Anastasia Ascending
an excerpt

Excerpt from chapter two of Anastasia Ascending. Anastasia has just been laid off, and she's slinking away from work for the last time dressed as a witch and carrying a Tupperware full of uneaten caramel squares. In the excerpt below, we meet her nemesis, who ultimately brings Anastasia to the end. Or the beginning. Whichever way you want to see it.

There’s something else we need to know about Anastasia’s morning. It wasn’t all caramel square making, witch costuming glee. No, Anastasia had a run in with Darinoc. Which, if you knew their history, would make you shudder to your very core.

Darinoc, or, Disgusting Animal Residing in Nether-region of Car, is the tenacious, overweight mouse that has made his home inside Anastasia’s 1999 Volkswagen Jetta. How Darinoc found his way in there, and how he decided that living amongst Anastasia’s vast collection of empty candy wrappers and random petrified French fries is unclear. What is clear is that he has a knack for running across Anastasia’s lap while she’s doing eighty on the freeway, sending her into a complete panic and causing her to scream “holy shit” more than anyone in the history of time.

The most difficult part of this rollercoaster relationship, is that once Anastasia white knuckles it off the freeway and stops, Darinoc is nowhere to be found. She’s even taken to opening every door and leaving the car sitting that way for several hours in hopes of extricating him. And though the few short hours after attempting to rid the car of vermin usually prove to be peaceful, it never fails that the same sort of incident is repeated the following day.

This morning however, was a bit different. After digging through her purse for twenty minutes looking for her glasses, Anastasia concluded they must have slid out of her bag when she was driving home the night before. She snuck down to her car in her pajamas, ran into the GQ-esque guy that lives above her as he was heading out for a run, turned several interesting shades of red and noticed the moon walking frogs on her pajamas were even looking for a place to hide, and finally made it to her car to begin rooting around the floor of the passengers seat. Finding nothing but a crumpled bag from Starbucks and some loose change, she stuck her hand under the seat.

And that’s when things went pear shaped.

Instead of feeling the stiff frame of her glasses, she felt a soft, warm, fuzzy string. That wiggled.

Anastasia jumped, conked her head on the doorframe, and began jumping up and down feverishly repeating, “ew, ew, ew,” over and over. A few dry heaves later, she raced back up to her apartment on the verge of hysterics, and after washing her hands about seventeen times, she got an idea. That’s it, she thought, still waving her hands around in revolt, I’m taking care of this once and for all.

She stormed into her bedroom and found Edgar, her twenty-pound tabby, asleep on her bed. Edgar winced at the light as she tried to rustle him from his slumber. “C’mon, bumpy,” she said confidently. “You have a job to do.”

It should be noted that it wasn’t one of Anastasia’s more brilliant moments. Especially since Edgar mouse hunting skills were less than polished since his daily routine was sleeping and chewing on plastic bags. In her fervor, she reasoned that he was, after all, a cat, and according to every comic strip and cartoon she’d ever seen, it was simply a matter of his instincts kicking in.

However, one tiny detail that Anastasia overlooked was that Edgar, being a fairly intelligent cat, had come to associate her 1999 Volkswagen Jetta with tumultuous trips to the vet where the scary guy in the long white coat sticks his fingers in unwanted places. She ignored Edgar digging his claws into her for dear life on the way back down to the car, figuring once he caught whiff of Darinoc, he’d turn his passionate reaction toward him.

Of course, that didn’t happen. When Anastasia set Edgar on the passengers seat, he began howling like a banshee and proceeded to jump into the backseat, pee straight up into the air and soak the dashboard with urine, and claw the back of the drivers seat until it looked like shredded lettuce. Then her problem wasn’t so much that her had a mouse in her car, it was that now she had a cat in full on ape-shit mode that may very well maim her to death when she tried to remove him.

Needless to say, Darinoc was still residing somewhere in the nether-region of the 1999 Volkswagen Jetta, and Edgar, after destroying the sleeves of Anastasia’s pajamas while she crammed him into the cat carrier, was seriously considering coughing up a hairball on her favorite suede skirt.

Warily, Anastasia stops at the trunk of her car, taking a moment to try and tap into the universe for some calming rhythms. The ride to work had been uneventful, but she couldn’t help but feel that the Edgar incident may have provoked some kind of dormant mouse rage in Darinoc, and it was only a matter of time before he snapped. Don’t be a spaz, she tells herself, it’s just a mouse. I’m nine hundred times his size. And who has ever been attacked by a mouse? It just doesn’t happen. Surely that’s something that would have made the national news if it were a serious threat.

She unlocks her car and takes a deep breath. Though the looming fear of being assaulted by portly vermin was palpable, there were certainly more weighty issues to worry about. Finding a fulfilling job, hoping that the $7834.22 check would be enough to carry her through until finding said fulfilling job. Praying that Ramona wouldn’t divulge the “hiding in the bathroom” situation to the cute guy in hopes of winning him over.

With determination, Anastasia opens the driver’s side door and tosses the Tupperware over the console onto the passengers seat. She gathers up the velvety flows of her dress and cautiously climbs into the car. You see, she thinks, everything’s completely normal. Aside from the shredded upholstery and nauseating cat pee smell, everything’s absolutely fine.

And everything was absolutely fine. That is, until she pulled onto Denny Way. A feeling of calm had just begun to wash over her, and she even allowed herself to relish a little in the thought of not having to get up for work the next morning. She began planning her evening, which included stopping at Pasta & Co. to indulge in some walnut and Gorgonzola tortellini, stopping at Trader Joes for a bottle of wine, sinking into her sofa and stuffing her face while watching her Firefly DVDs. She was just arriving at the idea to fit a nice sudsy bath in there somewhere as well, when she felt something graze her ankle.

A wave of panic rushed over her and her whole body snapped to attention. For a moment she wondered if it might have just been part of her velvety skirt that she felt, but when she felt the same sensation on the other ankle, she knew it was more than simply the wafting of fabric. But, before she could even take a breath to launch into a frightened tirade of expletives, she felt tiny prickling claws on her left shin. Anastasia screamed and began flailing her legs around madly. With her foot off the gas, her car slowed down, provoking rage in her fellow rush hour drivers. Horns began blaring on all sides, and she finally looked up to see she was drifting into the right lane. She jerked the wheel back to center while she smacked at her shin, but the tiny prickling claws had moved up and were now digging into her thigh. Anastasia whaled and her frame went rigid. Her feet slammed into the floor, but her right foot landed smack on the gas peddle. Suddenly her car jerked and began picking up speed. “Get off, get off, get off!” she screamed, flailing around and hitting her thigh.

Then, with a cacophony of horns, the screeching of tires and a piercing scream, Anastasia observed the following: a curb, a tree, a deafening crash, an brief image of Brian Chumley, the first boy she ever kissed in seventh grade who she soon after dubbed "the human vacuum cleaner", the pungent smell of sloppy Joes, another strange image of the sales girl at the Limited laughing at her when she asked for a size 6, the sound of the theme song to the short lived 80’s television show The Greatest American Hero, another deafening crash and then total blackness.