Drunk Cupid

 The evening the mosquito showed up, Tiffany whipped fresh cream with a whisk in a bowl her mother had made. 
"Ouch," Tiffany said. She waved at the tiny pinch on her neck and checked for open windows or doors. 
That night, while she was sleeping, the mosquito stabbed her eyelid. Tiffany woke to a red mass of hurt around her lashes. Doctor Lewis said, "Mosquitos aren't my specialty. Usually, they get a little slower as they eat. Not unlike the patrons at your cafe."
This one didn't. If anything, Tiffany's blood made the mosquito stronger, faster, and more ravenous. Tiffany grew welts on her ankles, knees, and back. She had a mosquito bite on her left armpit that made it almost impossible for her to keep her arm down at her side. 
As she devised ways to remove the pest, Tiffany got creative. All the wonder and excitement she'd employed to create the desserts at the Chambers Cafe poured into her mosquito death wish. Tiffany left canning jars half-full of apple cider vinegar with holes poked in the top set out on her kitchen table at night. Before she knew it, Tiffany had a mosquito bite in her gums above her front teeth. 
*
Tiffany rolled up newspaper and slashed, bought a small fly swatter, and swatted. She sprayed a poison concoction all over the ceiling. After that, the world's fastest and most elusive mosquito even got her once beneath the fingernail on her middle finger. 
Tiffany started drinking the night of the now-famous windstorm. "If I get drunk, you get drunk. Then we'll see who suffers," she said to the mosquito. She figured the mosquito would have a Tiffany cocktail. If Tiffany had only a little blood in her alcohol stream, the tiny devil might crash-land headfirst onto the floor. At the very least, a drunk-flying mosquito would be easier to catch.
Of course, Tiffany had almost never seen the mosquito. The tiny insect moved so fast that when Tiffany spoke to the offending bug, she addressed the corners in her rooms where the walls and ceilings met. "What's your pleasure?" she said before turning to survey the bottles from her pantry. 
The wind had already shaken some of the pistols from her gun tree. She could hear them hit the shingles and skitter down before launching off the gutters and collecting on the ground. Tiffany put on Frank Sinatra to sing love songs to the mosquito that would soon be dead.  
"I've got you under my skin," Tiffany sang, glass in hand, and smashed a dinner plate. 
Most nights, Tiffany ground oranges into pulp with the heel of her hand to squish them at the bottom of cocktail glasses. Tiffany poured Southern Comfort or even straight vodka onto these undulating foundations of orange guts, sipping and slurping her concoctions. The evening of the windstorm was no different. So when Tiffany began flinging glasses, books, coffee mugs, lamps, a box of crackers, and her toaster oven, the sweat from the exertion had her wiping at her face and neck to stop the tide of perspiration. The orange remnants mixed with her onslaught of sweat until the citrus sting closed her eyes to helpless slits as she scanned the house for the mosquito. 
"Day and night, you're always a part of me," Tiffany couldn't tell if the tears were from frustration or exhaustion or just the only hope her eyes could muster at flushing out the burning sensation of defeated oranges.
"I said to myself this affair never could go so well," she sobbed. 
Thud, thud, thud, the pistols bounced and skittered against her roof, raining down past the windows and the porch.
*
On the far reaches of the other side of town, Larry lugged a bag full of gold ingots. His back and Samantha's legs both bent with the expectation of being warped beyond repair. He took his hat off and tried to shield the dusty wind from his ears and eyes and mouth. The wind didn't care.
The wind, sneakier than an imaginary or invisible mosquito, came at Larry from every direction. When he could, he looked up to find himself in the map he'd been making inside his mind. In the distance stood the steeple of the Gun City Presbyterian Church. He could hear the windblown soaring gun fruit striking the bell in an irrational melody. 
Tiffany heard the sounds, too. Maybe it was their bing-bong cacophony that snapped her out of her destruction. She stopped long enough to scan the smashing and breaking her throwing arm had wrought. The cockapoo clock would never be the same. Her framed diploma on the wall wore a spiderweb of cracked glass. In her hand, Tiffany still held her lowball, empty except for the booze-sodden fruit. 
She knew her life had become a cartoon as she felt the mosquito bite inside her ear. She shoved her hair under a hat, braced herself against the storm as she struggled open the door, and walked outside to grab a gun fruit. 
Larry was sure he heard the shots. But unless a wind packet picked up the sound of Tiffany's blasting, there was no chance the cracks crossed the distance of town and the emptiness to reach Larry's ears. He swore to the sound until the day he died, his nostrils coated with toxic gold fumes that made his voice croak nasally as he said, "I'll never forget the sound of Tiffany changing the world."
Even if wind gusts toted bullet sounds like overgrown storks delivering diapered babies to Larry's exhausted ears, how could he have heard them above the symphony of flying gun fruit? Gun City had never endured a storm of that magnitude since the elders had planted the trees. Now, the overripe gun fruit soared through windows, thudded against the heads of unstabled horses, and killed Carla Tremblatt's prized dachshund, Antigone. The entire city reflected the rampage Tiffany had perpetrated in her home. Except the gun fruit weren't looking for mosquitos. They were looking for gravity and wind velocity to let them rest on ground. Unfortunately for everyone, windowpanes, horse heads, and tiny-legged Antigone got in the way of their slumber. 
*
No one could argue that Larry saw the muzzle flashes. In the sharp dark, the light of Tiffany's pulled triggers sliced the night more than the deadened sound of the bullets soaring in the windstorm could. Of course, Larry's horse would become one of the casualties of the wind. As it was, Larry barely escaped with his life as he drove boots into the ribs of Samantha and charged toward Tiffany's rampage.
He ditched the smashed-faced horse and ran the rest of the way. By the time he reached Tiffany, she'd shot the gun tree near her house until the trunk was mangled like an elderly woman's back. He witnessed her last blast, a chiropractic disaster for the tree's spine, and watched the heavy branches, gun fruit, and teetering waist of the immense tree bash into the roof of Tiffany's house. It bounced.
Then, as if accepting the weight of circumstance, the shingles split, the cross beams cracked, and the heaved-over gun tree landed in the middle of Tiffany's living room. Her beautiful house emitted light like prayers headed into a sky of dying winds. As the clouds cleared and the wind stopped whipping, the glowing stars in blackness welcomed the light of Tiffany's former home with beckoning open arms.
"What in the world?" Larry said. 
The two of them stood still. Tiffany had hair in her mouth she waited to spit out. Larry's chest and arms were stained with horse brains and blood from the impact of his run-in with wind-blown gun fruit. 
Tiffany said, "There's just no way that mosquito could still be alive."