Fear Nothing

Well, I'm telling you, this one was more than just mean. This laugh was the coldest sound I've ever heard, the coldest and the ugliest - and evil.”
        “I'm still with you,” I assured her.
        Instead of returning to her chair from the door, she moved to the kitchen sink. Every square inch of glass in the windows above the sink was covered by the curtains, but she plucked at those panels of yellow fabric to make doubly sure we were fully screened from spying eyes.
        Turning to stare at the table as though the monkey sat there even now, Angela said, “I got the broom, figuring I'd shoo the thing onto the floor and then toward the door. I mean, I didn't take a whack at it or anything, just brushed at it. You know?”
        “Sure.”
        “But it wasn't intimidated,” she said. “It exploded with rage. Threw down the half-eaten tangerine and grabbed the broom and tried to pull it away from me. When I wouldn't let go, it started to climb the broom straight toward my hands.”
        “Jesus.”
        “Nimble as anything. So fast . Teeth bared and screeching, spitting, coming straight at me, so I let go of the broom, and the monkey fell to the floor with it, and I backed up until I bumped into the refrigerator.”
        She bumped into the refrigerator again. The muffled clink of bottles came from the shelves within.
        “It was on the floor, right in front of me. It knocked the broom aside. Chris, it was so furious . Fury out of proportion to anything that had happened. I hadn't hurt it, hadn't even touched it with the broom, but it wasn't going to take any crap from me.”
        “You said rhesus are basically peaceable.”
        “Not this one. Lips skinned back from its teeth, screeching, running at me and then back and then at me again, hopping up and down, tearing at the air, glaring at me so hatefully, pounding the floor with its fists…”
        Both of her sweater sleeves had partly unrolled, and she drew her hands into them, out of sight. This memory monkey was so vivid that apparently she half expected it to fling itself at her right here, right now, and bite off the tips of her fingers.
        “It was like a troll,” she said, “a gremlin, some wicked thing out of a storybook. Those dark-yellow eyes.”
        I could almost see them myself Smoldering.
        “And then suddenly, it leaps up the cabinets, onto the counter near me, all a wink. It's right there ” - she pointed - “beside the refrigerator, inches from me, at eye level when I turn my head. It hisses at me, a mean hiss, and its breath smells like tangerines. That's how close we are. I knew-”
        She interrupted herself to listen to the house again. She turned her head to the left to look toward the open door to the unlighted dining room.
        Her paranoia was contagious. And because of what had happened to me since sundown, I was vulnerable to the infection.
        Tensing in my chair, I cocked my head to allow any sinister sound to fall into the upturned cup of my ear.
        The three rings of reflected light shimmered soundlessly on the ceiling. The curtains hung silently at the windows.
        After a while Angela said, “Its breath smelled like tangerines. It hissed and hissed. I knew it could kill me if it wanted, kill me somehow, even though it was only a monkey and hardly a fourth my weight. When it had been on the floor, maybe I could have drop-kicked the little son of a bitch, but now it was right in my face.”
        I had no difficulty imagining how frightened she had been. A seagull, protecting its nest on a seaside bluff, diving repeatedly out of the night sky with angry shrieks and a hard burrrr of wings, pecking at your head and snaring strands of hair, is a fraction the weight of the monkey that she'd described but nonetheless terrifying.
        “I considered running for the open door,” she said, “but I was afraid I would make it angrier. So I froze here. My back against the refrigerator. Eye to eye with the hateful thing. After a while, when it was sure I was intimidated, it jumped off the counter, shot across the kitchen, pushed the back door shut, climbed quick onto the table again, and picked up the unfinished tangerine.”
        After all, I poured another shot of apricot brandy for myself after all.
        “So I reached for the handle of this drawer here beside the fridge,” she continued. “There's a tray of knives in it.”
        Keeping her