompetent assistants, she was the first to help rather than impede his practice. Long story short, he thought she was his other half and stuff.

How foolish, he thought, sitting alone in their mountain cabin. How foolish to believe that marriage was for him. That he should leave his practice and start a peaceful life with his new wife away from it all, in a secluded cabin. That Estella could be trusted to be loyal. Or to find an actual peaceful and secluded cabin.

“So stupid,” he said to the moose head staring at him from high on the wall. At least the hunting lodge next door had quieted down, and the practice shots had stopped for the day.

Then he heard it. The irritating scratching coming from… where? Was it in the attic? The walls? He craved companionship, given how fast Estella had decided to make her exit and stuff, but not the rodent kind.

He went to sleep with the gnawing sound in his ears and woke up with it still there. Luckily, the hunting lodge had someone perfect to take care of his problem: a young man named Jamie, who said he could get any creature, anywhere. He probably slept with a knife under his pillow and wore camouflage pajamas.

“Oh, yeah,” Jamie said, tapping on the walls. “Ooh, yeaah…”

It was unsettling to watch the guy get so much enjoyment out of inspecting the walls and stuff. So Joe cut it short.

“Listen,” he said, “I have to handle a divorce—my own as it is—so I’ll be gone for a few. Can you take care of this vermin? Just… kill it and stuff?”

“Kill and stuff?” Jamie repeated, thrill in his voice.

“Yes, kill and stuff.”

“Suuure! My pleasure!”

Unfortunately for Joe, his wife had picked up the tricks of the trade during her time as an assistant, and the divorce proved to be anything but quick. She fought him tooth and nail, or rather condo and bank account, and left him only with his car and the newly acquired cabin. The rat-infested cabin. Now that he thought about it, she should have kept it. It would have been fitting. He could see now that she wasn’t that pretty after all, with her sharp nose, beady eyes, and stuff. Why, she looked like a rat herself. And rats were bad luck for Joe. The worst of luck.

But like all things that had tried to kill Joe over the years, his divorce finally came to an end. Took three months, but it was final, and he could pick up the pieces of his life. Had to figure out what to do about the cabin, but for now it was his only abode. Maybe he would keep it. It was away from the mad world, and he could learn to put up with a few gunshots from hunters here and there. They were nice, wholesome people, those hunters. Even that kid, Jamie. A little odd, but how nice of him to come help a stranger and ask for nothing in return. Yes, Joe thought on the drive back, he could learn to enjoy that beautiful cabin. It would be his sanctuary and stuff.

He arrived just after nightfall. An owl was hooting in the dark.

“I don’t give a hoot about you.” Joe walked to his front door, chuckling at his great sense of humor.

He stopped in the doorway and listened intently: no scratching. Relieved, he dropped his bag on the floor, closed the door, and stumbled his way to the couch. He fumbled around the lamp on the side table, feeling for the switch. He clicked it on and dropped onto the couch with a contented sigh.

“Finally, some well-deserved relaxa—What the hell?”

The moose head stared down from high on the wall, and with him were a pair of rats clinging to the wall in oddly still poses. Joe flinched and scooted to the other end of the couch. But two more rats were frozen on the wall to the right of him, so he scooted back, and—holy jurisprudence—three more rats on the left. Joe’s shrill scream disturbed the quiet night as he noticed the largest verminous specimen right next to him on the table, stuck in a fighting stance, menacingly reaching out with its clawed front paws.

He cursed Estella out loud, convinced that somehow this was her doing, the ugly, lying rat that she was. But then a certain exchange echoed in his mind, and he realized that it was all his fault.

“Kill and stuff?” Jamie had asked.

And Joe Enza, Esq., had confirmed: “Kill and stuff.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dalia Grigorescu hails from the asphalt paradise of Bucharest, Romania, but has traded it for green lush Pennsylvania, where she lives now with her husband and three children. She enjoys writing short stories that are humorous and sometimes mysterious, and dreams of publishing a historical novel set in Romania’s 1950’s.

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