Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  “How could you?” she whispered, stomach contracting in horror and despair. Her senses attacked with an intensity sharper than any knife Mel had ever wielded. She could smell the gagging stench of decay of her mother and baby all around her like a palpable thing, a blanket of death. And everywhere…the glint of steel and skin made her want to close her eyes again forever.

  She looked down, unable to face the remains of her baby. Or her husband. She saw the sheen of electric red blood slicking her leg, and saw the scars that pitted and poked their way up her thighs, turning to criss-cross trails like a city road map gone mad on her belly. Her once taut and beautifully creamy skin was a wrinkled mess of tears and mends, slices and stitches. There was no more beauty there; her youth was carved away, one pore at a time. Left behind on the points of Mel’s pins and knives and barbed wire roses. There were spots discolored, like the stretched skin of a wax figure that was slowly melting and stretching, taffy in the ghastly machine. Idly, she wondered which of the roses here was made of her own tortured flesh. Surely some of the gouges she’d thought to be innocent wounds of passion at the time had been meant to make harvests for Mel’s twisted garden.

  “Are you okay, honey?” he asked softly. “I know it’s probably a lot to take all at once.”

  She nodded, unable to answer, eyes drawn again and again from her own ruined torso to the tender sculpting of her baby before her, every petal paper thin, yet still a rose grown thicker than most in life. There were bare stems next to it still, barbed branches waiting patiently for their own bloodroses to bloom, and Tanya closed her eyes and said, “it was better to be blind.”

  She closed her hands around the barren stems until blood dripped brightly to the ground below. She brought her face down as if to sniff the sharpened barbs and then with a wrench, screamed as their tips scraped out her sight, a violent abortion, fake thorns carving new scars in the broken pits of her eyes.

  Dimly she heard Mel’s usually honeyed voice turn to broken glass as he screamed “no,” but it didn’t stop her from twisting the rose stems this way and that, twirling them deliberately all around until the red fire of pain and betrayal slipped from nausea, to numbness, to final, freeing black.

  — | — | —

  MADE FOR EACH OTHER

  A heart never empties in one night. It bleeds itself dry over a period of days and weeks and years. In a best case, the heart is connected to another, and as its blood drains away, it is replaced by transfusions from the other. They become a synchronous structure, both bleeding and refreshing the other. Unless one springs a leak.

  The true test of any structure—whether a heart or house—is how it weathers not just summer’s storms, but winter’s ice. Regardless of conditions, it shouldn’t spring a leak. I’m a carpenter by trade and know of these things. Let me tell you a story of hearts and houses.

  While a journeyman learning my craft, I purchased a small plot of land for the future. I lived in a small apartment, and put away my earnings until I was ready to build. I was smart. I had a blueprint.

  I laid my own foundation, married each beam to each concrete piling. My level was honest. My hammer true. My friends helped me, on weekends, and after a time, I left my lease behind to live beneath the roof of my industry. I followed my plan, worked hard, and knew where I was going. In fact, I got there.

  And then I met Regina.

  It was at an upscale bar downtown. The only electric lights beamed the room in blue and gold, while candles shadowed every table and corner in flickering mystery. A saxophone’s tale slithered between the table legs, while a drum’s tongue licked the mirrors behind the bar. The jazz was overpowering, intoxicating. Just like her.

  My friends said later it was love at first sight. I looked up at rap-tap-snap of her heels clicking in time to the beat across the hardwood floor as she moved in exaggerated rhythm from a table near ours to cross my vision on her way to the bar. It wasn’t the red boots, spitting candle tease back in my eyes, or the short black mini, flapping provocatively close to the edge of where her derriere must round. It wasn’t the way her filmy white blouse cinched tight to her waist before ruffling out again, lazily, or the point of her red lacquered nails tapping in countertime to the bass drum on the black slate of the bar as she waited for the tender’s attention.

  No, I was watching her face, captivated by her reflection in the mirror. She looked ahead of herself, unfocused, searching. I stared like a prisoner on first parole at the glinting blue of her eyes, and the glossy promise of lips so full, she might have been pouting, not playing with the napkins while nodding to the sudden rise of the saxophone’s sinuous neck.

  I could bore you with the painfully embarrassing details of my first approach that night, both of us a little farther into the bottle, the alcohol raising my courage while lowering her resistance. Both of our foundations tilted at a less than steady angle as I patted her shoulder, while she batted her eyelids. From such foundations are relationships built. No wonder the rate of marital attrition only grows.

  “You were made for each other,” our friends said, gaping in awe as we danced our way from bar to promise bands to wedding, each social event a new brick in the ever-growing masonry collection that was us.

  In actuality, we didn’t have much in common. I was a tradesman; I made my living with my hands, every nail’s bite a bond of solid truth. When I finished a job, there was something solid to show, something that couldn’t lie about its core, regardless of the amount of paint slapped on its surface.

  Regina, on the other hand, thrived on ephemera and illusion. She worked in an advertising agency. She wrote copy that sold millions of people on products they didn’t know they wanted or needed.

  She wasn’t a real blonde.

  It was months before I realized that the luscious globes of her naked breasts were not her own. At least, not completely.

  Nothing of her was what it appeared on the surface. Still, when she told me she loved me, I never questioned her. A house can be inspected, its joists tested for strength, its walls squared and leveled. A heart pumps away its love blindly, hoping that the flow returns and never knowing until too late if it does not.

  Regina’s goal in life was to improve things. Or, at least, to sell them as more than they were.

  When I undressed at night, she ran her hands over my chest, cool, needy and exciting. I shivered from the sensation and despite my goosebumps, she told me I was perfect. That must have been very frustrating for her.

  When she moved into my house, she sighed and spun around the wide hardwood floors of my living room and put her hands on her head.

  “It’s perfect,” she pronounced with a catch in her voice, just before hugging me. I didn’t realize, at first, that this was not a good thing.

  Perfection never lasts, if it exists at all.

  Regina’s last husband had not been perfect. Ned was a slacker, she said. A biker in a leather jacket with a perpetual sneer and the tattoo of a naked woman on his arm. It was like she had to compete with his biceps, she told me. Of course, after the bike accident, he’d been missing most of what hung below the biceps. Not to mention his eye. I had started to wonder if that unaddressable imperfection had been the real reason behind their marriage’s disintegration. Not that he couldn’t have had those issues addressed today, in the new age of body mod.

  Regardless of Ned’s obvious shortcomings, I was coming to realize that Regina wasn’t satisfied with anything for long. Even perfection.

  “I love your skin. So brown, so perfect,” she whispered one night, trailing her fingers from my belly across the wiry hair of my chest. Her face shifted then, and she looked up at me, bright-eyed. “Let’s get tattoos of each other’s names,” she said.

  “Only if you get a dragon tattoo right here,” I said, running the tip of my finger from the delta of her thighs to the dark pit of her bellybutton.

  She rolled on top and snaked a tongue between my teeth. Wanton.

  “Deal,” she whispered, com
ing up for air. “It will be like showing the world that we belong to each other.”

  “I thought that was the point of this,” I responded holding up the gold wheat twine of my wedding ring.

  She snorted. “That just says you’re married. But not to me. I want something of me on you.”

  “Your brand,” I said, and she raised an eyebrow, but didn’t answer.

  One weekend as I sipped my coffee, enjoying the quiet of early morning, she said, “Let’s add a sunporch off the kitchen. It will shield us from the light in the morning at breakfast, and give us a protected porch in the afternoon.”

  “But the whole point of having an eastern breakfast nook is to have the sun in the kitchen at first light,” I argued.

  But logic never counted for much in Regina’s world. After all, in one of her most celebrated ad campaigns, she sold mortgages with billboards depicting lip-licking braless coeds barely wearing business jackets. Loan applications at the sponsoring bank went up 57 percent during the first week of the campaign.

  I built a sunporch.

  The new sunporch threw off the planned balance of the house, and strained the furnace, since I hadn’t originally structured the ductwork to incorporate another long room. Our bedroom was cool in the winter, and warm in the summer. Once it had been even-temperatured.

  “Paint the house white,” she suggested, “to reflect the sun better.” I preferred its gentle blue and black accents, but still, I did. And found while I brought my brush across the siding that there was a crack in the foundation just to the left of the new sun porch. When I checked the basement, I discovered its previously perfectly smooth concrete work was splintered and leaking. The patchwork took an afternoon, but my house was ready again for winter.

  And soon, so was I.

  “Look what I got for you,” I said one day, beaming (and wincing slightly) as I strode into the now-gloomy kitchen. Regina was sorting the mail, and I rolled up my shirtsleeve to reveal the new blood-red heart pincushioned into my biceps. Across it, in black, was an arrow. Riding the arrow, were the letters R-E-G-I-N-A.

  “That’s so sweet,” she grinned, and kissed me, hard, on the mouth.

  “I got a two-for-one special,” I bragged. “We can go back and do you, too.”

  “How about if you just come do me now?” she coaxed, pulling me backwards into the cold bedroom.

  Afterwards, she suggested that, while the tattoo was nice, there were other ways in which I could improve.

  “You know, the latest body mod fashion is to go one-armed.”

  “Might be hard to swing a hammer that way,” I laughed, flexing her name so that the G jumped like a heartbeat.

  “You can have it put back on after the winter,” she said, shaking her chest below me. Her breasts barely rippled. She’d had her breasts resized to hard white shields over the summer, at the same time as she’d had the gene modification to color all of her body hair to a bronzed orange. I’d barely recognized her in bed that first night.

  “You have to keep reinventing,” she’d explained. “Otherwise… well, you wouldn’t want to be the same forever, would you?”

  “But I thought I was perfect?” I joked, biting playfully at the tiny nipple now held so close and hard to her chest.

  Regina had an amputee fetish.

  I guess she wasn’t that odd; one-armed men were the fashion that year. But I’d never experienced the intensity of the warm, wet explosion of her lust that my first night home sans arm brought. I’d had the left one removed and put in cryo-storage, since my tattoo was on the right. She couldn’t get enough of the smooth skin that ran from my shoulder blade around the curve to meet my breast. The ghost image of my arm was troubling; mentally I kept reaching out to grab things that I couldn’t touch and I found it difficult to maintain my balance; from then on, she was on top.

  In December, the upstairs bathroom began to leak, but not in a place I could reach easily. The leak was somewhere hidden, behind the wallboard. I knew this because a dark brown circle formed on the ceiling of the living room. Before I could get a friend over to help me fix it (I was fairly useless at such things with only one arm) the whole ceiling gave.

  Regina was smothering me in bed when it happened, shaking herself in my face and crushing me with a meaty arm across my neck. We both stopped when we heard the noise. A long, slow, grinding that escalated from aching moan into a necksnap crack and disintegrating crash. Her eyes blinked and she pushed off of me, stumbling from the bed to the floor, and I lay there, catching my breath for a moment before staggering erect myself. When we both shambled into the frontroom, I could see a rain of molding, rotted wood and wallboard littering the floor in front of the couch, and the joist I’d laid in so carefully years before with my two hands was now undone, warped and leaning from ceiling to floor.

  Regina waddled over beneath the hole to stare up at the dangling tiles from our bathroom. She’d put on 100 pounds this winter, because weight was suddenly the fashion. The perfect point of her chin now waved hello to itself, and the points of her breasts were lost in the surf of her belly. We rarely made love anymore. I couldn’t lie beneath her for long without an arm to protect myself and live. Yet still, I held out hope for us. I remembered the waist and wiggle of that girl at the blue-lit bar.

  “You really are made for each other,” my friends still said, though they didn’t sound as sure as they once had. I began to suspect that Regina was made—and remade—for herself alone.

  “You’d make a great one-eyed bandit,” she said one night, as I tried to slide between the folds of her second belly to find the hidden entry of her sex. Her flesh sloshed beneath me, hindering my explorations with doughy obstinance. It was then that she pushed me away from her thighs and begged me to give up my eye.

  “Do it for me, baby. You can always put it back if you want later.”

  It wasn’t lost on me that her ex- had lost both an arm and an eye in a motorcycle accident before their divorce, but I booked the body mod surgery anyway and came home to be almost crushed in her gratitude.

  It didn’t take long before she was bored again.

  “Open it now,” she said, thrusting the brilliantly wrapped box into my hands. I had just returned from a walk and hadn’t even taken off my jacket. She pulled it off me and led me back to the bedroom.

  “What’s the occasion?” I laughed, and pulled at the velvet ribbon with my teeth. I couldn’t very well hold and open it easily with only one arm.

  Impatient, she reached over and pulled the lid off herself. Digging through the white cover of tissue, she pulled out a flesh-colored, rubbery bag of skin and held it up to my face.

  “Try it on,” she begged. I could hear the water from the upstairs bathroom dripping in steady splats on the worn carpet of my frontroom. My will to build seemed to have been lost with my arm and my eye, and so the hole in the ceiling remained. The water had taken to draining steadily through the ceiling, onto the floor and running in a black wet stain to the corner of the front room, through the drywall into the flowerbed near the driveway. The wall was covered with the thin fuzz of mold, totally rotten. It would soon no longer support the french windows I’d installed.

  I’d fix it, I promised. Just as soon as I’d had my arm put back on.

  Not yet, she begged. Another month or so.

  I stood still, blinking blearily at her through my one good eye as she pulled the rubbery mask over my face. My flesh tingled as my new face found its comfort point and settled tightly on my skin. When she was done, there were dark rims around my field of vision, but I could see her through the hole that settled over my one good eye.

  It seemed to grip and mold almost perfectly to my face; I could feel its eyebrow raise when I wrinkled my own.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “It’s the latest thing—custom facials.”

  She leaned back on her elbows and appraised me, orange eyebrows raised like peaks of flame. I responded with an arch of my own; she had removed the weight thi
s week, anticipating spring, and seeing her lounge lasciviously supine on the bed was almost like seeing a stranger naked for the first time.

  “I think I look like your ex,” I said, noting the wart on the right upper cheek and the swarthy complexion of my new face. I’d seen plenty of pictures of her with him. In some of them, he even had all his limbs. My stomach lurched.

  “Don’t be silly,” she cooed and pulled me from the mirror to the bed with my good arm. “You can still walk.”

  She stroked my cheek.

  “It’s made from permaskin, the stuff they use on burn victims. If you leave it on for a day or so, it will fully bond with your skin and actually use your own blood supply to survive. “I had this one made just for you.”

  “For me, huh?”

  “Kiss me,” she said, spreading herself wide for me and pursing cupid bow lips dyed red as plums. A trail of newly pocked bellybuttons arrowed from her revitalized breasts to her burning bright pubes. Bellybuttons—lots of them—were to be this summer’s fashion statement.

  I leaned forward, favoring my armed side and trying to avoid clumsily falling atop her as I pushed my tongue through my strangely puffy new lips to meet the fruit of her mouth.

  Her eyes sprang open at my insertion between her moist lips, glittering with the telltale seagreen starbursts of Seduction Surgery. They sparkled in the dimmest of light like a prism. I had tried to tell her that she didn’t need that to seduce me…I’d fallen for her—for her…but she hadn’t listened. Maybe it wasn’t me she wanted to seduce. She pulled me down to her and ran her fingers along the smooth skin of my severed arm.

  “Oh Ned,” she whispered, staring into my mask, forgetting herself as she ran desperate hands from my new facial wart to the empty socket of my eye to my limbless shoulder. “I’ve missed you so.”

  She pressed me to the bed and I cried as she made love to a man I had never met. I cried for a long time when she finally pried the mask of her first husband off my head.