Dark Duets

by Christopher Golden

  A triangle of bloody flesh was on the floor, there on the Persian rug, under the coffee table. It looked like something a cat might vomit up, a chunk of a hairless baby bird scarfed down and then violently regurgitated. She let go of her wrist and reached her good hand toward her nose, only to find a slippery bony hole where her nose had been.

  She would not have thought it possible. She looked at her pinkie in horror. It had blood on its knuckle.

  “It wasn’t me,” her pinkie protested. “I’m innocent.”

  She rushed to the bathroom while blood spurted from the center of her face. She instinctively grabbed the white of the toilet paper and pulled it into great swirls and crammed the three-ply paper into her naked nasal aperture. She frantically searched with her free hand for the first aid kit. Her eyes so filled with tears it was like searching for something underwater. Her head throbbed. She felt dizzy and fevered—was she having a stroke? She managed to locate gauze patches in the first aid kit and added to the drenched toilet paper with gauze pads—she shoved them in, wincing, and thought about how boneless noses were . . . how vulnerable and defenseless. She sat on the toilet with a thunk, her middle-aged ass bigger than the seat. With her good hand, her gentle, compassionate hand, she held the gauze and paper in her nose hole. She eyed what was left of the toilet paper roll. She closed her eyes. Tried to regulate her breathing. Was she going into shock? Would she keel over off the toilet and hit her skull on the bathtub rim and crack it open and die? But wait, was the bathtub clean?

  After a time, her pinkie spoke. “OK. Fine. I’ll admit it. This looks bad. But I’ve been set up, hoodwinked, framed. I don’t even have a weapon.”

  “Your fingerprints are all over that nose,” she said.

  “I’ve held my tongue for fifty years. I’ve watched you do this mind-bogglingly stupid thing with your life little by little, year after year, and I kept to myself. Minded my own hand business. But there comes a time in the life of every finger when enough is enough. Do you realize how many times I’ve had to do things against my morals? Do you have any idea what my life is like connected to your body? I could have belonged to a concert pianist. A cellist. A star quarterback. A surgeon. A painter! But with you? Noooooooo. For Christ’s sake, I can’t even hold a decent martini.”

  She thought she heard her pinkie weeping. It drooped a bit and shook, almost as if it had shoulders that were heaving. Briefly she considered petting it with her calm hand. Like a mother would. Or a wife.

  But then she snapped out of it: “You sliced off my fucking nose!” she said, in a fit of rage, spitting the words down at her hand. Didn’t we all have an edge, a place in our bodies where we could go hard like steel?

  “Well, all right!” her finger shot back. “Yes! OK? I did it! I confess. I can’t undo it! But losing your nose is nothing compared to what you’ve done with your life! It’s a wake-up call, I’m telling you, like a message from God! Well, except for the fact that I’m an atheist . . . but those other ludicrous fingers, they believe in God! I hear their incipient whispering at night. Losers. So you can think of me as . . . I’m like a . . . like a commandment! Got it? I’m the motherfucking Moses finger of this bunch!”

  “What do you want from me?” she sobbed. “What on earth have I done? What are you talking about?” she screeched. The mirror shuddered. The shower curtain wavered. She caught a glimpse of mold. There should be more bleach, she thought. Why is there never enough bleach? She pictured her nose, alone, cold, probably blue out there on the rug. Dust bunnies gathering around it. Could it still smell?

  “Look,” her pinkie said, “it’s actually quite difficult for me to control myself just now. I mean, I’ve really had it. I can’t take it anymore. I’m a finger on the edge, I tell you, and I could use a drink. Do you think you could get us a stiff scotch before we continue this conversation? Just dunk me in it.”

  “I’m not getting you a scotch to dunk in!” she screamed, and then turned to the mirror and caught a glimpse of herself, bloodied and frantic, yelling at her own hand. What if the neighbors could hear her? Shouldn’t she call 911? Was her blood loss nearing a dangerous place? What the hell would she say when they got there? Should she put her nose in a Tupperware container and bring with? Her thoughts tumbled in her skull like drunk dice.

  “Oh no? NO? No scotch? FINE.” And then her hand swept up like a terrorist pledge of allegiance and lopped off one of her breasts right through her blouse. It splatted on the ceramic tile floor and jiggled like a jellyfish for a second—blood and corpuscle and vein guts and fatty tissue glistening in the halogen light. Her chest poured blood. There wasn’t enough toilet paper in the world for the wound where a breast should be. With the one hand she could trust she grabbed at a towel before falling to the floor, breathing “My God, my God . . .” Her breathing became like feathers. Her sight went all television snow. She had trouble forming word thoughts. The ceramic tiles were cool. Her chest exploded. Pain locked her jaw and dismantled her spine. This must be what soldiers feel when a grenade explodes, she was almost able to think. But really it was just a retinal flash from a scene in Apocalypse Now. Blood pooled before her there on the bathroom floor.

  “Yeah, well, God’s not here. I am,” her hand said quietly. “So here it is, straight no chaser.” Her speaking hand inched up near her face. She did not open her eyes, but she thought she could feel its breath on her face.

  “I’ve been offered a job,” her pinkie said. “By the government.”

  “A job?”

  “They want me overseas immediately. I can’t be lugging around your sorry ass. It’s nothing personal.”

  She opened her eyes. Her finger was mad, deranged, half cracked. “You’ll die without me,” she mumbled. It would, wouldn’t it? It couldn’t drive certainly, not without a thumb. How far could it get?

  “Ha!” cackled her finger. “That’s just like you, always the center of the universe, always making decisions for the rest of us. Newsflash, sister. I don’t need you, I never did.”

  How had she not seen this coming? The nail on that finger was always breaking. It had always had a mind of its own.

  Her life played out in front of her as blood spread on the floor. When had this phalangeal resentment started? Was it when she slammed that finger in the car door when she was ten? Was it when it got rolled over by another skater at the roller rink? Had she used it too often to feel around for hemorrhoids? Had her rings been too tight? It was true. She had been hard on that finger. This was her fault. She had to stop it.

  “Like, I don’t know what you are thinking. Would you just stop for a second and really think? Remember in college at the job fair when the government folks came and you interviewed with them? Remember how that one guy said to you, ‘You know, you have covert ops potential. Here’s how to access applications to the CIA’? Remember how excited you were?”

  Clutching her bleeding chest with her nontalking hand, she pushed herself up into a sitting position. It hurt to breathe. But she forced herself up onto her knees and started to crawl. Her leg nudged the raw meat of her dismembered breast and it skidded in the blood on the floor and came to a rest against the toilet.

  Her pinkie tried to slow her down. It clawed at the wall, at the pedestal of the sink, but she pressed on, across the hall, through her open bedroom door. The bedside table was painted purple, the color of a bruise. The drawer was already open an inch.

  Undaunted, her pinkie ranted, “Remember when you met that James Dean–looking dude your senior year and he said ‘Let’s go to Joshua Tree’ and you jumped on his motorcycle and hugged his ass with your thighs and held on for dear life, laughing your ass off like a banshee?”

  But then, with a shudder, her finger seemed to grok what was happening. How many times had that hand been in that drawer, rooting around for sleeping pills, a hair band, her mouth guard? It had seen the gun.

  The finger struck her on the side of the face, and she heard the sound of skin ripping and felt a flash of cold air
and pain.

  “This is your last chance! This is it, woman!”

  “Fuck!” she cried. Her ear hung by a bit of skin at the lobe. Her skull was wet with blood. The ear flapped against her neck as she lunged toward the drawer and plunged her good hand inside. This was really the last straw. Her fingers found the grip of the Glock and she pulled it from the bedside table and leveled it at her pinkie.

  The pinkie made a run for it, and her arm went straight as a board as the little digit strained and fluttered at the end of her hand, an arm’s length away.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot,” she cried.

  Her pinkie turned back, defiant. It wagged itself at her, the cocky motherfucker. “You can’t shoot me,” her pinkie said. “You don’t have the hand-eye coordination. You can’t even find the B on a keyboard.”

  She could feel the pulse in her palm, rapid and thready, her flesh a bloody sponge. She was on the cusp of losing consciousness. She steadied her trigger hand and fired.

  The bullet hit her pinkie square in the middle phalanx, severing the interphalangeal joint and blowing off tendon, skin, and nerve, leaving a jam-filled hole in a stubby one-inch sausage casing of flesh. A mound of shredded muscle sat on top of the hole, like a scoop of sorbet on a cone. It didn’t hurt. She brought her hand to her face and looked down at the bloody stump, ringed with a thin layer of skin.

  Thin-skinned. Figured.

  Dizzy from loss of blood, she crawled forward, looking for the phalangeal corpse. She found her pinkie on the bed. It was still alive and making quite a scene. She could hear a faint, pitiful rasping coming from it as it twitched on the chenille bedspread. Her finger seemed helpless without a hand to anchor it, unmoored.

  She curled next to it on the bed.

  “I’m pressing charges,” her finger coughed. “You won’t get away with this.”

  “Oh, shut up,” she said.

  SHE WOKE TO the sound of her own heart—or the awful bleeping of a heart monitor anyway. Everything around her looked beige and blurry. She could only be in a hospital. No place else smelled like someone shit air freshener. She tried to focus. Her face and head felt heavy, almost like lead. With her good hand she reached up and felt around; bandages covered her nose and ear. Something was under the bandages. Firm body parts, it felt like, splints. They had sewn her back together. Reattached her veins, arteries, bone, muscle, nerve bundles, and skin—sutured, cauterized, and clipped. She jutted her chin down toward her chest—yep, judging by the pain, they’d reattached her poor boob, too. She shuddered to think what it might look like—a bruised deflated balloon? There was only one place left to look.

  She brought her hand of violence and terror up toward her face. The finger was there. As if it had never left. She tried to speak, but a cough came out. Finally she said “Hey” to her betraying appendage.

  The pinkie swayed back and forth a little.

  Was it still . . . alive?

  Nothing.

  Two nice-looking policemen came in later to take her statement. Her neighbor had heard the gunshot, they said, and called for help. She was lucky to be in one piece, they said. The policemen opened their notebooks and gave her grave stares. “What happened?” they asked her. “Who did this to you?”

  She glanced at her bandaged finger. It throbbed slightly.

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  Nurses came and went, checking on her vitals, speaking in hushed tones about the tragic, brutal attack she’d survived, shaking their heads back and forth with sympathy. Noses, ears, fingers—they had slow metabolisms, the nurses said. They were quite durable, really. You could misplace an ear for a few hours, and as long as it was a clean cut, the surgeon could pop it back on, no problem. Penises did especially well when they got lopped off. They could last fourteen hours in a bucket of ice.

  She drifted in and out of sleep. There were two more surgeries on her breast. The doctors cut into her lower belly, loosened skin, fat, and muscle, and then tunneled the tissue up to replace the flesh that had died. She had long talks with surgical residents about nipple sensitivity.

  The police came back twice. She pled the Fifth. No one asked to talk to the finger.

  SHE WAS RELIEVED when her chest drain came out and they finally let her go home to her beautiful Restoration sofa set and her carefully crafted floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and her array of Pottery Barn knickknacks, candles, bowls of rocks and thistles. But instead of feeling at home, she felt like she’d stepped into the scene of a terrible crime. Her kitchen suddenly looked too shiny and unwelcoming, like things cooked in there would be toxic. Her bathroom held dark, unseemly, naked secrets like in a horror movie. It scared her a little to sit and pee. She eyed the toilet paper with strange trepidation. And her bedroom, her beloved, safe, gigantic bed with its 600-thread-count sheets, the velvet sage-colored curtains, the corresponding soothing sage walls, somehow seemed menacing now, like it had all turned against her—the bedroom, the house, her very life. All these beautiful things. Were they laughing at her?

  She looked at her pinkie—the stitches rather Frankensteinian-looking, even if they were the self-dissolving kind. Her pinkie remained silent, black and blue, swollen.

  The next morning she prepared for work like she always had in the past, coffee in the coffeepot, but she couldn’t help a strange feeling coming over her. Why hadn’t anything in her stupid house lifted a finger to help her in her time of need? She stared at the knife rack. Shiny useless inanimates. She leered at the pots and pans dangling swankily from the ceiling. Typical hangers-on. She ignored the dirty dishes in the sink. They would have to wait. Fuck them. What had they ever done for her? Her kitchen suddenly seemed like everyone else’s in the universe. A cartoon kitchen.

  She showered, washing all her fingers as though they were fingers. One ached and hung slightly askew compared to the others, but she tried to ignore it. She avoided the mirror—her nose and ear had not quite settled into their old positions—and she dressed for the weather, red boots, a rain jacket, and red leather gloves she bought to make herself feel special in the brick cubicle that was her office and destination.

  On her way to the door she took a quick detour back upstairs to her bedside drawer. There, she dug out the Glock and tucked it among the day’s paperwork and to-do lists. It comforted her, the Glock.

  On the freeway, her car merged with all the others, traveling at a constant speed not faster than traffic and definitely not any slower. For the first time she saw the road as four lanes wide of nothing but asphalt leading to a million dead and middle-aged ends. Her commute was forty minutes, and midway there she dialed down the heater and removed her gloves. A text buzzed in her purse. It started to rain again. Her exit loomed ahead of her . . . Exit 17. Why did it suddenly seem ominous? She could almost hear the minor notes of scary theme music. A voice-over booming out “Exit 17 . . .”

  Then quite suddenly her pinkie hooked around the steering wheel. She stared at it. It was difficult to know whether the actions that followed were intentional or due to some force outside her—some metaphysical power steering the car crazy fast across all four lanes of traffic, almost clipping Suburus and Priuses and mom vans en route. Her pinkie had the lightest touch, and yet her car drifted toward a completely wrong, completely unknown exit ramp that swung back over the freeway in a giant sky loop. When her exit was executed, she faced a strange and previously unknown long narrow road. Soon, signs presented themselves. Her pinkie acted like a finger at the end of her hand. It said nothing. Though she thought she might have heard a sigh, a long outtake of breath that sounded as if it had taken a lifetime to build . . . with her good ear.

  She looked ahead of her. This was not going to work. She looked in the rearview—all she saw was her own eyes, and the receding image of the job she was supposed to get to. Who was she and where was she going? She was a woman with a nose job. A boob job. Plus an ear job. A hand job. But so not like advertised on TV. Her breast burned, her nose ached, she still had two black e
yes from surgeries, her ear felt hot and fevered, and what she used to regard as her pinkie, well, who the hell knew what it was thinking? And why did she suddenly want to know?

  “Hello?” she said in the glass cave-world of her car, and then almost in a whisper, aimed at her pinkie, again, “Hello?”

  To the north, the narrow road led to a giant air traffic control tower in the distance. Planes leaped into the air all around her. People flying away from their lives—maybe to clandestine government jobs where they got to play spy or carry weapons. To the east, the desert . . . roadkill and scrub brush and red dirt and heat, where a woman could even lose herself, or find herself, or where murder-suicides were, in fact, common.

  Hollow Choices

  Robert Jackson Bennett and David Liss

  What struck me was that I didn’t feel happy in any way at all when they walked me down the hall. I’d seen other prisoners whoop and cheer they were paraded through the doors and gates and checkpoints, nodding to friends or enemies—especially enemies—as they made their big exit. I’d seen smirks and shit-eating grins and knowing smiles. I didn’t feel like celebrating. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even imagine how.

  Maybe it was who was walking me out. The guard on my right I knew pretty well. I knew his baton for sure, which I’d felt on my shoulder or cheek occasionally when I didn’t look at him the right way, or when he just needed to show off. The guard on my left had never hurt me, or at least never struck me or wounded me: but he had been the one to look away and slink off on the afternoon when Hutchins and his friends, who I’d apparently slighted, crowded into the shower with me, slowly penning me in the corner. . . .

  I wondered, as this guard walked beside me, if he had listened. He must’ve known what they were going to do to me. And I wondered if he’d known then, as I had not, that it wouldn’t be the last time.

  They showed me the papers. Recited the appropriate texts. Notified me of all the strictures that’d be placed upon me when I walked out those doors. They were telling me, in a way, that though I was free of this place, though I’d served my time and paid my debt to society, I was not truly free, for they still had some part of me, some part still locked up in here. I nodded, and nodded, and nodded.