MY OWN PERSONAL SVETLANA/Challenge #2/Group 1/Suspense

Genre: Suspense
Location: Pet Store
Object: Trash Can

My Own Personal Svetlana

Synopsis: A man discovers that love can be more dangerous than he ever imagined.

 
As the last of the chloroform cleared from my system, I opened my eyes. My head was pounding. I blinked a few times and the sights and sounds – and smells – of the room hit me hard. My stomach rolled over a little, and I had to concentrate hard not to vomit. The smell of animal by-products – musk, feces, urine – hammered me relentlessly. I realized I was in the back of the pet shop, after closing, judging from the dark outside the frosted window pane. I looked around for Marty, but I couldn’t see him, and turning my head made the whole room spin.
I heard her before I saw her.

“Dahling,” she said in her thick, creamy Russian accent. “You’re avake.”

She stepped in front of me, and suddenly, the smell of her completely wiped away all the other odors in the room. God, she smelled good. I looked at her gorgeous face, and she smiled at me.

“You look so pale.Vould you like some vater?”

The idea of swallowing anything made my stomach curl up and hide behind my liver, shaking like a scared little girl. Future tip - never use chloroform on an empty stomach.

How did it ever come to this? I asked myself, looking into her heavenly face as she leveled the gun at me.

All I wanted was a dog.


I was on Morgan Avenue when I realized I was almost skipping. I was happy. I wasn’t putting on a brave face, as my sister-in-law, Glynnis, had suggested. I was genuinely, sincerely happy for the first time in four years. It was two weeks since my fiancée, Crazy Darla, had moved out of the apartment we’d shared for the past four years. Darla realized I was never going to set a wedding date, so she issued an ultimatum. Set a date, or she’d move back to her sister’s in Denver. What could I do? I bought her a first-class plane ticket to Denver.

Darla didn’t seem crazy at first. That happened slowly after the first six months. I should have left the minute I spotted it. But I’m an optimist. Any day, I kept telling myself, my crazy fiancée would leave, and my girlfriend would return. God, I loved my girlfriend. My fiancée? Not so much.

I woke up the next morning happy. The feeling was so alien to me, I took an Advil. Before my feet hit the floor, my phone was ringing. Darla had called Glynnis from the plane, saying she’d finally left me. By the time Darla had landed in Denver, thanks to Radio-Free Glynnis, my entire family and most of our close friends already knew. I don’t blame Darla. What better way to pass on the information than telling the nosiest buttinski in the contiguous United States.

I enjoyed my freedom that first week. I tolerated the pity calls from Glynnis. Yes, breaking up was the only answer. No, I needed neither a support group nor a casserole. Yes, I promised I would do nothing rash. Yes, I would put the past behind me, get out there and start dating again.

Then, out of the blue, and totally by accident, Glynnis had a brilliant idea.

“Maybe you should get a dog,” she sniffled.

I’d wanted a dog for years, but Darla was allergic. I put on my shoes, grabbed my keys and headed for the pet shop down Morgan Avenue, nearly skipping.

There, in Marty’s Pets and Supplies, I fell in love, twice, first with the dog, then with the girl. Her name was Svetlana. (The girl, not the dog.) She was from Russia, she said. (The dog said very little, but stuck his nose in my crotch, which I suppose is a kind of statement.) I took both Svetlana and the dog – now named Henry - home that very day.


I should have guessed she was trouble the minute she opened her mouth and that caramel accent came pouring out. I should have known that guys like me are not destined to live happily ever after with our Svetlanas. Truth is, guys like me don’t get Svetlanas. We get Crazy Darlas, or some permutation thereof. Nothing exciting happens to us that doesn’t end badly.

By the time I realized Svetlana was a major player in the Russian mob, and that Marty had gotten himself in trouble with her loan sharks, I’d already seen too much. Marty, it seems, had agreed to placate the loan sharks by consigning the pet store over to them. They were running drugs to the dealers from the back. I stepped in it deep when I went to dispose of an empty soda bottle, and picked the wrong trash can. I picked the trash can with the bags of uncut heroine in it. Had I chosen to recycle that bottle, things might have turned out very differently.

As I sat tied to that chair, my head bursting at the temples, I thought about Darla. At the moment, Darla didn’t seem that crazy. I probably should have just married her. Then I’d be sitting on a couch, planning a wedding, instead of…. At that moment, I leaned as far forward as I could and vomited on the floor.

It wasn’t just the chloroform or the imminent danger. Even on the precipice of my certain death, the idea of marrying Darla made me physically ill. If this past month with Svetlana was to be my last, I wouldn’t have spent it any other way.

Maybe other guys like me went dogless and married to the Crazy Darlas of the world. But for one short month, at the end of my life, I was the kind of guy locked in the erotic, leggy embrace of my own personal Svetlana. As I stared into the snub-nose .38 and watched the cylinder slowly turn, I smiled.

“Take care of Henry,” I told her, as I heard the unmistakable click of the cylinder falling into place behind the gun barrel.