Double Devils

Cooker for the devil

What a lovely day, perfect in every way!

That was what I thought when I opened the balcony of my house to let in the early morning cool breeze.

But instead, what greeted me was a grey mass of smog that entered directly into my lungs.

What the hell was happening? I immediately ran towards the devil's house and knocked on it. He opened it wearing just shorts and no shirt. He'd covered his nose and mouth with a cloth. It was clear that he'd been coughing spuriously. I went inside his house, which was entirely covered with the grey smog all over.

"What the hell are you doing? Making Powerpuff Girls?" I asked him.

"The kitchen...kit.." He said, pointing towards the kitchen, his voice muffled from the cloth.

I ran towards the kitchen and found the black remains of a charred vessel on the stove. The stove's flame was till burning.

"The knob doesn't work. The flame keeps burning." He said. I immediately turned off the gas valve.

I took a pair of tongs which was lying nearby and carefully removed the charred vessel; the remnants of a once glorious cooker; and threw it into the sink.

"Thanks. I had no idea what to do. Thanks for saving me." He said.

"I actually had no intention of saving you at all. I just didn't want to get bronchitis." I said.

Within five days of moving here, he had set the stove on fire. I had, eventually predicted it, but not within such a short while, to be honest.

I was only a little bit not surprised.

"So, truce, then?" He said, and casually extended his hands to shake with mine.

"Truce? What are you talking about?" I asked him, though I knew perfectly well what he was talking about. He was referring to our mutual 'door slamming sessions' that had been occurring since the troll incident (refer chapter 2 on how to make fool of a naive person-me). We'd purposely slam our front doors very loudly just to annoy the hell out of each other. Even though our neighbours threatened to cut off our water supply if we did it one more time, we'd continued to do it. I suppose he too had discovered the unparalleled joy of slamming the door to our heart's content without a care in the world.

"Truce, as in no more door slamming. No more ding dong ditching, and no more loud television watching at night." He said.

"You were the one who rung the bell several times yesterday? I thought it was one of the kids. How childish!" I exclaimed.

"No more childish than placing an array of cactus right on my doorstep." He said. I'd done that so he'd step on them and never rise again. But damn he'd been careful enough.

"Fine, fine. Truce, then." I said, and shook my hands with the neighbour from hell.

"Yay!" He exclaimed, in a fake voice.

"So what are you planning? When people like you call a truce, you have something evil planned." I said.

He was silent for a few minutes, probably thinking of a novel way to convey the probably ridiculous idea in his head. I regretted asking it in the first place.

"Will you be my cooker?" He asked me.

"What?!"

"I meant, will you cook for me? I don't understand why a person who cooks is called a cook. I mean, a person who talks is called a talker, a person who walks is called a walker. So why isn't a person who cooks called a cooker? " He said, deep in thought like a scientist working out some paradox.