"Hey, Carmen?"

Carmen strode into the living room with a demister in her hand and a frown on her face. "What?" she demanded.

Aaliyah was standing with her mud-crusted boots on their clean carpet, still a little damp from the rain. She glanced half-apologetically down at the small puddle of dirt she was standing in. "Sorry about the carpet," she lied.

Dismissing her apology with a weary wave of the hand, Carmen replied, "Don't worry. Judy got blood on the carpet last night, so I'll let this slide."

She pulled a face. "Why was Judy bleeding on the carpet last night?"

"Oh, no, no, it wasn't hers. It was just some guy's she brought home."

Aaliyah looked somewhere between surprised and impressed. "A guy? Anyone we know? What was his name?"

"She just kept referring to him as 'The Infernal Bridegroom'."

"Huh." She scratched the back of her neck. "Is he from our building?"

"Actually I think it's a reference to the character from Une Saison en Enfer, the extended poem by French poet Arthur Rimbaud."

Aaliyah hummed. "Classy," she approved.

Carmen looked skeptical.

"Anyway," said Aaliyah hurriedly, "I need you to help me."

"Well I can't." She held up her demister. "I'm doing things."

"No but this is really important," Aaliyah insisted, dropping her bag and shrugging her way out of her jacket.

Carmen glared at the bag as if she was trying to destroy it with the power of telecombustion, but instead she said, "No. I've had a long day. I'm busy."

She spread her arms. "Why are you being like this? This is important!"

"I'm just wondering why you think you're more important than my asparagus aethiopicus."

Aaliyah pulled a face. "You're blowing me off for an asparagus?"

"An asparagus aethiopicus," she corrected.

"I mean, are we having it for dinner, because I think I ordered Chinese?"

Carmen looked scandalised. "You can't eat my asparagus aethiopicus! It's a houseplant, not a food!"

"Then why are you spending so much time over it?" She folded her arms. "I personally believe that you shouldn't spend over ten minutes working on anything you can't eat."

"That's stupid advice," Carmen argued. "Anyway, even you don't follow it. Remember when you spent two hours at my aunts' wedding trying to flirt with my cousin," she scoffed.

Aaliyah smirked.

Carmen screamed.

"Anyway, anyway," Aaliyah said, waving a hand impatiently, "you need to help me."

"Help you to do what? Eat my asparagus aethiopicus?"

"I swear to god you're supposed to eat those."

"I think you're thinking of the common or garden asparagus officinalis."

"I'm fairly sure that I'm never thinking of the common or garden asparagus officinalis."

Carmen folded her arms neatly, which was tricky because of the demister. "Then what's the problem? What did you do this time, molest another one of my cousins?"

"Hey, I didn't know you had more?" Aaliyah perked up hopefully.

"Ew."

She looked slightly put out by this. "Carmen. Listen to me. I've got a problem."

"My therapist agrees."

She paused. "Wait, you tell your therapist about me?"

"Frequently," Carmen muttered.

Aaliyah smiled. "Aw!" Then she plastered her serious face back on. "Carmen, you've got to help me. I'm in trouble."

"With Jesus?"

"No." She paused. "Well, yes. But also more pressingly with the Estonian mafia."

At this point Carmen didn't even look surprised. She was constantly at her peak level of stress, so at this point she was comparatively unflappable.

"Does Estonia even have a mafia?" Carmen asked.

"Yes. Of course they have a mafia, why wouldn't they have a mafia?"

"Well, they're just so...Estonian," she admitted. "Their principal export is telephones."

Aaliyah said, "Well maybe their principal non-telephone export is crystal meth!"

"Actually it's refined petroleum."

"Why would that be something you know and remember?"

Carmen shrugged.

Aaliyah went on, "Anyway, you know the mirror in the bathroom? It wasn't there this morning, where did you put it?"

"I had to take it down. I didn't like how when I floss, Judy creeps into view behind my reflection. It's very eerie and off-putting."

"Where did you put it?" she demanded, seizing Carmen by the forearms.

Carmen sprayed her neatly in the face with the demister, causing Aaliyah to stumble back and release her grip. "I don't know! I just put it somewhere in your room."

"My room?" She threw up her hands. "Great, now it's lost forever."

"Why do you need it anyway?" asked Carmen. "Don't you just use your phone screen as a mirror like a painted woman?"

Taking a second to recover from Carmen's use of 'painted woman', Aaliyah said, "I kept all my money strapped to the back of that mirror!"

"Why don't you just use a bank?"

"And trust Big Pharma with my hard-earned money?" she scoffed.

"I feel like you don't know what that is."

Aaliyah didn't have time to be offended. "This big Estonian dude just accosted me in the hallway right now, demanding like, a thousand pounds!"

Carmen cocked her head. "Are you sure that wasn't our landlord, Hendrik? He's Estonian."

"No, I'm fairly sure it was a Mafioso."

They were interrupted by three sharp knocks on the door. Their heads snapped towards the doorway, and they quickly shared a horrified glance.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" gasped Carmen.

"Hsss," hissed Judy from the bookcase on which she was perched.

"Sorry," she apologised hastily, then she said to Aaliyah. "Is that him?"

A muffled voice through the door called out, "Girls? Girls! Let me in or I'll break down the door!"

Aaliyah jabbed a thumb in the direction of the door. "Mafioso, see?"

"Technically I do not, since there's a door, but holy hell that's terrifying!"

"Don't worry," she said, seizing a lamp. "I've got this."

Aaliyah paced slowly towards the door, clutching the lamp tightly, its wire and plug trailing on the carpet. Her hands were sweaty as they curled around the doorknob. Carmen held her demister out like a weapon, her finger on the trigger, poised to spray some mean tap water. Slowly Aaliyah turned the doorknob, bracing her beating heart and pulling the door open.

"Girls," said the tall, bald, white man in the doorway in a thick Estonian accent. "I need the money.

"Eat my asparagus aethiopicus!" screamed Aaliyah, swinging the lampshade round to hit him square in the face.

"Please don't," requested Carmen primly. "It's a houseplant, not a -"

"DIE!" She kicked him repeatedly in the shin.

The Estonian stumbled back into the hallway, howling with pain.

"This is assault!" he screamed. "This is assault, I'm evicting you both!"

Aaliyah froze, her lamp in mid-swing. "Wait, what?"

The Estonian doubled over in pain, his large hands shielding his red face. "I'm evicting you!" he repeated, his voice cracking with pain.

Judy was suspended like a gargoyle, cloaked by shadows.

"Wait," Aaliyah said slowly, "Are you Hendrik? Our landowner?"

"Landlord," he winced, touching his bruised face. "But not for long."

She let her lamp-arm go limp, hanging by her side. Her posture suddenly changed from confused to affronted. "Hey man, don't you think that's a bit harsh?"

"You attacked me with a lamp, screaming 'die'."

"Yeah," she said gradually. "Which you didn't actually do, which is the important thing."

"No. No it is not."

"That's what I was saying," called Carmen from the background. "There are lots of things worse than death such as abandonment, torture, mutilation, motherhood, calculus - both the maths, and the dental condition - and mental impairment, blindness... I could go on."

"Don't," requested Aaliyah.

The Estonian stared at Carmen in bewilderment. "You think hardened dental plaque is worse than death?"

"Yes." She did not elaborate.

"Look," Aaliyah told the Estonian. "You can't kick us out, Carmen started a small ecosystem in her bedroom, and also you're probably not going to want my mattress back."

"This is assault!" the Estonian cried, trying his best to ignore the mattress remark. "And you haven't paid your rent in months. I am going to have to ask you to vacate in a week!"

"A week!" she cried. "That's unscrupulous! That's unethical! That's a human rights violation."

"You broke your contract. Lawful eviction is not a human rights violation."

She opened and closed her mouth, failing to find a rebuttal. Instead, Aaliyah did what she usually did in stressful situations: threatened necromancy.

"If you go through with this," she threatened, "I am going to have to be forced to exact my murderous revenge."

"That's a human rights violation," pointed out the Estonian.

"No," she protested. "All women are blessed with a powerful inane magic by the womb of mother earth, and I'm going to use mine to fuck up your afternoon, sir."

"That's ridiculous."

Suddenly, a shadow shifted. Somewhere just behind Carmen, a vaguely human shape scuttled furiously on its hands and feet towards the door, scampering like a desert lizard.

The Estonian screamed and slammed the door shut. From behind it he cried, "What the hell was that?"

"An ungodly hell demon," said Aaliyah at the same time as Carmen said, "Judy."

Aaliyah flashed her a hurried look.

"I mean...the hell...thing," she amended awkwardly.

The Estonian cried from the other side of the door, "Mine metsa, deemon!"

The sound of his heavy, rapid footfall sprinting down the staircase thudded into a silence.

"What do you think that means?" asked Carmen, perking up.

"I think it means we're absolved from our rent," Aaliya replied.

Judy hissed.