“I remember how it was, and it was not at all like that,” she whispered.
“What are you talking about, honey?” - asked Paul, holding back impatience and making her voice sound smooth and soothing.
- I lost part of the nail, he went into your back - he just disappeared!
Paula raised her eyebrows. Janet must be more nervous than she is aware. What is she talking about?
Janet began to sob in a half-strangled voice.
“Paula, you will probably decide that I am crazy;” I myself think I've lost my mind. She stopped and took a deep breath. - Paula, do you feel anything?
Paula turned her head again. She shrugged.
- I do not know. I feel myself good. That is, in fact, nothing else itches me. Maybe you'll leave him all day, huh? She joked and laughed. However, her laughter soon died out: in Janet's silence there was something that was even more disturbing than her sobs.
- Janet, what's wrong with you?
Still silence, except for some bronchial wheezing: it must have been Janet's breath. Paula raised her voice.
“What's wrong, baby?”
No answer.
“Come here,” she said, patting the bed next to her.
Paula felt Janet rest against her back with her other hand. Finally, Janet stopped pushing and spoke, and judging by how that sounded, she spoke through gritted teeth.
“I can't,” she said in a hoarse whisper. - I can not. I don't know how to explain this, but I ... - her voice turned into a howl like a rising tidal wave, - ... I got stuck in your back, my finger got stuck, and I CAN'T PULL IT OUT!
And then Janet hit in a panic. By the time she stopped rushing about in hysterics, they were both covered in scratches. Janet's free hand was streaked, and Paula had her whole back, and another long scratch crossed her cheek, moving to the bridge of her nose - she received it when she tried to turn to Janet to grab her distraught hand.
They each called their work, saying they were sick. Then they made an attempt to get dressed. Janet found a sleeveless cotton blouse that someone had once given her, and which, on occasion, was fastened from the left side. The blouse was completely off-season and, together with her hiking boots, looked ridiculous, but Janet didn't care. For Paula, dressing was a more difficult task, until they finally found a black sequined evening jacket, half open on the back and with a deep neckline. He looked eccentric over jeans and a sneaker; moreover, every time Paula turned, one or both of her breasts popped out of an unusually large neckline, like plump naughty fish.Paula drew her hair with an elastic band and stood in front of the mirror in the living room, bending her head so that Janet could look at herself over her shoulder; Janet, meanwhile, tried to get her brush through her own hair. She was very nervous and could not really concentrate, as a result of which the hairstyle turned out to be very crooked, but Janet was too excited to continue trying to do something further with her.
The two of them threw Janet's spacious coat over (Paula, trying to grab the lapel, accidentally hit a finger in Janet's nostril), and then tried to get into the car. In the end, it was done. They could have felt like a lesbian version of Laurel and Hardy [44] if they hadn't been so excited by this time.
Paula brought them to Angie's office. Angie lived with Paula in the same room when they were in college, and now she had a thriving “women-centered” medical practice. Pole and Janet had to wait in the waiting room, piling sideways on the adjacent chairs, until some patient left the treatment room, after which Angie invited them to come in.
She began a polite conversation, but stopped, noticing their strange attire. At first she broke into a smile, then frowned at the sight of Janet's finger, which was stuck in Paula's back. The first thing Angie tried to get him out of there. She didn't succeed. Then she firmly rested Field in the back, grabbed Janet's hand and jerked strongly, but Janet only howled in pain.
Then Angie took up a closer look. She tried to poke the mysterious place with a cotton swab, but the stick also stuck. When Angie gently pulled her, suddenly the wand was slowly pulled in and disappeared without a trace - like a bitch caught in quicksand. Seeing this, Janet began to sob, and Angie sank heavily into the visitor chair, and her face turned red. Paula fidgeted, trying to turn around and look at them, asking endlessly: “What? What? WHAT? "
Finally, Janet was able to find her voice - more precisely, his husky and half-strangled version.
“Oh, Paul, you won't believe it, but Angie just poked her with a cotton swab, and she went there meet!”
Paula rolled her eyes and turned to Angie, twirling her finger at the temple and pointedly pointing her eyes in the direction of Janet - until she saw Angie's face. She looked as if she had been hit by an electric shock. She sat, slowly shaking her head from side to side, as if trying to free herself from something interfering.
They returned home and tried to find a convenient way to sit on the couch. Saying goodbye to them, Angie said she would do some research and call them back so that they would contact her if there were any changes. After some time, her friends had new difficulties - Paula wanted to use the toilet. Janet didn't have such problems, at least while Paula was standing nearby, helping her to take off her jeans and tearing toilet paper for her. In the evening, after they had eaten (Paula was eating, clinging awkwardly to Janet's lap; however, thank God, Janet said it was “even romantic”), Janet said that she no longer saw her nail. Paula felt her friend's body harden; then Janet began to tremble, shaking her whole body, as if a huge snake was beating inside her.
Finally, exhausted, both lay down in bed, almost in the same curved position in which they woke up. They lay stiff and holding each other's hands; they could not sleep, but for some reason they could not even talk. They never noticed that they fell asleep until they woke up somewhere after dawn. Janet almost immediately after this began to cry. She shook Paul on the shoulder.
“Paula,” she whispered. - Paula, my fingers, my damn FINGERS!
When Paula reassured her friend so much that she was able to speak, Janet said that while she was sleeping, her middle and ring fingers, adjacent to the stuck forefinger, were also drawn into the spot. All three of her long fingers were now inside. Paul began to feel nauseous, she only wanted one thing - to go somewhere and think a little about all this alone. But of course, she could not do just that.
By evening, all Janet's fingers had disappeared; from the side it seemed that the veins on the back of her hand just went somewhere under the skin of Paula. Paula still did not feel anything except for hot breath and Janet's tears on her neck. She could smell sweat, which appeared from Janet from fear - it seemed to her that the whole house was saturated with this smell.
Angie called them back in the morning, but said nothing comforting. Then, towards evening, she came to look at them; her face twisted in disgust, and she said it was better to try an x-ray. She brought them to her office and tried to do a fluoroscopy, but for some reason she didn't get a good picture. Around the spot where Janet's metacarpals penetrated Paula's back, the image was simply missing. Angie turned pale, standing in the middle of her empty office, and offered Janet to amputate her wrist. Janet vomited right on the lead apron. Paula just shook her head.
That night they again thought that they would not fall asleep, but then they fell asleep. This time, however, the dream came in small portions, twenty to forty minutes. Waking up, Janet each time began to cry and described the small areas of her hand that were visible before and were not visible now. She said she feels herself being drawn in more and more. By morning, Janet's hand went already above the elbow, and she sobbed without stopping; she shook from convulsive sighs and could not calm down. From time to time, she began to fight in hysteria. At the same time, she painfully tugged at Paula, and her body, wet from sweat, touching Paula's back, rubbed him to irritation. Paula desperately wanted her to calm down.She closed her eyes and introduced Janet in meditation, calm and focused. It did not help.
Around noon, Janet broke her finger
on her right hand in a fit of hysteria that happened to her in the hallway on the way to the toilet. Paula called Angie, who immediately came and bandaged Janet's hand, giving her a sedative so that she could fall asleep. As before, Paula felt absolutely nothing, apart from some relief from the fact that Janet would lie still for some time. Little by little, she began to realize that if they survive this, Janet can lose a limb ... if only they survive it. She caught herself imagining what it would be like to lose Janet, but she forced herself to throw such thoughts out of her head with a will. This demanded such tension from her that she felt nauseous.More and more, she felt like a kind of giant bird of prey, a sort of neck, but instead of a pair of wide wings, the body of another woman was fastened behind her. Moreover, she was hardly able to fly now - she seemed to herself bulky, crushed by weight, unable to tear herself off the ground.
Janet slept through the night, and woke up to find herself firmly pressed into the field. Still twitching her tongue badly after a sedative, she informed Paul that her shoulder was pulled inward and that the edge of her blouse was also beginning to fade. She said that the larger part of her body is inside, the stronger the craving becomes. At the morning meal, while snow was falling outside the window, Janet finally lost her shoulder and part of her left chest. She said that she had the sensation of putting cans on her shoulder blades or a bell of a large vacuum cleaner. Paula felt her heart pound against her chest; in the voice of Janet, she heard plain pain, dull torment. Suddenly, a panic attack seized her - she fell into the trapof Janet's body, sweaty skin of Janet pressed against her back and buttocks. Paula closed her eyes and suppressed a tantrum.
They both deeply regretted that they did not allow Angie to immediately have an amputation, but now, of course, it was already too late. That sense of guilt alternately swept through the floor, since it did not draw her inward (although who knows what will happen to her when Janet's whole body disappears?), She disgusted the thought of Janet's body, a large stump sticking out of her own . And then again, a feeling of guilt for feeling disgusted. Are the Siamese twins experiencing something similar too? Paula tightly squeezed her eyelids and made herself feel every inch of Janet's twisted, pressed body against her, trying to keep this feeling in her memory.
Late that night, when Janet's chin pressed against Paula's back with such force that her jaw seemed like some kind of clamp, painfully screwing on her shoulder blade, Angie appeared with a hospital wagon. Two hefty orderlies shoved them in through the back door. It was strange, but neither Paul nor Janet had the idea to ask what was happening. They still thought only about how they, each in their own way, to live the next few beats of the heart.
They were not taken to the city hospital, but to some base or research institution somewhere on the north coast. When they arrived, they were examined by a number of people in white lab coats who felt them, poked their instruments and asked many questions in strange monotonous computer voices. By the time the studies and tests were completed, Janet could no longer move her lower jaw. They were given a sedative, and they immediately began to sleep with terrible force. Janet still managed to say: “Ola, I'll be the one of the girls”, and these words squeezed Paula's heart, as if with a vice, pushing a powerful sob through her squeezed larynx. Janet cried a little and then slipped into an unconscious state;before disconnecting herself, Paula heard her beloved's breathing become calm and even, almost like that of a child. In the morning, Angie told her that Janet's whole head was already inside, and immediately after that she gave her a large dose of a powerful sedative, which worked even before Paula could react.
She woke up again only two days later, filled with strange slurred dreams; as she was told, by this time the last piece of the big toe of her right foot Janet had already disappeared between her shoulder blades, like a stone thrown into a pond.
She was kept in the laboratory for another week, subjecting her to all possible tests that were ever invented - she was given a fluoroscopy, a computer scan, and a blood test. At night she was given a sedative, and in a dream she saw Janet's big toe falling under the water, sticking out above the surface like the tip of an iceberg, and Janet herself, like a big fish, swam with a stream of blood through her heart and disappeared into the distance.
While she was sleeping, she was examined with the help of laser surgery, carefully examining various parts of her body, but this did not advance one iota in understanding what had happened. In the end, they let her go home. A few months after that, Paula visited Angie weekly, but there was no indication that what had happened had somehow affected her. Angie asked her, “How are you feeling?” And Paula answered, “As usual.” She shook her head and sighed. By mid-summer, she could even laugh a little. She smiled wryly at Angie and said: "Well, at least this itching has passed."
William sanders
Quenching
or
On the seashore with Marvin and Pamela
The Bradshaw couple returned from vacation late Friday night and immediately found that they were not alone in the house.
Marvin Bradshaw walked along the path to the front door - he walked across the road to collect mail from neighbors that had accumulated during their absence - when he heard his wife cry. He ran up the stairs and burst into the house, cursing and cursing himself for not making more efforts to get permission to carry weapons. But there were no burglars in the house - only his wife, standing in the middle of the kitchen with a pale face, trembling from head to toe and pointing in the direction of the sink.
“Look,” she said.
Marvin looked, not understanding what was required of him to see there. Everything was as he remembered - however, he never paid much attention to the area of the kitchen, which, after all, was not his diocese.
- What is there? He asked, and then he saw something small and dark quickly run along the edge of the sink. Now he noticed another one, a little larger, climbing up the wall behind the pipe.
- Damn it! - cursed Marvin Bradshaw. - Cockroaches!
“I came to pour water for myself,” Pamela Bradshaw's voice sounded almost in a whisper, as if the first cry had exhausted all her vocal resources. - Turned on the light, and ... Marvin - they were everywhere! They scattered in all directions. - She shuddered. - It seems that one ran down my leg.
Marvin Bradshaw stepped toward the sink, but the cockroaches reacted too quickly. The one in the sink immediately dived from the edge, hit the floor and slipped into a barely noticeable crack under the baseboard. The one sitting on the wall escaped a slap in the palm of his hand and disappeared inside the cabinet over the sink. Marvin swore confusedly, at the same time feeling some relief: he did not feel much enthusiasm at the thought of crushing a cockroach with his bare hand.
“Cockroaches,” he said. - Wonderful! For years, tearing his ass, finally get out of the city, away from dirt and colored; to get a house for three thousand bucks in one of the best places that are available on the Long Island coast - all this in order to leave for a couple of weeks and come back to find cockroaches here! Lord Jesus!
He looked angrily at his wife.
“And you know perfectly well who is to blame!” Be sure to have to hire this damn Mexican!
“Ines is not Mexican, she is from Guatemala,” Pamela protested. “And we don't know yet ...”
- Mexican, Guatemala - what the hell is the difference? - Marvin never saw much reason to delve into all these idiotic differences between people who say “si” when they want to say “yes”. Maybe it was still worthwhile to distinguish from each other all kinds of Japs, Chinas and other narrow-eyed, because nowadays we have to do business with yellow-handed bastards - but Latinos are Latinos, no matter what kind of messy country they are from .
“The fact remains,” he said. “We never had cockroaches in the house until you hired her two months ago, and now they are.” I'm telling you, you just have to put these people on the doorstep, and you will immediately have cockroaches. Was it in vain that I managed for your father these ho
uses in the Spanish quarter before we got married? Cockroaches and Puerto Ricans - I'm fed up with both of them! I know them.
“I'll talk to her when she arrives tomorrow.”
- To hell with two you talk! - He pulled out a folded sheet of paper from a packet of letters, which he held in his left hand. “I was just about to tell you.” Look what your lovely Ines left for us!
She took the paper and unfolded it. The message was written in pencil, in large clumsy block letters:
NO HAZYAIN SO DOESN'T FALL YOU DID NOT PAY ME TIPER 5 NIDEL WENT TO SISTER ARIZON PAJALUST to send MY MONEY MARGARET FLORES 72281 DEL MONTE TUSON ARIZONA 85707 INES
Marvin took the note back, rolled it into a ball and threw it into the bin, but missed.
“He comes here, turns our house into a cockroach motel, runs away, we should turn our backs on her, and still wait for her to get paid!” Hold your pocket wide, fat immigrant whore!
Pamela sighed.
“And still I will miss her.” You know, I worked with her, tried to help her remember her previous incarnations. I think she used to be a Mayan princess, and ...
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