Needles & Sins
by John Everson
Smashwords Edition
Necro Publications
2011
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Smashwords Edition
NEEDLES & SINS © 2007by Edward Lee
Cover art © 2007 by Travis Anthony Soumis
This digital edition January 2011 © Necro Publications
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4524-5165-7
Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
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a Necro Publication
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“Needles & Sins” © 2007
“Something Inside” © 2007
“The Strong Will Survive” © 2005 First appeared in Space & Time Magazine #99, Spring 2005
“The Beginning Was the End” © 2004 First appeared in Black October Magazine #6, Fall 2004
“Letting Go” © 2007
“The Char-Lee” © 2007
“Bloodroses” © 2000 First appeared in Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions (Delirium Books, 2000)
“Made For Each Other” © 2004 First appeared in Feral Fiction Online, September 2004.
“Spirits Having Flown” © 2003 First appeared in MOTA III: Courage anthology, (Triple Tree Publishing, 2003)
“Warming the Women” © 1996 First appeared in The 1995 SPGA Showcase anthology, (SPGA, 1996)
“Mary” © 2002 First appeared in Dark Testament anthology (Delirium Books, 2002)
“Green Green Glass” © 2004 First appeared in Damned: An Anthology of the Lost (Necro, 2004)
“The Devil's Platoon” © 2007 First appeared in A Dark & Deadly Valley anthology (Silverthought Press, 2007)
“Mutilation Street” © 2001 First appeared in Bloodytype CD-ROM anthology (Lone Wolf, 2001)
“And Then Some” © 2002 First appeared in Freaks, Geeks & Sideshow Floozies anthology, (Twilight Tales, 2002)
“After the Fifth Step” © 2002 First appeared in Freaks, Geeks & Sideshow Floozies anthology, (Twilight Tales, 2002)
“Birth and Death” © 2002 First appeared in Freaks, Geeks & Sideshow Floozies anthology, (Twilight Tales, 2002)
“You Never Got Used to the Needle” © 2007
“Irrelevant in Anathzebra” © 2007
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For Shaun
Who Loves a Good Bedtime Story
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Table of Contents
A Circus in Five Acts
You Never Got Used to the Needle
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Introduction
This introduction to Needles & Sins will be less literary and more informal than some introductions. This is because John Everson’s latest collection pulls such a diverse range of emotions from me.
I couldn’t have been happier or more honored to be asked to write the introduction for one of my favorite modern horror authors…not to mention one of my best friends. This doesn’t make me biased. Just pissed I hadn’t written these stories myself.
John Everson has produced a variety of tales which will neither bore nor grow stale with the telling. His prose is whatever it needs to be for the piece: raw and shocking, bitingly tender with traps, rich yet always believable. His knowledge, feel and love for the work shows in every line, like the brush strokes of a painter. Yet it is most definitely of the 21st century and hurray for thus. Writers should step up and create from a new millennial gut. Times change and good writers aren’t sheep…no matter how wicked they pretend to be while attending a convention. If you write RAW, you aren’t shy. You know rules were made to be broken—unless all you want is a cozy buck. John says what he means and means what he says. Ought to have been born a Texan. (Oops. Sorry.)
And to see him, he’s so adorable. A true gentleman. He is a Renaissance man: author, musician and composer, critic and artist. But the gentleman in the right shadow reveals a delicious flint in his eyes, suggesting a well-healed surgeon out slumming in London’s old East End.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like John Everson. Well, there is this one creep who is ostentatiously jealous of John’s many talents. May this varmint rot in a bilge stew of vomit-feathers and excreta-caked love beads found crammed into either end of a dead tramp cut in half by a rodent train in the meth back alleys of Dallas.
(Um, let me shake myself a little. Whew! That feels better!)
Now let me make a few comments about the book, Needles & Sins. I won’t mention every story. I want you to explore for yourself. Bring waders—it can be treacherously deep in Everson waters.
The first is “Needles And Sins.” This hurt me in more places than I thought I had. It is about suffering and abuse, and either you’ve been there or you haven’t. Either way the story is moving…dreamily, nightmarishly toward a spot in the soul that never quite gets filled.
John uses “Bloodroses,” a reprint I still love. It is a touching story, some of it in places you would never want to be touched. Depends, I suppose, on your tolerance for kinky. This story makes me cry (probably due to 13 prescription medications and an opioid patch—ain’t modern science scary?) and still gives me nightmares. It also makes me cringe at the sight and scent of roses.
Then there is “The Char-Lee.” What can I say as I blush? I love a tale that turns me into a real…
Sacrifices. They are like candy and flowers. Just not roses. “Her flesh wept with the tears of a thousand fickle knife-kisses…” Ouch! Oh! My…
“Mutilation Street” is just too much grisly sinful fun for anyone one nostril short of a good blood-red line. I laughed pounds off. I love Stupid Bitch.
“Warmin’ the Women” sure ain’t the Boy’s Town Spencer Tracy knew. Not so sure about Mickey Rooney.
“Mary” I don’t know if I would have dared. But I wish I had: “…Mary panicked, struggled against the lulling torpor of his sensual valium.”
I have done many stories about circuses and/or special people. This book derives almost a quarter of its content from the final five interwoven stories under the big top of LOVE & ROPE & SEX & SCREAMS: A CIRCUS IN FIVE ACTS. This is a wonderful quintet, especially to close such an amazing collection with.
The Big Death is popular now, full of religion, end times, and all its big hair. Because we have just done the last century and millennium and have girded our loins for the next, perhaps we feel it in the air, a sense of change. Death is change, the ultimate maybe, not necessarily the finale. Here is where writers, fools, and seers enter the picture, giving us shivers with options, maybe even a message wrapped in a rattlesnake speaking in tongues. As John writes in the first page of “Letting Go”: “Death was like that. A land of unintended consequences.”
Perhaps the meek (and sheep) shall inherit the earth. But who will get the lands beyond it?
—Charlee Jacob
Texas, 2007
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He heard the song before he felt the pain. Just a whisper on the edge of wanton breath. A woman’s breath, light and sweet. She moved in the shadows beyond his head, and the melody lurked just behind the heat of her earthy scent as his eyes struggled to open. To wake to this new place.
That’s when the piercing began. That’s when his eyes snapped open—no longer able to just drowsily think about it—and his body convulsed, and in a flash he saw:
…His chest laid open, a red, gory river snaking its way from somewhere below his neck to his belly button…
…His ribs glittering like a pearly cage of broken bones in the yellow lamplight…
…His gleaming, helpless organs revealed like a deli tray of cannibalistic delights…
…His genitals lolling like broken meat across a slack thigh, spattered with spots of crimson…
…His toes, purpled and bruised, spasming at the end of the table he lay upon…
…A white hand, fingers long and thin, pulling a long, hooked needle through the far end of the fatal gash near his belly and trailing an almost invisible fleshtone thread in the air behind it…
Charles screamed.
The song stopped, and a warm wetness slid across his forehead. Her tongue. A kiss. “Shhhhh,” the liquid voice intoned. “We’ve only just begun.”
“What happened?” he moaned, biting his tongue harder and harder until he felt the warmth of blood pass his lips as the woman’s thread passed lower, through his torn flesh. He struggled to remember, but nothing would come. “Why am I so torn up?”
She whispered two words in answer. “You lived.”
The needle dipped into a bowl of liquid near his ribs, and came out dripping golden rain in the weak light. Then it moved to touch the hamburger of his abdomen again. “Remember your wife?” the voice coaxed, and in a flash, he saw Sharlene circa age 32, just as she was trying her damnedest to make it work between them…
“Whatever you want,” his wife moaned in the shadows of 2 a.m. He grinned, a lust-shark in the blood-scented water of twilight and pushed her face down, down to the place where he knew Sharlene hated, where he knew she would feel defiled and humiliated, to the place that would haunt her dreams with feelings of self loathing and inadequacy. He knew all about her inner demons, but at that deep-sea moment he didn’t care, not then, not when he knew what could come, or cum, of it… “Yes,” he grinned. “Suck it good.”
The pain jolted him from the memory, an electric cattle prod.
He tried to push away from the table with his arms, but nothing moved. He was helpless beneath her song, and her needle. “Goddamnit!” he cried.
“Oh…he did,” the whispering woman agreed with his curse. Again her needle left his torso, trailed blood-slick thread high in the air and descended to the bowl to be baptized with a splash of…something. And once cleansed of the stain of his gut, the needle hooked through his skin once more.
“What about your son,” the perfumed breath whispered over his eyelids. “Did you love him?”
««—»»
Barry looked up from the hole he’d dug in the yard in panic. “Dad, I didn’t mean to ruin the grass, honest, I was just looking for locusts, you know, that might have nests that got buried…”
His hand slapped the boy’s face almost without thinking. The boy needed to learn. Learn to respect property, people. How dare he just start digging a hole in the middle of the lawn that had just been resodded a month ago? Barry had to learn…
Charles’ hand came down again, clipping the boy in the lip and cuffing his head. In that moment, the sweet, wet-lipped infant he’d once cradled in his arms metamorphed into a foul stain on his white sheets. In Charles’ heart, Barry became nothing more than a nuisance, a delinquent, a problem, problem, problem child that had locked him down to a life he never wanted…
“Dad, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again,” Barry begged, tears already staining the dust on his face as he scrambled away from the pile of broken grass and muddy earth and launched his feet in a scramble for the house where mom and safety lie. But Charles’ hand caught the hem of his shirt and yanked him off balance.
Charles right hand came down. “I’ll show you sorry…”
“He needed to learn to respect property!”
“Of course he did,” the woman whispered. “A broken arm is a good lesson. One he’d remember.”
“I didn’t mean…” Charles started to say, but then broke off to scream as the hook dug into the tight part of his flesh, just above the sternum.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he cried.
“Your life is one long thread. I’m just making you whole,” she said. And she began to hum. He could hear the words in her melody, words about pride, and tears and needles.
“Ohhhh,” he moaned. As the tip dug into the space above his rib, he looked down and saw slack, dead white flesh and sickly black hair curled atop it like leavings. The remains of his day.
“Why did you live alone at the end?” she asked.
The glass was cool against his lips and he smiled in the golden light of its love. Okay, it didn’t love…but it was what he loved. What he needed. He remembered the last time he’d had a woman here, in the tiny space that he’d carved out for himself just off the broken pavement of 8th Avenue. The complex was a last stop for most, but he’d covered the uneven walls of his purloined space with a $10 can of beige paint that he’d watered down to make it go farther and thus had hidden most of the cracks in its distressed drywall. He pretended that he lived in a home and that the soybeans he ate tasted like filet. He’d stuffed blankets in the draughty cracks that separated the walls from the floor and the windows from the walls and most of the time in the winter, he kept the place above 50 degrees. With a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, he could make it feel like the place was warm, while his flesh shivered unheeded in the cold.
The phone rang, and he almost dropped his glass. The phone never rang. Probably just another creditor or solicitor, he thought, brain buzzing with the metallic jolt of whiskey. Still, he answered it, pressing the cool plastic to the scratchy whiskers of his chin. Idly he scratched at the dry skin there as he said, “Yeah? What can I do you for?”
“Dad,” a voice said from a faraway crackle. “I need help.”
“Buy me a beer,” he answered, and laughed as he dropped the phone between two couch cushions. He looked for it squirting in the shadows, but his hand didn’t seem to have the energy to dig between the seams to retrieve it. Instead he fell back and closed his eyes. From somewhere far away, he heard a voice calling his name, but he no longer felt like answering…
The needle dug closer, and his eyes shot open, wider than wide in agony. A jet of crimson spurted like a geyser from some lost artery near his heart, and he gagged on the bile that gathered in the pit of his throat. “Stop,” he gagged.
“…the tears I gotta hide,” the woman’s voice whispered, singing along with the tune she’d been humming with every stitch. “Needles and sins,” she laughed softly, and completed the stitch as his body jolted against her hand. “Needles and sins.”
Charles was 16, and glad to be away. He crept through the cattails holding his BB gun like an army rifle. He was ready to use it. That’s when he saw the mouse scurry down the trampled path to disappear into the crumpled mass of stalks and dirt. He kicked off the top of the mound and laughed as momma mouse bolted away from the nest, leaving four pink, hairless babies to sniff and paw at the air, blinded by the unnatural light of the day. He cocked the air socket of the gun, aimed and blew tiny ball bearings through the thin skins of those helpless rodents. One, two, three, four. Tiny circles of blood blotted their purplish bodies, and the mice shuddered and clutched each other as they collapsed onto the matted grass of their once comfortable nest. They couldn’t understand the sudden change in their lives from warmth to pain, but mercifully, they died in seconds, just like the…
The needle plunged deep, drawing its thread tight.
…love that died as Charles lifted his hand for the first time when Gwendolyn told him in the back seat of his Chevy Citation to cut it out, that really hurt and maybe he should try learning some manners the next time before he touched a woman as if she was just another piece of trash for the curb, but he didn’t listen and her spit and blood coated his hand as she turned away in hurt and shame just like the way…
««—»»
The needle dipped into the bowl, and dripping cool sting, slipped inside his flesh again.
…happiness died as Charles looked at his daughter in her prom dress and laughed, saying “who do you think you are, the freakin’ Queen of Siam? Do you think the other kids are going to go out looking like that?” And as Rachel’s face crumbled into a black hole of betrayal…
The needle dripped and stitched, washing his flesh clean of blood as it closed his exposed organs back up within.
… Trust died as Charles promised that he’d be home on time tonight, and instead stopped off, just for one nip, just one, just one more, just a quick last taste…
“Stop, please stop,” he begged.
But she only whispered from behind his head, her voice sweet as spring lilies. “Still they begin,” she said. “Needles and sins.”
…And Ambition died as Charles watched the next hotshot and the next and the next walk past his cube over the years atop the soulless grey carpet to take a manager’s office at the end of the hall. An office with a door. And at last, one night he walked into that envied office and sat himself in the chair of his boss, 10 years his junior, who had left for home and cocktail parties two hours before, leaving Charles to work alone, pulling the weight for both of them. Charles sat in that leather-backed chair, and leaned back to stare at the framed poster on the otherwise sterile wall that featured the block letters spelling S-U-C-C-E-S-S in a black bar at the bottom and at long last, years in the making, he began to cry.
««—»»
The needle now closed the livid tear near his throat, the end of a long scar of twisted, bloody, knotted flesh. “They say not to sweat the small stuff,” the woman whispered behind his head. “But that’s what it’s all about…”
“I wasn’t like that all the time,” he said, and then moaned, “It hurts.”
Images clustered in his mind’s eye of his wife and kids and broken dreams mixed with the memories of dying mice and the spider-webbed glass of the car his parents last drove in and the pink slip that sent him from a broken home to the apartment where the liquor drove away the cold. And then his memories fled like dandelion seeds in an angry April breeze.
Dad?
Charles?
Baby?
Son?
The voices reverberated from inside, first louder, but then muffled, as the woman pulled the last skein of thread through his suppurating skin.
“It will hurt,” she whispered, humming softly into his ear. “It will hurt forever.”
“But why?” he moaned, trying without success to lift his arm to touch the horrible stitching that held him together and formed a knot at his heart.
“Because you lived.”
At last she moved so that he could see her. After tying off the thread that wound and bound inside him, she picked up the bowl of liquid. Her chin thrust into the dull shadow in stark, bone white, heavy eyes shone black as night water. She drank the deadly liquid from the bowl and grinned, her teeth stark in bony sockets stripped of flesh.
“Every stitch soaks my poison into the flesh,” she grinned. “Just like every sin poisons the soul.”
“So this is the end,” he whined. “All of my days done?
She only laughed.
Behind her, Charles watched the black shadow of wings unfurl in the wavering amber of the room’s deadly light.
“Still they begin,” she whispered and gathered him to her to start again…her needles and his sins.
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Something Inside
“There’s someone else hidden inside me,” the woman whispered. She seemed adamant. “She has been trapped inside me forever, and I want you to set her free.”
I had heard it before. Sometimes, I felt like I’d heard it all before. Hidden within every big assed woman was a skinny beauty queen dying to be “set free” for her tempestuous moment on the runway of dreams. Or so they thought. As a surgeon, I have a firm and well-founded belief in the innate ugliness of some people. No amount of surgical intervention is going to change the summation of a gene cesspool. But still they came, false dreams in their rosy lenses and checkbooks in hand. They wanted their water balloon slack tits to defy natural law and stand up straight as B-52 bomber cones, or their cellulite-striped bellies not to stretch like beached and rotting whale blubber over their shiny, tight-cinched steel belts. They especially wanted to obliterate that saggy, baggy line that stretched from the pubis to the ribs and which rippled and shook every time they moved. No regimen of weight loss could completely erase the sagging quicksand slippage of skin that said “once there used to be a big vat of fat—or a parade of babies—that nested here.”
The latest in a long line of women who wished that I worked in miracles and not scars sat in my examining room and pointed at the spiderweb of lines on her face, and then gave a general gesture to the rest of her flesh. It was not unattractive, but it was also not a look-twice-at-on-the-street body. An objective assessment said that she clearly wasn’t one of the genetic cesspool derelicts that was beyond salvaging. With a bit of cutting, stitching, nipping and tucking, I could set free the more beautiful woman that the years had walled up inside her.
But there was a look in her eyes that I couldn’t place. I’m not sure how to describe it really. Desperation? Yearning? Obsession? It was the kind of overly intense look that, five years ago, would have made me send her packing without a second glance.
Surgeons can’t take a chance on potential crazies. People think doctors make cartons of cash, and they do. But what people don’t know is that most docs have 10 years of student loans to pay off, and that as soon as you hang up your shingle, you’ve got to sign up for malpractice insurance—which instantly saps half your revenue. You operate on a couple nutjobs and get some outrageous lottery judgments against you from a bleeding heart liberal jury, and your malpractice insurance goes up and up; you might as well take up baggin’ groceries to earn a living.
Which I was close to doing now. I speak here from the deep deep well of experience. Ironically, because of my desperate situation, I listened to the desperately strange woman longer than I would have not so long ago when things were better for me—back when the local newspapers used to write articles about my surgical prowess, not ineptitude.
“I want you to cut me open,” she continued to explain. Her finger traced a line down the center of her forehead, across her nose and down in between her breasts. I noted, purely professionally, that she had no need of augmentation or reduction there…her chest looked provocatively obvious and well-rounded. No sags or deflated bags there. She was of a higher caliber than most of the patients I’d seen in the past two years. Not that there had been very many of any quality.
“There is certainly cutting involved,” I said, ignoring her crude directions which basically would have had me cut her in half if I carried them out to the letter. “But what is it that you want to achieve?”
She looked at me with the kind of seriousness that I imagined impassioned serial killers display as they approach their victims with single-minded purpose.
“I want you to cut me from my forehead to my toes,” she said. “I want you to set her free.”
I nodded and wrote something in her chart. “Nutcase,” I believe, is what I wrote. Then I stood up and said, “Wait here just a minute.”
I opened the door and ducked into the hallway.
“Wait doctor,” she began, leaping off the paper-covered examining table. “I know this sounds crazy but…”
I was already at the receptionist’s station. “ Carrie,” I said. “I can’t operate on Ms. Phoenix. Please give her the name of someone at the Artgeld Clinic.”
I always used to give Carrie the shit jobs. After all, she ran the desk. She was my front line protection.
The problem was, when you’re on the way down, nobody is all that keen to protect you and help you back up. Especially when your checks bounce. And when you turn down cases when your payroll checks are bouncing…
Well…that’s why, the next time Ms. Phoenix—“Please call me Janis”—came to my office, I was the only one there to receive her.
She rang the buzzer at the front desk and I had to answer. She roused me from a reverie of worry that involved the winner of the next NCAA pool among the medical building tenants, the fleeting concern about my overdue mortgage and the thought that maybe, just maybe, I might get laid if I went down to Billy’s Tavern tonight and mentioned that I was not just a surgeon, but a doc who had given “breast lifts” to the stars. It was a weak dream, but it was better than the thoughts of the repo men coming to cart all of my furniture back to some endless, Orwellian warehouse.
I knew the stains on my office carpet were really the visible comments on the lackluster spark that had been my brief career. I probably would have failed as a vet. I was probably best cut out as an accountant. But here I was. A skids surgeon who had gotten his degree in an offshore program because my grades weren’t quite up to par to make it into a medical school here in the states. A guy with a scalpel, a mediocre degree, and an office that cost too much, even though it shared a zip code with the slums. While at first I had charmed a few well-connected patients—and the press—I had, in the end, not done particularly well for myself.
Nor for others really.
The carpet of my office was as stained in blood as the legal proceedings against my name were saturated in ink. I got into this business to help people; really I had.
Yet here I was, in an empty, beaten-down office, with a crazy woman asking me to flay her open. Filet her like a trout.
And there wasn’t a nurse to be found to back me up. Normally, doctors always had a nurse in on a consultation, largely to make sure that if any litigation followed the surgery, there would be a) a witness, and b) another woman to refute it. Put a man in court against a woman with a spit-on-command eye faucet…and the man lost every time, regardless of the circumstance. Estrogen always triumphed over testosterone in our courts of law. Call it primordial. Call it unfair. It was what it was.
And right now, there was a woman in my broken down office, for the second time in as many months, asking me to cut her open.
Only this time, I was within five days and $250 of losing my lease. I had no staff salaries to pay because I had no staff. But Janis Phoenix was potentially the only patient between me and bankruptcy. And I didn’t even have a heroin habit to blame on my decline.
“You remember me,” she said, when I came out from the back room and raised an eyebrow at her stance behind the nurse’s station. She had rung the tiny “call” bell ten times in as many seconds.
“How could I forget?” I asked. “You want me to cut you open…but to gain what?”
“To release the inner me,” she said.
“What you’ve proposed will only release your blood and put you in danger of dying,” I said.
When she smiled, I almost believed that letting out a little blood on the table would make her sing. But that wasn’t the end of it. She wanted me to trim her flesh to the bone. To cut her from stem to sternum and then some…until her skeleton was set free to dance in a kaleidoscopic celebration on my fucked-up bones. Because if I did what Janis wanted, I would have no office or career, or life. I would be locked up forever, for first degree murder…with a violently violated corpse as gruesome evidence that provided no potential defense. Nobody cut open a woman for a procedure the way this woman wanted me to.
“You can release your inner you without my help,” I said finally, after listening to her insane demands. “Watch Oprah.”
“I have,” she said. Her wide lips curled up higher in a sneer. “But this isn’t a fake bourgeois ‘I need to go to the mall’ problem that I have.”
I shrugged in curiosity. I’d like to say disinterest, but frankly, this woman fascinated me. She was not bad looking. She was close to my age. And she seemed to be fixated on having me put a knife to her flesh. I assumed she was some kind of extreme masochist. Not my kink, but fascinatingly perverse, regardless.
“Listen,” she said. “There is a better me inside me that needs to be let out.” She ran a finger up my arm, as if to suggest…sensual reward for my work. This, I was well-versed in dealing with.
“Janis,” I said, “I can help you to realize the goals you have in your surgery…”
“Spare me the surgical-psycho mumbo jumbo,” she cut me off. “I don’t have any goals other than that you cut me open and let the real me out.”
I laughed.
She slapped me.
“I’m not fuckin’ kidding,” she said. “I want you to put a scalpel on my forehead, draw it down to between my breasts, and then open my belly, my thighs and my calves until the blood flows out to the floor like a bad plumbing leak. I want you to slip your hands inside the open wound, and lift the flesh like a door until my body is truly ‘open.’ Only then, can she be set free.”
“Assisted suicide is not legal in this state,” I whispered.
“I’m not talking about suicide,” she insisted, her eyes blazing wide. “I’m talking about rebirth.”
Color me stupid, but I just didn’t feel that desperate yet… I turned her away, a second time. And as the door to my ramshackle office rattled itself closed, I sank to the stained carpet and held my face in my hand. She had been my only potential patient for days, and I’d turned her away for …what? Morals? Ethics? She was crazy as a loon but who was I to deny taking money for doing what she wanted? And I was at the end of my own hang-noose rope. I could have insisted on cash payment up front and disposed of whatever remains remained efficiently, after the fact. Beggars can’t be choosers, or they die. I stood up after a while, walked to the back office, and poured a tall glass of Maker’s Mark bourbon. No other patients rang the receptionist bell that day to interrupt my drink. It was the last I was likely to have of the good stuff. When I finally left the building, it no longer looked lost and rundown to me. It only looked blurry. Like the focus on my life.
I imagine that she went to other doctors in her mad, self-abusive quest. I imagine she was turned away. I imagine that’s why she spent some time on research when she found that my medical practice had closed, and turned up at the door a few weeks later to my one-room apartment. It was hard to pull myself away from the buzzing glare of the hypnotizing lights inside my head to answer the door. I had been drinking cheap whiskey and sometimes cheaper vodka for much of the month, and sound was occasional. Cognizance optional. The lightshow was phenomenal though.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she whispered, when I finally staggered to the door. I responded with something intelligent to that, like “huh?”
“I want to live,” she said. “I can’t take being bottled up anymore. But you have to set me free.”
She pressed a boxcutter into my hand, and began to unbutton her blouse in full view of the still-open hallway door. “I want you to help me.”
How could I dare to touch her? She was a more handsome woman than the bitch who had married me, drained me of all my free cash and then divorced me with a large alimony anchor. Her eyes were hazel and mysterious in their refusal to choose a color. Her breasts were full and alluring, despite being hidden behind a fabric that never showed cleavage. Her waist was not thin, but was also not fat. I could imagine being lost in the midnight mysteries of her and dreaming of returning. Why would I cut her?
She waived a stack of green hundred dollar bills in my face. The stack was thick. At a glance, I guessed that it amounted to three or four thousand dollars. Maybe more.
“There’s more if you’ll just perform the procedure,” she promised. I laughed at that.
“If I cut you the way you said, you’ll be dead within 10 minutes. There will be no more anything.”
“No,” she insisted. “I will be reborn. And I’ll pay you for that.” She pulled up her shoulders to stand straight and declare with laughably dramatic posture, “I will pay you handsomely for setting me free.”
“Why don’t you just cut yourself open?” I asked. I looked pointedly at her visible scars. “You’ve clearly played with knives in the past.”
“I didn’t say the procedure wouldn’t hurt me,” she said. “You’re right; I’ve cut myself plenty.” She pointed at the ghost-white lines tracing history across her face, her neck and her arms. “I’ve seen the real me, my beauty within. When I open myself, I can see her slip around and knot and move beneath the skin. But it hurts too much for me to do it myself. I need your help.”
She pressed her hand against my chest, and the pressure almost tipped my inebriated derelict body over.
“I need a surgeon,” she said. “And you need the money.”
The idea of the money in her hand transferring to my bank account flitted through my blurred mind. It was a fine idea. Buying bottles to hide in was growing increasingly difficult.
“I need anesthesia,” I declared, wobbling just a bit. “Not for me,” I added.
“No anesthesia,” she said. “No drugs of any kind. If you put me to sleep during the procedure, you’ll put my inner self to sleep as well. And then it all will fail. I need you to strap me down, and cut me open. Fast. You must be quick.”
She looked hard at me, and there was a glint in her eye that threatened to dissolve into tears. “Can you do that?”
What she asked of me was barbaric. To be filleted alive. Without relief. It was worse than murder. Yet the crime didn’t daunt me in my desperation.
I nodded. Yes, I could be quick.
“We need an operating suite though,” I said. “I need a table to strap you to, and scalpels. And no one can be around.”
“They haven’t emptied your old office yet,” she said. “I stopped there today. The door was locked, but the furniture still was inside.”
“Why…” I began. But she put a finger to my mouth.
“Don’t ask questions,” she said. “Just cut me open, and let the real me out.”
There was a chain around the door of my old office, and a yellow sticker that declared it an off limits place. A scene that had been deemed criminal…or at least, unpalatable by local authorities. I had been evicted. But from the look of the door, you’d have thought that I had murdered patients and stacked them like gory firewood against the rafters inside.
Maybe tonight, I would perform an act that would give those stickers some remote credence.
“We can get in a side window,” she suggested.
“We’d have to break one,” I said. “They didn’t open easily from the inside, let alone from the out!”
“It’s not like anyone’s monitoring the place,” she pointed out.
I looked at the urban avenue around us and had to agree. The pet supply house across the street had bars on the windows and doors, and a pawn shop two doors down also was well sealed. A few cars slipped through the intersection two blocks down, but nobody had passed through the sighing wind on our street in five minutes. It was desolate. And lonely. More than a little creepy. The wind felt empty as hopelessness, and tasted hot and end-of-day stale as broken dreams. When I had moved into this office, this had been a vibrant section of the city. Now it had about as much going for it as I did.
“Let’s go in through the alley,” I suggested, not quite ready to bash in a window in full view of the empty street. I picked up one of the paving stones from the front walkway, and then we walked around an unkempt browning evergreen shrub to slip into the shadows of the alley. There wasn’t a light on in any of the buildings nearby, and in seconds, we were literally feeling our way down the wall of the building to a window.
“This should be the window in the hall near the first waiting room,” I said, raising my hand to bash the rock through it. She pulled a t-shirt over her head and held it out to me, while standing in the alley wearing only a bra and pants.
“Wrap this around your hand,” she said. “We can’t afford for you to cut your hand now.”
Appreciating the irony, I used the shirt to wrap and protect my hand, and then brought the rock down on the glass.
In the movies, glass smashes like so much electric tinsel. This glass was tougher. My hand bounced off it on the first try, and again on the second, though this time the edge of the rock made a chiseled, white-crusted mark.
On the third try, after I exposed the edge of the rock better, and swung my arm harder, the glass gave way with a crackling splash of sound. My arm slipped into the warmth of the inside of my old office, and jabbed painfully on a shard of glass still stuck in the base of the window. But the protection of her shirt paid off, and I pulled back my operating hand unscathed. In moments, using her shirt as protection, I had cleaned off enough of the ledge of free form glass that she could help me up and into the office.
Once inside, I found a chair and handed it through the window to her. In seconds we were both inside. I pulled the window shades on my old small surgical center room to close out prying eyes, and flipped the switch to turn on the lights. The electric still worked.
Another bonus. My ex-office was on a deserted street in a shady side of the city and was locked from the outside…but still had electricity. Janis had surely chosen her surgeon well.
I almost cried as I looked around at my old operating table, equipment drawers and red-stickered bodily waste disposal can. I hadn’t performed an operation in weeks now. And I missed it so bad. It had been my life…when I had a life.
Janis didn’t look around. She wasn’t here to reminisce. She stripped off her bra and pants, and laid down on the table in the center of the room. “I’m ready,” she announced.
I wasn’t. I asked for her to wait a moment and walked out of the bright room back into the black of the hallway and into the shadowy grey of my old office. The furniture was still there as well, and I pulled open a drawer of my desk. It was empty.
But I felt with my fingers to the way-back of the drawer until I found a small steel stub. I pushed it, and a small door opened. My fingers slipped in, pulled out the glass container, and held it up to the dim light.
A small secret stash of Maker’s Mark. Half full. I twisted off the stopper, took a long gulp and held it in my mouth, enjoying the burn as it settled on my gums and strained at the back of my throat.
I coughed when I swallowed, and said “Fuck yeah” to a vacant room. Then I stalked back to the OR, to do what I was being paid for.
To kill a woman.
A woman who was paying me to kill her. My only saving grace here, I figured, was the fact that I would be wearing rubber gloves. I pulled on a pair as soon as I got back to the room with my bottle.
“Care to share?” Janis asked.
When I cocked an eyebrow at the question, she said, “Hey, I didn’t say I couldn’t have a drink. I just can’t be knocked out like a log.”
We shared a couple swigs, and I marveled at the color in her eyes. They were brown, but that dark light veiled a flicker of fire. And desperation.
“What do you want me to do?” I said presently.
She pointed the way. “Cut here. And here,” she said.
“And here.”
She pointed to her forehead, and breastbone and belly. I retrieved a marking pen from the surgical drawer and drew lines across her in the places she marked, which grew to include slash marks on her arms and legs.
“Why do you want to die?” I asked at the end. “And why do you want to do it in such a painful way?”
Her chin trembled in a deliciously frightened but determined way. “I don’t want to die,” she said. “I want to live. Finally.”
“This operation, without anesthesia, or instant stitching up, which you say you don’t want, will kill you,” I declared. As I said it, my leg gave out and I clutched at the table she presented her naked body on.
“So says the drunk,” she tittered, and lay back on the table, exposing breasts I could never hope to suck between my pale, lost lips without induced anesthesia. I’d been there before, and the legal aftermath hadn’t been a feather pillow. She didn’t really need surgery to look good. But she was going to use an ex-surgeon to make her look bad. Really bad.
I pinioned her hands in the straps, and then locked down her feet.
“They’ll arrest me,” I said. But I’m sure she could tell from my voice that that wouldn’t stop me. Desperation breeds fatalism.
“Do what I paid you for,” she insisted.
I pulled a scalpel out of the surgical tray and held it up to make sure there were no stains on its shiny surface. I needn’t have bothered. I knew that if I started cutting this woman, I was going to kill her, so postoperative infection really wasn’t a concern.
“Start on my face,” she said.
I took another slug of bourbon, and brought the blade down to her forehead. Slowly, I pressed the blade into the skin of her head just above the nose, and began to bring it down. She moaned, slightly, as I broke the skin, but then, before I’d cut an inch, she yelled at me.
“Deeper you fuck. Don’t just make me hurt…Cut me open, you lazy no-good hack of a butcher!”
She pissed me off.
The blade seemed to slide through her flesh of its own accord, dividing her nose in half right down to the skull, and creating a cleft in her upper lip that not only severed the outer lip but dipped deep inside her oral cavity to open her gums to the bone.
She began to scream, bubbling bloody spray and air all over my hands, but I laughed in a haze of violence begat by empty loss.
“You want me to cut you?” I said, as I drew the blade along the smudged marker line on her throat. The wheeze of her gurgling wet breath instantly filled the room.
“I’ll cut you to the bone you stupid crazy bitch,” I said. The blade slipped into the chest cavity, and I could see the white of her sternum as I slit and pressed hard. I was no longer performing an operation, but a desecration. I wanted to cut her open from tit to spine. From belly to coccyx. I would lay this stupid cunt open to the core. She had badgered and stalked me and offered me the glimpse of green that could save my pathetic life, at least for another month or two. And I wanted to give her exactly what she’d asked for.
Customer service indeed.
“Does this feel good?” I asked, as the lining of her belly parted with a warm rush of iron breath and I could see the inner bags of her uterus and stomach lying like fruit to be plucked and crushed in her cavity.
A rage had taken me, and I couldn’t stop.
“Stupid, stupid, fuckin’ crazy cunt,” I howled, and dug the blade into the delicate pink folds that led from her esophagus to her belly and again from her belly to the wrinkled, tightly wrapped folds of her intestine. The room filled with the rich organic scent of blood and the foul retch of shit. And an acid, back-of the-bar smell of puke. Her insides opened like tissue paper to my knife, and I cut through them indiscriminately. On the table she thrashed and screamed but once begun, I didn’t look back. I continued to follow the lines I’d drawn at her direction, and opened the flesh of her thighs to the yellowing muscle near the bone, and to the calves, and to the bones of her shaking, convulsing, last-seconds-of-life arms.
I cut the tendons at her wrists last. She had stopped screaming, though her howls were still an echo in my ears. Her blood had spilled like water from a broken dam to the floor, and her shit and piss and blood mixed in a foul odor that colored my world in a red haze of horror. A horror that I had created, bathed in, enjoyed. I was crying as I traced my blade along the last lines of marker to sever the tendons of her fingers.
I stepped back from what was left of Janis Phoenix and looked at the ruin of her body. She had not been so bad to start. But now…now there was nothing pretty left. White flesh speckled with the radiant blood of murder. Blue eyes bulged with the pain of unmitigated brutality. Guts opened to spill like slaughterhouse waste to the ground.
I hadn’t needed to pry her flesh open as she’d asked to let her “inner self” out. Her flesh had parted to the violence of my knife without resistance. Her life was an open book, and I was the sole reader. But I could not see any story worth studying now. She was a testament to death, and an accusation to me. How could I have fallen so far?
After years of carving people open to change and shift and stitch them into another—a hopefully better— form, I looked at Janis and felt violently ill. My stomach lurched uncontrollably and I dropped to my knees on the operating floor, the bourbon a hot flame in my gullet that threatened to join the blood and offal of Janis on the floor. Accusation indeed.
But as I fought off the sickness of my own pathetic life’s decay, I looked up at the body of Janis Phoenix. She shook and trembled on the table, clearly in her last death throes. I had cut her as she wanted. And her last words were to call me a butcher because I wasn’t cutting enough.
I stood, grabbing at the table for support, and stared down into the hole I had dug in the poor woman.
Something moved inside her.
Something pink, and long and agile. It shook and rattled against the confinement of her flesh, shifting folds of tissue and gut and then, finally, punched through the suffocation of her intestines. A hand.
The fingers were small but perfect. They waved in the air like a flag of victory. Or denial. I can still see the shiny needles of their white, blood-streaked nails in my minds’ eye today. First one hand, and then another emerged into the empty air from the brutalized gore of her chest, and then a small but delicate leg pulled free of the flesh of her thigh to point like a cheerleader at the blinding glare of the operating room light.
A head finally slid free of the mush I had made of Janis’ not-so-terrible face. It had skin of porcelain, and eyes of ocean blue. It was sexy and ethereal at the same time. With a grin that showed teeth no newborn nymph should ever have, it slid like rubber from the bloodbath of her broken core and then, dragging all of its newly born body with it, fell in an uncoordinated tangle to the bloody tile of the floor.
“Oh my fuckin’ god,” I whispered, looking at the thing I had released from Janis’ body. Sirens were screaming outside, but I didn’t even notice.
Its mouth opened perfect, pointed teeth to laugh, and then the creature I had set free from Janis Phoenix stood up for the first time on its own two feet. She wrapped two bloody hands around my waist, looked up into my eyes with deadly piercing orbs of her own and with a strangely garbled squeak, laughed at me. I swear it was a laugh of thanks, not of meanness. As she pulled away, in a high, breathy voice she gasped three words. Maybe they were just nonsense. Syllables of the damned. I don’t know. But I could have swore she said, “Free, at last.”
Then she stepped back and walked, nakedly— and almost human— to the broken window out in the hallway that I had entered with Janis less than an hour before. With a single, strangely liquid wave, she slipped over the sill and into the alley to disappear into the night.
“What did I do?” I whispered, as I looked back at the mutilated body of Janis Phoenix. “What DO I do now?”
The room was filled with the shifting light of red and blue as the sirens I’d been hearing grew closer. You can’t strap down and flay a woman alive and not expect someone to hear the screams if you lived within 50 miles of…anything. And this was the city. A backwater slum, but still the city.
The wrecked, split face of Janis looked back at me and smiled. Smiled in the wrong direction. A vertical smile of murder.
I was fucked, whether she had left hundreds or thousands of dollars in my pocket. Whether they found my fingerprints or my rubber gloves. I knelt to pick up her pants and her shirt, running my hands through the pockets to look for whatever money might be hidden there. Maybe I could still follow the strange creature who had slipped free of Janis like a wraith. Like a prisoner set free from a lifetime in a cage. I found a pocketful of green, but the spotlights already splitting the black shadows of the ceiling said they wouldn’t help.
“I did what you wanted and set you free,” I whispered to the dead remains of a not-so-crazy woman in what had formerly been my operating suite. “I let something inside of you out.”
From the hallway of my office, a smash, and then a voice.
“Put your hands in the air.”
Somehow I knew that it wasn’t in the cards for me to have the same kind of transcendent, phoenix-like rebirth as the corpse on my table.
Bills fell from my hands like confetti, and I stood to meet the start of my own new life. I suspected that it would be far more confining.
— | — | —
The Strong Will Survive
The petals slip lazily down like bloody autumn leaves, spattering the glass above his face. I put the unbreakable window there to protect him. Not from decay, he’d done that already himself, but from the children, the pilgrims. They come from near and far. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They continue to pass through this corridor and still, they do not cease to come.
They do not bring friends. Certainly not lovers. Their pilgrimage here stems from the hidden depths of love.
And hate.
Some wait in salvaged pews that I dragged here weeks ago from an abandoned church on 11th Street. Often the pilgrims wait in this damp, concrete warren for hours or days before leaving. Some arrive wearing three-piece blue pinstripe suits, and some appear in sweat pants and Reeboks. Still others are dressed for the season, in layers—flannel draped over cotton shirts and T-shirts and Marine-green Eskimo coats on top of it all. I thought they should have some place to sit and sleep besides the blackened floor.
Time seems to stand still here, deep below the steady pound of the city. Trains are the only clock, breaking the chill silence periodically with their rhythmic clicking and clacking and braking screeches. The room rumbles and shakes with their passage, but leaves us otherwise unchanged. Untouched. Our attention rarely strays from the dead man beneath the glass. He also, untouched. And we…untouchable.
A middle-aged man kneels before him now, the gift of crimson roses shivering slightly between his clenched fingers. His almond hair is already silvering, his wide, faintly Irish face furrowed with the early cat scratches of time and heartache and worry. His ears look chafed and protrude somewhat from the cut of his close-cropped hair. A dark mole guards the entrance to his right ear, the one facing me. A tear glistens there too, and the slow rain of curling petals turns to a storm as his praying hands begin to pound on the glass above the face of the dead man.
I leave him be for awhile; that’s why I put the safety glass there. There are others seated in the shadows of the room, waiting. Some for their turn at the glass, some for…even they couldn’t say. None move during the newcomer’s outburst. This man was certainly not the first whose mingled and conflicting emotions drove him to try to annihilate that which was already dead. But, like any monument, I felt this one needed preservation, so that all who were summoned could have the chance to witness.
And yes, I mean summoned.
This is no open exhibit. No wake for friends. We were all called here.
I was the first.
I called the rest.
««—»»
I almost didn’t open the envelope. Karen’s funeral was still a thorny crown around my eyes, constricting my ability to see beyond the most selfish moments, and most of my mail was going straight from box to trash. I had no time for junk solicitations. I had no time for much of anything besides nursing a parade of golden longnecks on my couch while staring at the goose-feathered dreamcatcher she’d given me just weeks before. It hung, a manmade mystical web of feather and twine, in the living room above my television, where it was likely to stay empty. No dreams there. Only regrets.
While the return address in the upper lefthand corner was pre-printed with a doctor’s name and street, this envelope was hand-addressed to me. When the day’s refinancing offers and car wash coupons and CAR-RT-SORT vacation offers slipped unread into the paper recycling bin, I held this one out. Absently slipping my thumb beneath the loose endflap, I opened it.
Inside was a small piece of stationary, emblazoned with the same return address as the envelope. Upon it, a hastily scrawled, cryptic note:
I need to see you. It’s urgent. Come at once.
—Dr. Chavis
I stared at the address, and the name, trying to make sense of it. I hadn’t been to a doctor for myself in years, though I’d certainly sat with Karen in several crowded reception areas. But none of her increasingly desperate appointments had occurred in the area of town that this office was in. And I didn’t recall any Dr. Chavis from our medical travelogue. We’d been from one specialist to another, looking for the miracle cure to her chronic disease.
We hadn’t found one.
I began to crumple the note up, and then stopped. Tucked it in my pocket. Maybe she had seen him at some point. Or a partner. Maybe he had something to tell me about her.
The phone rang. It was my mother, who now checked up on me every day, reminding me that she had withstood the passing of my father, and that my life had just begun.
Her pain made me feel guilty, but no less lost.
“Remember the good things,” she told me again, for the hundredth time. “And leave the pain behind. Karen would want you to move on with your life. You know she’d want you to be happy.”
“I know, Mom. I know. But I’ve got to go now, I’ve got an appointment.”
I pulled the note back out of my pocket, smoothing the wrinkles on the yellowing countertop. “Do you remember a Dr. Chavis?” I asked on a whim.
She thought a moment, then replied. “It sounds familiar, but no, I can’t place it. Why, hon?”