The Apocalypse Club by Craig McLay

all.” Extended pause. “Yes, but it has been two days now and the temperature outside is very cold and now it is so cold inside that we are finding our pipes have frozen, too.” Pause. “Yes, your brother-in-law is a most excellent electrician, but I believe he has connected the wrong things and gave himself something of a shock.” Pause. “No, he is, I believe, okay. He is sitting on the kitchen floor and my wife is giving him tea. It is iced tea, but then, everything that we have right now is iced, if you will pardon my saying, sir.”
    Violet hated listening to these conversations. Her father always brought her along because the skinny men who loitered around the phone were less likely to hassle him to get off the phone when she was there. She hated her father’s cowardice and the supplicating tone of voice he always used. She hated the rathole apartment. She hated the neighbourhood. She hated her parents for dragging her away from her warm and sunny home where they had everything to this frozen wasteland where they had nothing.
    But above all, she hated Mr. Stavros. He was fat and ugly and smelled like fish. He yelled at her parents, calling them lazy and ungrateful and stupid and worse. He barged into their apartment whenever he felt like it and never showed up when they needed something fixed. He would take out wads of cash from his pocket and wave them at her father.
    “You see this?” he would yell. “This is what comes from hard work, you lazy
skoulikia
! Any more complaints and I will report you!”
    Near the end of their first winter, Violet’s father contracted viral pneumonia and couldn’t go to work for almost a month. He was fired by the hotel and too weak to look for another job. Her mother picked up a night job in a dry cleaners’, but it wasn’t enough. When they weren’t able to cover the rent, Mr. Stavros showed up immediately, thumping down the stairs like an angry bull. Her mother was at work. Her father was lying on the futon that doubled as the family bed. His breathing was raspy and his colour the same as the mildewed ceiling.
    “Look at you!” Stavros bellowed. “Lazy pig! Lounging around when you should be out working! I am kicking you all out today! If this furniture is still here in two hours then it is mine!”
    Stavros moved to grab her father on the couch, but Violet positioned herself in between. He pushed her aside with a fat and sweaty hand to the face and bent over to grab her father by the neck, shaking him violently.
    “Do you hear me,
malaka
?” he yelled. “Out of my house! I do not care if you are pretending to be sick to cheat your employer! Today you are all gone!”
    Violet picked herself up off the floor and looked at the small, fat man she hated. The rage she had been feeling was, strangely, gone. Something about her had changed, though. Her calm was so unnatural that Stavros actually stopped assaulting her father for a moment and looked at her.
    “What about you, little
skyla
?” he spat. “Think you are going to call the police? I think you are not!”
    Violet shook her head. It felt like there was a silent cyclone spinning in her brain, but it was one that she had absolute control over.
    “No,” she said, with a voice much larger than her own. “I think I am going to kill you.”
    Stavros started laughing. He laughed until he tasted the blood running from his nose. Gushing, in fact. He let go of Violet’s father and staggered backward, reaching up with a shaking hand to try and stop the flow, but the blood only backed up and poured out of his mouth instead. He made a sound that was half gag and half scream before slipping on the wet floor and falling on his back. He was dead even before his head hit the bottom stair.
    The autopsy would later show that every vein and artery in his head had more or less exploded at the same time. He had died of what the coroner described as the largest cerebral hemorrhage ever recorded. Stavros did have high blood