by Martin Rose
I reached forward to grab Mr. Rogers, who had no intention of moving anywhere. He continued to stand with bovine aplomb, all eyes and dumb expression, in his prim sweater vest and wire-rimmed glasses. Spots dotted the upper corner of his button-down shirt, peppered with bloody spinal fluid.
I was long past the ability to vomit, but bile collected in the back of my throat in a sad testament to memory, to the days when I could. Congealing like honey.
With a fistful of his sweater vest and my extinguished cigarette still clamped between my teeth, Mr. Rogers’s head followed suit, exploding in a mist of blood and gore, bone fragments thrown into my face.
The sound of an expulsed shell from a distant gun ricocheted off hot pavement.
I twisted and zeroed in on the sound echoing through the cul-de-sac and bouncing off the eggshell sky. Mr. Rogers’s headless body fell like a puppet as I released him, jetting blood like the Trevi Fountain. My deck became an abattoir, my shoes soaked in pooling crimson.
A shadow outlined against a house a hundred yards away. Between the manicured topiary, his silhouette formed a target against bleached vinyl siding, and I took aim, firing once, twice.
The sniper stumbled as one of the bullets hit home. His face veiled in a ski mask in the hot summer sun, the man snapped his arm toward me, adjusting his aim with a fistful of hot lead: he returned fire.
My hand exploded.
Two fingers evaporated into blood mist in the blast; their remains rolled across the porch like lollipop sticks and then were lost between slats of wood into darkness. I ducked. Lucky shot, I thought with grudging respect and irritation. Hunkering in the shade with my knees soaking in the Rogers’ blood, I looked down through the porch boards as though my fingers were dropped change and I could make out one crooked nail on the edge of a severed fingertip. I kneeled in warm blood, stared at it, and fought the urge to reach down and lap it up, to pick up the fleshy fragments and eat them like a man at a barbecue roast. My mangled hand hung like a limp, wilted flower through my sleeve.
The pills could push my monster urges into the background, but they could not eradicate them. I would always be hungry for a food I forbade myself to feast upon.
When I looked up next, the shooter was gone. The yards and the lawns were empty. I waited a moment longer, to be sure the neighborhood was deserted. The nice thing about suburbia is that no one ever calls the police. Not for murder, not for Hitler, not for headless people on my porch. People moved here to be alone and to increase their isolation. They would fight to preserve it, even if it meant ignoring a fire fight in our own frontyards.
*
When you eat your wife, technically, the marriage is over.
I am a widower. Gone are the humble gatherings at the dinner table and gone the trappings of a well-feathered nest infused with the warm smell of apple pie, the feminine grace adding a softness to my days and a kindness to my heart.
I had a new girl now and she’s harder and meaner; hot to the touch and never worries about her weight even though she eats lead and copper by the round. Though it’s sad commentary to suggest my most trustworthy friend in the world is a firearm, I would rather have my hand blown to shreds than lose the last thing I loved the most.
His shot blew apart the butt of the gun, and the magazine inside, destroying the weapon. Fragments of broken synthetic plastic tore holes through my palm, fracturing my wrist and debriding parts of my hand. Flesh came away like a glove dragged over barbed wire, the skeletal structure visible beneath my tendons and ligaments. Two fingers gone. MIA. I would have to fish them out later to prevent infection to the local squirrel population.
My hand looked awful. I whisked away Mrs. Rogers’s scarf, since she no longer needed it, and used the dry end to wrap it. Only one person was capable of repairing this extensive damage, but I dreaded going back to her.
A hand can be replaced. But a good, reliable weapon? That was priceless. I felt naked without it.
I dragged the bodies into the trash barrels around the side of the house. You might be thinking, won’t someone notice? What about all the blood, the gun shots, hell, what about the friendly garbage men who collect the trash?
Well, we have an automated service, a truck with a robotic arm that picks up the can and dumps the trash. The garbage man never leaves the cab while the process occurs. If they see anything, they don’t talk about it.
Behind swatches of beige vinyl siding, people within cocoon themselves in the glow of computer screens and game systems, others medicated into their own versions of a brave new world. The conscious population does not care, and does not want to know about your personal business. Half of them are embezzling, laundering, smoking things the government doesn’t want them to smoke, and growing them to boot. They don’t want to notice you, because they don’t want to be noticed in return; and the rest are sleepwalking through their lives, the twenty-first century path to better living.
I want to believe there was a time when people cared, when people paid attention, when someone would have noticed five gallons of blood bleeding from my porch like my own self-contained water park. I want to believe that it was not always like this. Someone would demand answers and justice for what occurred here.
But you don’t ask a lot of questions from a pre-deceased corpse who likes to carry firearms, do you?
And anyway, the next-door neighbor had a power washer. I’m sure if I asked nicely, he’d let me use it to get the blood off the porch. Brings down property values, you know.
*
I waited until dark.
Pleasant Hills Cemetery.
Freshly watered grass soaked my boots and up into the fabric of my pants. Tombstones stood in the moonlight like upright fingers. My hand trailed the ragged, bloody edge of a scarf and held the last bits together with my congealing flesh.
I cased the building and attempted to light a cigarette with my maimed hand. The funeral home shut down for the evening and I could see Niko through the window, moving back and forth in a yellow square of light.
I’d gunned down a few nasty things in my life, but I was terrified of a petite, Bettie Page look-alike. That’s the power of beauty—it shakes you deep within, but skin-deep wouldn’t be strong enough to do that. Niko’s volatility burned through to the outside like a foundry. A man, or a woman, for that matter, could be tempered by her fire and love every second of the burn.
Her silhouette disappeared, and then the back door opened and she stood in the threshold, blue-black hair illuminated by the orange street lamp.
“You should come inside. It’s getting cold out.”
I trudged through the grass, across the graves. Some might think it rude, but the only difference between me and the ones in the ground was that I was still ambulatory. Cigarette smoke trailed out in a ghostly line behind me.
“How’d you know?” I asked.
She smiled, holding the door open for me. Ripped denim at her knees with fishnets beneath revealed warm skin pulsing with blood. I found myself licking my lips and stopped, clamping the cigarette harder between my teeth.
“I saw the cigarette.”
Her eyes fell to my destroyed hand as I reached out with my good one for the door. Still, I hesitated before entering, wary, and even guilty. I should leave her alone. I would only bring trouble here to find her. Trouble was all I knew.
“Bad day at the office,” I explained.
“You get that a lot? Or let me guess—you brought roses for me, but the thorns were really, really big.” She gestured at the bloody rag holding my hand together.
I smiled. “I’m a sucker for flowers. I liked them so much I kept them.”
“Your wife must like that.”
“I don’t have a wife,” I answered.
I stepped inside, and she led me into the building. We continued trading words back and forth. Her gait rolled onward, easy and weightless as we ducked inside the funeral home proper. We passed the empty knight on his pedestal. Though Niko commanded all m
y attention, I found myself wrenched away to stare into the blackness of his empty visor. To imagine him taking his first ringing step to the floor. Pulling out his sword. I manufactured the hiss of steel in my head. The sound of his gauntlet. Every strip of metal rattling to signal his approach.
I rushed past. The swinging door shut behind us and we left the knight behind. Mentholated smells of fungicide swept over me, the familiar drain holes in the middle of the floor. I should have some installed on the porch, I thought, taking in the newest corpses laid out on the tables. There were two; busy day in town.
“Divorced?”
I shrugged and when I turned to answer her again, she touched me. The instant took me aback as she grabbed me by the shoulder with one hand and pushed down on the center of my chest with the other. She forced me into a chair like a bull captivated by a matador. I did not resist. Her fingers were warm.
She turned away to gather a tray of surgical instruments, leaving me cold again.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“Maybe you should tell me about it.”
I puffed out smoke between my lips.
“You always have a thing for dead men?”
She turned back to me.
“Just you.”
Blades and mortuary instruments glinted in the light, cold steel. She took hold of my intact wrist, waxen corpse flesh beneath the cotton of my shirt cuff. With a firm grip, she pulled the sleeve up, revealing gangrenous flesh, moldy skin. She stared at it a moment.
My rasping voice broke the silence.
“You can pretend all you want. But at the end of the day, I’m as rotten as the corpses you treat. And I’ll never be human. Do you understand that?”
What little blood was left in her face flooded out, giving her flesh a subtle, blue note and her lips condensed into a thin line. She unwound the scarf from my blown-away hand, gentle, as though I still had any semblance of feeling, any sensation of pain. All that was over for me. I could sense when I was damaged, I knew parts of me had fallen off, but pain was a thing of the past. All that remained was discomfort and regret.
If in her tender, young heart, she was beginning to feel something for me, better that I crush it now. I sensed her burgeoning regard, a tension expanding the air between us each time our paths crossed. Barometric pressure inviting a storm. I regretted having come here in the first place. She could deny she felt anything, and the idea was preposterous—the last time I had a pulse, Britney Spears was a virgin.
Preposterous it might be, she had a way of looking aside from me, a blush that crept into her cheeks when she was as close to me as she was now, flustered and embarrassed.
“You understand, right?” I pressed her.
She laid my crippled hand bare on the table. Strange fluids oozed out, green and black and red. Half of the hand, from the palm up, was not even connected to the carpals; they would have to be pieced back together with other means.
But the hand was not important.
While she peeled back parts of the skin to assess the damage with a pair of tweezers, I used my good hand to touch her shoulder. She was so warm. I remembered life. I remembered the thump-de-thump of a heartbeat. I remembered blood and breath and intimate union.
I swallowed and my grip tightened until she stopped what she was doing and looked at me.
“It can never happen, do you understand? A kiss alone infects. There is no cure. I will never be alive, ever.”
Her expression didn’t change but her eyes shifted and she looked past me.
Before I could speak, a cleaver appeared in her hands, and in the next instant, my hand was gone.
*
Some butcher’s paper, I thought, and you could mistake it for a pig foot. If you discounted the blasted-apart fingers, that is.
My severed hand lay on the table. I missed it, even though it was well past its useful life. I’d had it since birth, carried it with me through grammar school and into adulthood. I’d shot my weapon with it. I had a lot of good memories with that hand on many a long, Saturday night. I smiled, remembering that part of living—the gentle part.
“What are you smiling at?” she asked, turning toward me with a fresh hand.
“Oh, nothing. You keep leftover hands around all the time?”
“Maybe it’s better that you don’t know.”
“You didn’t take it from a corpse, did you?”
She said nothing, but plunked the hand on the table next to me and began to pull out a series of surgical wires. Enough injuries and I’d be made of metal more than flesh.
“Don’t you think the relatives are going to notice dear old Dad is missing his hand?”
“No,” she spoke casually, aligning the wrist to my own. “Closed casket. I’ll throw yours in before they seal it up.”
“So, you just roll over one day and decide you want to touch dead corpses for a career path? Why not something more genteel, like a realtor? I hear that’s all the rage these days.”
She snorted with derision. Instead of being pig-like, it sounded cute.
“Maybe I really do like dead men.”
I hitched a breath in, taken aback, before I decided she was joking. Her sense of humor ran dark—real dark. I liked her.
“Seriously.”
“Well,” she said. “I was born on Hawaii, the Kalaupapa Peninsula. The island of Molokai.”
“Truly?”
“Truly. And they offered some programs paid through the government, and one of them was mortician work. So I went for it. Most thought I was crazy, but I like being alone. What about you? You shoot yourself in the hand just to have an excuse to see me? I won’t tell anyone.”
“Like I said—no wife. No one to tell. And someone shot me.”
“There are people who can help, you know.”
She was pressing wires into my arm, through the moist stump of rotten flesh as she spoke. They stuck out on the end like antenna on Sputnik, a bizarre, artistic sculpture.
“Hospitals don’t know what to do with me.”
“No, not the hand. I mean, with your other condition.”
“It’s called death, Niko,” I sighed, and pulled out a cigarette with my free hand as she began to connect the dead hand to my wired wrist.
“Yeah, that one.”
I said nothing. It was sweet that she wanted to help, but entertaining such a notion was counterproductive. I breathed in smoke, the lit ember dancing before my eyes.
“I left family behind,” she said. “They wanted me to stay, but there was no future for me. And I was not like them.”
“And leave all this behind?” I gestured at the bodies displayed in the cold, flickering light.
She smiled. “I learned a useful thing or two from my people. I know what it is like to live in a world starved of human touch, Vitus.”
I swallowed, and it sounded louder than I anticipated. As if to stress the words, her fingers pressed insistently over my exposed bone.
She stepped back from the table, extra wires clutched in her hand. “There, try it now.”
I stood up from the chair, evading her gaze. Now, I felt awkward and naïve before her, afraid to look at her face framed in dark, fragrant hair. The mentholated aroma of fungicide permeated the air around us like a perfume. I lifted my hand and flexed it, clenching it into a fist and opening it again.
The flesh was new, smooth. Unbroken skin whose cells still radiated with a near-visible aura of vitality. As if my clenched fist could hold on to the phantasm of my past life, anima draining away with each passing second.
The former owner of this hand could have been anyone—a banker, a construction worker, a food server, a pencil pusher. Were his memories still buried in the skin I admired for my own? Did the flesh hold ghostly echoes of this man’s meals, his typing habits, how he moved his fingers when he went fishing, if he did? I recalled a time when my hands had been so smooth, so young and untouched by the terrible vicissitudes of fate.
“You didn’t have to
do this,” I told her. A mist of smoke and hospital smells permeated the air and I contributed to it with each exhale.
Niko startled me, reaching over the tray of tools on the table between us, and plucked my new hand out of the air, with the cigarette dangling between the fingers. She curled warm fingers around my new ones, bringing the back of my hand to her lips.
I hissed a breath in warning. The skin she pressed her lips to was unbroken, but no matter how smooth the new hand may have been, such contact was still a risk. I pulled back like I had touched a burning hot stove, her lips still pursed, beguiling, as she looked up at me.
“Don’t do that,” I whispered. “You’re too young to be fooling around with monsters.”
“Then stop coming,” she challenged, throwing her head back like a boxer in a ring, ready for the next punch. “But we both know you’ll be back.”
Flicking ashes off my sleeve, I sucked in a lungful. Smoke outlined halos around us as I turned and left, hunched inside my trench coat.
She was right. I would be back.
*
Beep-beep.
Time for my dose. I dry swallowed a pair of pills like candy, forcing them down my sticky, decomposing throat.
When a client dies, the case is over.
I hung the picture of Owen on my fridge, the toddler picture and the high school picture side by side, and stood against my counter in the frigid dark with only cigarettes for company. I studied the two faces as though either could give me an answer about their identity, their circumstances. Mr. and Mrs. Rogers were dead, their story ended.
Clay’s—Owen’s—was just beginning.
*
When I arrived at my house, a vulture was perched on my porch.
Talons dug into the old, splintered wood, pig-like eyes sunk into wrinkled, lizard skin. His feathers looked like an old man’s unwashed hair, stringy, thin.