UnCommon Bodies: A Collection of Oddities, Survivors, and Other Impossibilities (UnCommon Anthologies Book 1)

by Michael Harris Cohen

  Cyrus will unbag our dinner and then he'll lean in to kiss our cheeks and that's when I'll stab him in the face. I've been practicing on the wood in our back room, training on the paper mountain so my hand won't slip when the time comes.

  Cyrus smells like pine trees. I remember pine trees and their whiff, or Millie does. She remembers better as she's always looking back. She retains more things of the world but I recall some. I recall the touch of sun on our faces, the wet feel of a bath. I remember grass between our toes. I still dream of those things and my dreams are mine and mine alone.

  We don't really remember Mama. All we have left of her is what's in our blood and her Bible Book. She cried when we was born because mothers want a baby that looks like them and not a nature's mistake. We don't remember much but we know it's true because she told Cyrus and he told us. How she cried and almost drowned us in the bath and what mother states a thing like that if it isn't true?

  Cyrus saved us. He set us free, Millie likes to say but I think about it different, though I wonder if it's gonna be hard to kill him. Will he fight? Will I cry? Will I later grieve for his pine smell, his rough lips on our cheeks? Will I miss his voice saying my old name? I look forward but I can't know. A wall stands between the forthcoming and me.

  Cyrus calls us Mary because he says that's the name our Mama gave us, though we can't remember if it's true. We were too little. But it's for sure true that Mama garbaged us so I garbaged her name. I named myself and to hell with mama and Cyrus.

  Millie doesn't like it when I swear or reflect about the name. She frowns and our scalp tingles. She says, It's a sin not to keep your birth name, even if it's from a woman who forsook us. 'A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches.'

  I cross my legs and smooth our skirt on the stool. I tell her, "Who named you Millie? You weren't even born with a name." She doesn't say nothing to that because she knows it's as true as can be. I christened her and not mama, not Cyrus. I chose Millie like I chose my name. I titled myself Janus because of the man who spoke through the glass. The old man I could hear.

  Between you and we is the wall of glass. Cyrus says it safeguards us. If it wasn't there Cyrus said you might chuck things or hurt us. The wall was new once but now it's forever smudged and scratched. Cyrus' rule number two is: don't touch the glass.

  "Don't want to hurt yourself," he says. "You're my darling. My favorite."

  All day people slip past. Brave children mush faces on the glass, tiny lips and noses pushed in like Millie's. You sometimes put a single fingertip on it to point at Millie in the mirror. Must have been a million you and yours fingers pressed on that glass between us. We can't count that high.

  I've imagined walking through that glass a thousand times. I've imagined thinking so hard, I make it disappear. Then I'll stand off this stool and follow you out into the hall. I'll finally see the others in their rooms, then walk to the EXIT and whatever is beyond.

  Millie quit trying to stop me imagining. We is we except for what is mine and what I imagine is mine and mine alone. Her face scrunches up tight when I imagine the glass gone. I can't see her but I feel Millie like you feel your fist tighten, with a mind of its own, when you're wrathful at something or somebody.

  It's a funny thing that the thousands of you and yours can see Millie and I can't, because she's behind and I'm front.

  I got your back, Millie likes to joke.

  But when you are not watching us, I sometimes make the trick. I hold a mirror to a mirror to see her, though it's not a mirror at all but the knife I found. I witness fuzzy Millie in the reflection of the reflection on the blade. On the back of our head, sticking out of our hair, she's exactly me only with the air took out of her face–mushed nose and sleepy looking, as she can't hardly open her eyes. Sleeping Beauty. Her skin is pale, sun robbed like mine, white against the black of our hair. Snow White after the apple. The truth is she's not sleeping. She thinks all the time and talks almost as much as she thinks. Often I just long for quiet and peace, nothing more.

  Right now she's thinking about our secret. We love our secret. What we know that you don't, what even Cyrus don't know. That Millie is Millie and not just a face on the back of my head, not just a twin I tried to gobble in mama's womb but couldn't finish because I was too tired from growing legs, arms and ribs, or maybe just not starved enough. She is me but not me and we is we.

  We've been we since I can remember. When I learned to talk she learned to talk. Hello Mary, full of grace, she said like she'd just arrived and was introducing herself. Though she was always there. Always and forever. We'd play and sing and argue and she was always there–sleeping when I slept, waking when I woke.

  We sometimes think how lonely it must be for you who are not we. All alone in your head, that must be a terrible thing. I wonder again if that old man was lonely in his head.

  Millie doesn't like me thinking about the man. She says, like always, He was just crazy and this time I don't say anything. I just remember the story despite her.

  I recollect how it was a slow day with not so many of you. We squirmed on our chair, restless and hot, legs stuck to wood, the air like sand. Then he came. Like a child, he pushed his face right up to the glass.

  But he wasn't a child. He was the oldest man ever. For a weird moment I felt we'd paid to see him, the most ancient man in the world, and not the other way around, the way it was and is.

  I froze like we're supposed to and watched him watch us. I tallied thirty blinks and waited for him to move on down the hall. But he didn't. He ran a hand through what little hair he had. Thin and white as cobwebs, it scarcely roofed his head. Brown, mud-like spots speckled his face and hands. His cracked lips mouthed words and I did something I'd never done. I slipped from our stool and stepped to the glass.

  You stay put, Millie said. Rules is rules.

  But I didn't care about the rules. I craved to hear his words. I brought our face up to the glass. Up close, I saw the blood traffic beneath his paper skin. His eyes reminded me of blue sky and clouds as I turned our head and pressed our ear to the cool of the glass.

  "Janus," the man said, his voice a whisper from the sea, though he must have been roaring to get his words through to us. "You're Janus. You look to the future and the past. The god of beginnings."

  He smiled, baring teeth like rotten corn, then bowed his dappled head and was gone.

  Millie said, The old got straw for brains. But I took that name and made it mine and mine alone. I threw Mama's Bible Book back in Millie's face. Respect your elders, I told her, and that she was Lot's wife, looking back, while I eyed the future and new beginnings.

  Pride goes before a fall, Millie says.

  Better to fall than never run, I say and she doesn't say nothing to that and I smile because I know it's one of those things that means something else, too.

  It must be closing time. None of you and yours has come for a while. I grip the knife in my hand and wait. Cyrus will come soon.

  This is not the first time I've meant to do this. There's been more than 20 burgers since I found the knife and made the plan. But tonight I'll shove that tiny blade in his face, a face I've studied so long it's grown ugly to me, no matter how handsome Millie thinks he is.

  His nostrils are too big and his ears stick out like wings. His breath smells like gasoline. Tonight I'll stab his ugly stinky face. I'll stab it and take his keys and run.

  To make Millie happy I clear my jumbled head and we play a game, Picture Paint. She chooses dog, so we paint that. She chooses the breed and I add the ears and fur. I make it white with black spots. I make its tongue pink and wet. Then I choose mountain. She shades the trees and the rocks and I add the clouds and the birds atop. We paint and wait for Cyrus.

  He's slow to come so when we tire of painting we play Imagine the Others. Millie styles a Crow Man, like always, with wings that touch both walls of his room. I make Fish Girl in her own pool of a room and The Eyeball–a man with a face that is nothing but a blinking e
ye. Millie laughs and I think how maybe I'll set them all free, all the others, whatever and whoever they may be.

  When Cyrus finally shows I can tell he's well oiled. He fumbles with the keys and drops the food bag on the floor. He nearly falls over trying to pick it up. I clasp the knife so hard it becomes part of my hand.

  Drunk, he'll be slow. He'll be slow and I'll be quick, I think.

  Quick at what? Millie says. What are you doing, Mary? And I panic because I didn't alphabet soup my thoughts, I'm too nervous and now Millie knows, she sees the plans and future I gaze toward. Everything.

  She doesn't say what I imagined, Thou shall not kill or Cyrus saved us. She just screams.

  She screams and screams, like those sirens that pass us when we're on the road only louder and never passing, she screams so loud our head will explode. It'll splat all over the glass wall.

  I try to tell her how we'll be free. I paint all the things we'll see that we've forgotten, and all the things we've never seen that we'll see: the sun, the moon, the stars, the sea, television and chocolate, dogs and horses and cats, grass between the toes, other books and laughter and... but I can't go on with the endless list because she just keeps screaming and screaming.

  "What's wrong, sugar?" Cyrus says, his words slack from the drink. "You look... lost."

  And I am lost as we collapse off the stool and I know the plan won't happen tonight, won't ever happen, because of Millie and how she's always looking back, back even to the Garden and man's fall, and never forward and I can't think and won't ever think again from her screaming–a million crow caws in our head, the laments of the burning sinners in hell–and I jab the knife up and into Millie's sleepy eye, and it's a flame in my own, and she screams even louder, and I stab again, again, again, 'til finally the screaming softens and I whisper to her, It's our only way, and, For no one who has a blemish shall draw near. I stab 'til she says nothing. She'll never say nothing again and I marvel at the new quiet and stillness in our head, like I'm on top of Picture Mountain hearing the soundlessness of clouds.

  My head grows wet from mists and lighter, as if I'm turning cloud. There's hurt but sleep and calm too, because I know Cyrus–who's by me, gripping my hand, though I can't hardly feel it, taking back the knife–he'll let me go because I'm not a freak, not like the others, and no more will you stop and gawp because I don't have Millie and we is not we but just I.

  About the Author

  Michael Harris Cohen is a recipient of the New Century Writer's Scholarship from Zoetrope: All-Story, a Fulbright grant, fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Artist's Residency, The Blue Mountain Center, and the Modern Grimmoire Literary Prize as well as Mixer Publishing's Sex, Violence and Satire prize. He is a graduate of Brown University's MFA program where he received the Weston Award for best graduate fiction manuscript. He has published numerous stories, both online and in print, and his first book, The Eyes--A Novella and Stories was blurbed by Brian Evenson, Robert Coover, Stephen Graham Jones and Stephen Wright. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Bulgaria and teaches writing and literature at the American University in Bulgaria.

  All the Devils

  by Keira Michelle Telford

  Summary: It's 1889, and women are being killed in the East End of London. They've become the targets of a deranged sexual killer, but why? Because they're prostitutes? Sapphists? Or something else entirely?

  September 9, 1889

  Pain shoots through the tip of her middle finger, piercing under her bitten-down, brittle nail and tearing into the quick. Another splinter. Cursing her clumsiness, nineteen-year-old Lizzie plucks out the jagged wooden sliver and sucks her finger into her mouth, tasting a foul, bitter mixture of her own blood and the astringent cleaning fluids she's been using to scrub the floor to no avail. No matter how hard she scours the warped boards with the cheap wire brush, the bloodstains won't be washed out.

  Exhausted, her back and knees aching from kneeling on the hard floor for over an hour, she slumps against the bed frame and sobs. The heat isn't helping. Her clothes are sticking to her chest, tiny beads of moisture trickling down between her breasts and soaking into her chemise. Seeking relief, she unbuttons the bodice of her dress, peeling the fabric back to expose a thin cotton camisole worn over her corset. Too many layers for September.

  Ready to call it quits, she stares glumly at her efforts. The wall is blackened in streaks where the former tenant's blood spurted after the blade of a knife was run across her neck, severing her carotid artery. She bled out in seconds. Crimson fluid flowed profusely from the wound, saturated the palliasse, and pooled on the floor. The cut was so deep her head was very nearly detached, but that was by no means the worst of the atrocities committed upon her.

  After death, she suffered the worst indignities imaginable. Her breasts were cut off, her thighs denuded of flesh. Her organs of generation were cut away and placed on the bedside table, along with the lumps of meat removed from her thighs, so forming a heaping, slopping pile of fat and tissue. Her abdominal cavity was cut open, her uterus removed and placed on the pillow beneath her mutilated head. Her face was gashed beyond all recognition. Only her eyes remained, staring lifelessly at the doorway, the lids cut away.

  Lizzie read of the murder so often in the papers that every detail of the crime is etched into her mind. The poor woman's innards were all displaced, her intestines deposited at her right side, her spleen at her left, and her liver between her spread feet. Her heart was never found.

  By all accounts, she was a beautiful woman before she was hacked up. She was tall, possessed of considerable personal attractions, and had many friends. Several of those who knew her are still residents of the tenement-lined court in which this single-room rent is situated, and since Lizzie moved in two days ago, she hasn't been able to speak with any of her neighbors without hearing them profess profound sadness for the poor unfortunate who met her end here.

  It's been some ten months since the slaying, but fear still abounds in the East End. No woman is safe. Certainly not those of a particular profession. The man responsible—ought he be called a man at all?—was never caught, and this was not his only crime. He claimed the lives of six women in eighty-eight, and though he fell dormant for a time, this summer he again picked up his knife.

  A woman was stabbed in the throat not far from here. As she lay dying, her attacker threw up her skirts and mutilated her abdomen, gouging her privy parts with his blade. What his purpose is in the work, no-one is sure, but that he loathes women of a certain class seems irrefutable. He is the Whitechapel Fiend. A butcher of women. A maniac, some say. Others call him a devil. He calls himself Jack.

  Eyes wet with tears, Lizzie picks herself off the floor and pats down her dirty white apron. In stepping away from the stained wall, she catches her foot on the chamber pot she's been using as a makeshift bucket and tips it, sending a gush of ruddy, slightly sudsy water surging over the sloping floor. At one spot beneath the bedside table, the water is funneled through a thumb-sized hole in one of the floorboards.

  Intrigued, she drags the table away and inspects the hole, poking her finger through and hooking it around the lip, testing to see if it moves. Sure enough, with a gentle tug, the board comes loose and lifts away, revealing a hidey-hole beneath. In this hole, a small bundle of possessions have been secreted.

  A coin purse containing a half-crown, a sixpence, and a few farthings.

  A two-thirds empty bottle of laudanum.

  A bundle of letters, tied up with a ribbon.

  Reckoning them to belong to the former tenant, Lizzie plucks them from the hole. Some are from Ireland. Some are from an address in Cable Street, Shadwell, near the docks.

  Dearest Mary Jane, the most recent one begins, it relieves me to hear you speak of leaving London. It's no longer safe for women of our kind, and I should rather like to think of you far away from here, prospering in new environs...

  Lizzie sinks into a chair at the table and lights another can
dle. For all that it's daylight, the two grimy windows looking in on her dingy room do little to illuminate the dank old parlor, with its sagging ceilings and peeling walls. It reeks of death. The palliasse was replaced—it had to be—but everything else in the room is as it was ten months ago.

  The bed frame.

  The cheap etching above the mantel.

  The spider-cracked porcelain washbasin.

  The rusty tin bath.

  She owns nothing herself. Not even the bedclothes.

  Ignoring pangs of hunger—for she hasn't eaten since suppertime yesterday, and it's now past noon—she settles down to read, noting that the Shadwell letters are all penned in the same feminine hand: a woman named Kate. A friend? A sister? A lover? She works her way through the stack, poring over every word. And what words they are!

  Without exception, the letters are intimate. They speak of love and affection, every sentiment rooted in deep concern and a sadly prophetic mortal dread. Knowing not what to do with them, Lizzie turns her focus to the coin purse. Though tempted to make use of its contents for her own needs, her conscience won't let her. It's not much, but it ought rightfully to go to someone who knew Mary Jane. Someone who cared for her. Someone who undoubtedly loved her.

  It ought to go to Kate.

  Dangerously out of her element, Lizzie wanders down Cable Street: an area notorious for vice. Guarding against the predatory glances thrown her way by any man she passes, she hugs her shawl tightly around her shoulders, covering herself as much as possible.

  It's barely mid-afternoon, but already the women of these parts are out in droves, flaunting themselves in pub doorways, their skirts too high and their necklines too low. They're the lowliest class of whores, Lizzie's been told. Cheap, intemperate, often old and stricken with disease, they cater mainly to the hordes of sailors continually making port at the nearby docks. It's surely no life for any woman.