Facial

by Jeff Strand

  I’d keep Chester around, because he had an extremely large penis and I was in favor of extremely large penises, but if he didn’t make this happen soon, I was going to flick his balls like I was flicking an insect off a windowsill.

  If I had to guess, I’d say that your sympathy for me right now is pretty minimal. That’s what happens when you start your portion of the narrative with a moment where you’re asking a guy to come in your face. I understand.

  I never expected to be the kind of woman who would cheat on her husband en masse. Greg is the one who deflowered me, after various issues kept me a virgin until my early thirties. Hell, I wanted to wait until our wedding night, but I succumbed to his charms shortly after I bought the dress. It didn’t hurt anywhere near as much as I’d expected, and I regretted not getting started with this aspect of my life much sooner.

  It was great for about fifteen years. Not that I had a basis for comparison, but overall, I was completely satisfied.

  Then Greg had what we discretely referred to as “issues down there.”

  That’s fine. Everybody gets performance anxiety sometimes. It becomes a problem when you’re unwilling to do anything to fix the issue. If I’m down there, being extremely generous, you can’t just sputter, “It’s not working!” and give up after thirty seconds. You can’t refuse to talk to your doctor. You’ve got to work through the humiliation and make an effort. You can’t just quit.

  What was I supposed to do, slip Viagra into his drink?

  The first time I cheated on him, it just happened. I know, I know, that’s a complete cop-out excuse. It doesn’t “just happen.” What I meant is that it was unplanned. Brett, the server at the Tex-Mex place where I often went for lunch, had always been harmlessly flirty, but when he asked why I was crying, I forced myself to give him a brave smile and said that it was nothing, just the problems everybody has, no big deal. He said that if I ever wanted to talk, let him know.

  He was young and fit and apparently into older women, and the next time I went there for lunch, I flirted back, less harmlessly.

  I called Greg to let him know I’d be late from work.

  Now I had a basis for comparison, and oh my freaking God had I been missing out.

  I felt sick with shame. I was now a woman who would cheat on her husband. A cheater! A reprehensible cheater! And when Greg found out, he’d divorce me for sure, and everybody would know what I’d done, and I’d be an outcast, and I’d deserve to be an outcast because I was a cheater.

  But, damn, it had been good.

  And we did it again.

  One evening, maybe three months after this started, I realized that Greg had been poking around in my e-mail. An e-mail from Brett that I hadn’t read wasn’t in boldface. His e-mail didn’t say “I certainly enjoyed sliding my erect penis into your vagina and thrusting repeatedly,” but it wasn’t innocuous, and it was clear that something was going on between us.

  I was sick to my stomach, physically trembling, waiting for Greg to confront me.

  He never did.

  A week passed, and he didn’t say a thing.

  I vowed to quit. I’d break it off with Brett, chalk it up to temporary insanity, and go back to being a loyal, faithful wife.

  Instead, I created a secret e-mail account and joined one of those websites for singles.

  I made a lot of new friends (and they were all friends—I wasn’t seeking a romantic relationship). Yes, I’ll admit that the number was getting kind of high, but if I’d had one boyfriend a year from the ages of eighteen through thirty-five, nobody would shout “Oh my God! She’s the worst slut ever!” I’d simply gotten off to a much later start and had my lovers in a more compressed timeframe.

  Greg knew. He had to know. His genitals didn’t work but his brain did.

  I kept waiting for him to say something. He never did. Was he too cowardly to confront me? Did he not even care? I started to resent him. If he wasn’t going to say anything, why shouldn’t I have fun? Why shouldn’t I have my physical needs met like never before?

  Sure, I felt guilty. Especially when I did things that had been strictly off-limits with Greg. The thing is, when you ask in a different way, and you’re careful to ease into it, and you bring plenty of lube, I’m more receptive.

  Like I said before I went into the backstory, I’m not a bitchy lover. There are simply different levels of longevity for different circumstances. If we’ve got a hotel room and three hours of free time, then I want you to pound away at me in a marathon session. If I’m going down on you in a parking lot, and there are people wandering around with shopping carts, it’s in both of our best interests for you to climax in an efficient manner. When I ask you to come in my face, do it!

  “You’ve got ten seconds,” I said.

  Chester nodded. “Ten…nine…eight…seven…”

  “Please don’t do a countdown.”

  Chester nodded again, and continued to nod down the rest of the count. He squeezed his eyes closed, tilted his head back, and jerked with such fervor that I worried that his penis might tear off, pop out of his hand, and hit me in the face. Since there was a very specific reason I kept Chester around despite his personality defects, it would probably give me a concussion.

  Finally, finally, he got there, letting out a moan of victory like a caveman who’d killed a bison.

  “Oh…oh…oh, yeah…that was so awesome…I just can’t even…oh, man…I never thought I would…oh, yeah…I love you.”

  “It got in my nose,” I said, wiping my face in disgust.

  “You sound like you have a cold.”

  7

  Jasper

  Now that the job was done, I felt sort of self-conscious about my enthusiasm for cutting off the dude’s head. I shouldn’t have admitted anything. I should have volunteered with more of a “taking one for the team” attitude than an “Ooh! Ooh! Me! Me!” one.

  I’m not a weirdo. It’s never been my fantasy to chop off a head. I’d always thought it was as vile as everybody else did.

  Yet when the opportunity came up, it seemed kind of…cool.

  And you know what? It was. It was fun. I wanted to sing while I was moving the hacksaw back and forth across his neck. (I didn’t.) Instead, I made up a song in my mind:

  Cuttin’ off a head.

  Cuttin’ off a head.

  He’s already dead.

  So he won’t need his head.

  It wasn’t a great song, but it had a catchy tune. I kept singing it to myself as Greg’s brother knelt down next to the face on the floor.

  “It’s not going to fit,” said Carlton.

  “It will if you are persistent,” said the face. It opened its mouth wide.

  I had to agree with Carlton. No way was that head going to fit. I’d happily saw it in half or quarters, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to volunteer.

  “Just do it,” said Greg. He was a nice boss, easy to work for, flexible with me arriving late or leaving early, but ever since he’d hired the assassin the dude was unpleasant to be around.

  Carlton placed the head on the face’s mouth. It wasn’t even close to fitting. Carlton picked the head back up. “Maybe we need to slice it.”

  “Just push,” said the face.

  “I don’t want to hurt your teeth.”

  “You will not hurt me. Push.”

  Carlton glanced at Greg, and then at me, with an expression that seemed to say, You guys are witnesses, right? He asked me to do this. It’s not my fault if his teeth all break off. Then he set down the head, facedown on the face, and pushed.

  The face’s mouth opened wider.

  Wider.

  It was a struggle for sure, but you know what? He got the head in there. I couldn’t believe it. Dirk’s head disappeared from sight, the face closed its mouth, and we stood there for a few moments, listening to crunching sounds.

  I thought it would be funny if the face let out a belch, but it didn’t.

  Finally the chewing stopped. The face l
icked its lips. “I thank you.”

  “Where’s our reward?” asked Carlton.

  “Have patience.”

  “You’d better not be reneging,” said Carlton. “I’ll go get some dog crap from my neighbor’s yard and drop it down there if you’re reneging.”

  “I will pay my debt.”

  The face closed its eyes. It began to glow with a soft, otherworldly blue light. It opened its mouth and a beam of that blue light shot out, quickly growing in intensity until it almost hurt to look at it, but I kept looking because when else are you going to see freaky shit like this?

  Suddenly the light disappeared.

  Three small items landed on the ground with a clink. Greg stepped on one of the gold coins before it could roll away.

  “Those were salvaged from a sunken pirate ship,” the face informed us. “They have great value. Spend them wisely.”

  “We’re rich!” I shouted, even though I had no idea how much gold coins salvaged from a sunken pirate ship fetched on eBay.

  We each picked up a coin. This could have turned into a situation where one of us picked up two coins and it became a tense standoff, but that didn’t happen.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to eat the rest of him?” asked Carlton, nudging the headless assassin with his toe. “Otherwise we’ll have to bury him somewhere.”

  “Then bury him. You have done me a great service, but further rewards await you, if you are willing to let go of your moral qualms.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Carlton. “Qualms are gone. We’ll definitely kill more people for you, no problem.”

  Carlton and Greg both looked at me.

  It was not a fun look.

  To be fair, there were only four of us in the basement to look at, and to be additionally fair, when a comment like “We’ll definitely kill more people for you” is thrown out there, it makes sense to look around at the others in the room to gauge their reaction.

  But considering the circumstances, I don’t think that it was too big of a stretch to think These fuckers are gonna kill me!

  Was it overkill to grab the hacksaw and start waving it around? Was it going too far to shout, “You sons of bitches aren’t going to get me!”? In retrospect, yeah, it was. Though it was less overkill than when I actually swung the weapon at my employer.

  I got him in the upper arm. It was a good hit with a lot of force behind it. Unfortunately, a hacksaw isn’t an axe, and you can’t really lop off a body part in one hit.

  I was by far the biggest guy in the basement, but it was two against one, and one of them had picked up a mop. He whacked me on the back of the head with the wooden handle, and I fell to my knees, and he whacked me again, and they both started stomping on me, and I apologized for my behavior, but I don’t think they heard me, and then my part of the story came to an end.

  8

  Carlton

  “Do not damage his skull!” said the face.

  I stopped my foot in mid-stomp, feeling a bit sheepish because I’d been about to do exactly that. “We can wreck the rest of him, though, right?”

  “Yes,” said the face. “But leave his skull unbroken.”

  So we beat Jasper to death without hurting his head.

  I’ll be honest and admit that there’s a point, even if you aren’t a trained medical professional, where you can pretty much figure out that somebody is dead. We went far beyond that. It was as if Greg and I were trying to find out how much we could flatten him out. We had gold on our minds, and when I was a kid, I’d read that you could take a piece of gold that weighed less than a couple of packs of chewing gum and pound it thin enough to cover a football field, so maybe that’s what I was thinking.

  Not that we stomped on him anywhere near that much. That would have been depraved.

  Finally my legs started to get tired. I think Greg’s legs were tired, too, but he didn’t want to admit it. We quit crushing Jasper and stood there, catching our breath.

  As you can probably guess, things were suddenly very awkward.

  I’ve already said that I’m a man who takes responsibility for his own behavior. I don’t go around blaming the ills of society for my problems. But hear me out. If you stomped a man to death, even in self-defense, and you kept stomping and stomping while bones snapped and organs squished and flesh split and fluids spurted, is it really so far-fetched to suggest that there may have been other forces involved? Greg and I squashed the fuck out of Jasper, a guy I’d always liked. Doesn’t that seem unusual to you? Again, I’m not trying to deflect the blame away from myself, but it’s worth considering.

  The face opened its mouth wide.

  Jasper’s head had already come off, so there was no need to argue about who would handle that task. I picked up the head and shoved it into the mouth, with much less effort this time because apparently the mouth had widened.

  More blue light. Two more gold coins.

  To me, the payment shouldn’t have been reduced just because there were fewer of us now, but then again, the face had tripled its original offer after we jammed Dirk’s head in its mouth, so who was I to complain?

  “Again, I thank you,” said the face, in unison. It said this in unison because there were now two of them, side by side. The eye colors and nose shapes were different, but they kind of looked like siblings.

  “Is that other face you?” I inquired.

  “I am many,” said the faces.

  “That’s weird as hell,” I said.

  Greg was wiping the sole of his shoe off on my bottom stair, which, even though there was splatter all over the floor, seemed kind of inconsiderate. This lack of courtesy was, to me, the real reason his wife was having affair after affair after affair.

  “So,” I said to Greg, “Jasper. He won’t be missed by anyone, will he?”

  “He’s got a wife and two kids,” said Greg.

  “Damn.”

  “With a third on the way.”

  “Fuck.”

  “We shouldn’t have murdered him.”

  “Hey, if somebody has a pregnant wife, they shouldn’t go around waving hacksaws at people. It’s irresponsible. We wouldn’t have killed him if he hadn’t been aggressive like that.”

  “I don’t know. I have to admit that I was sort of leaning in that direction before he picked up the hacksaw.”

  I sighed. “All right, I was, too. Screw him. He’s not family.”

  “He was a good employee. Always reliable. Always available to talk. He’s the reason I didn’t need therapy. If he hadn’t been there for me every Tuesday through Saturday, I don’t know what I would have done.”

  Greg looked like he was going to cry. I hadn’t seen him this upset since last night’s confession that he’d hired a hit man to kill Felicia’s lover.

  “Still,” I said, “the hacksaw is an important element of what happened. You can’t succumb to paranoia like that without consequences. Look what he did to your arm.”

  “It’s barely even bleeding.”

  “True. But only because you took action. Don’t think for one second that he wouldn’t have stood there and sawed your arm off if you’d let him.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you what we did?” asked Greg. He gestured to the gore that covered the floor in a twenty-foot radius. “This is the kind of crime they make documentaries about. Why would we do this? We’ve always been so passive.”

  “Honestly, I think it looks worse than it really is. This floor wasn’t designed for drainage, so stuff is spreading out. Is there any blood on the ceiling? Nope, not a drop. Is there any on the walls? Yes, but only one wall, and this basement has four.”

  “What about his hands?”

  I looked around but didn’t see them. “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know, either! You know why? Because they’re no longer recognizable as hands!”

  “Calm down,” I said, pointing to one of many, many wet red blobs. “That’s part of one. You can see the fingernail.”

  “I’m not try
ing to add tension to what is already a very stressful situation,” said Greg. “But I feel like we were a little out of control.”

  “Fine. That’s fair. I’ll admit it. If we’d taken the time to think things through, it probably would have played out differently. Not our finest moment by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, hey, we got the job done. Not all brothers can work together so well.”

  “We’re horrible people.”

  “No. Horrible people would steal Jasper’s gold coin. We’re not going to do that. In fact, we’re going to give it to his family. Not in person, of course, since his wife would think it was kind of bizarre for us to give her gold from a pirate’s lost treasure, but we’ll slip it under the door or put it in their mailbox or something, we’ll figure it out, maybe we’ll sell it and send them a check for the cash value, but however we handle it we’re not going to steal it, and I’ll bet you that ninety-eight percent of the people in our situation would steal that coin, the thieving bastards.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “I’m not trying to say that today you and I didn’t suck. We did. There’s no argument. But we didn’t suck as much as we could have, and I think that’s something to be proud of.”

  “I guess,” said Greg.

  “May I interject?” asked the faces.

  “Sure,” I said. What was I going to say, no?

  “Few would deny that today’s act of violence was more hostile than necessary. But where you saw mental illness, I saw passion. A passion for one’s work that is rarely seen in contemporary times. If a custodian was sweeping a floor, and he continued to sweep until nary a speck of dirt remained, would you think him a madman?”

  “A bit OCD, maybe,” said Greg.

  “Then today the two of you succumbed to obsessive-compulsive disorder about the task you were completing. Nothing more. You did your job with pride, and much like the aforementioned custodian, you are to be commended.”