by Del Howison
The car’s GPS led me through the tranquil little Old California farming town, now best known for its spas and weekend getaways, even while being hemmed in by endless groves of oranges. I passed through the two blocks of downtown, passed a dry but restful old cemetery, and wended my way around the outdoor ramshackle used stacks of Bart’s Books, eventually winding up a dirt road to a tiny little Craftsman bungalow, removed from its neighbors. Giant valley oaks cast a canopy of cool shade, their papery leaves rustling a welcome in the breeze. As the tires spat gravel and I coasted to a stop, a silhouette revealed itself behind the shutters.
My heart pounded a military tattoo as I cleared my throat and made my way to the door, not knowing exactly what to expect. I popped the trunk, climbed out of the car, and hefted my iMac to the door. She met me there, and we stood facing one another through the rusty screen door for a wordless eternity. Her oddly lovely face was unmapped by experience, smooth as a ten-year-old’s, a translucence seemingly never kissed by sun. Her face was framed in a bob of auburn hair, and her astonishing golden eyes were wide in expectation and glinting in the sun. She was tiny, much smaller than I’d expected: barely five feet. She wore jeans and a loose white cotton blouse under a sort of shawl, as simple and as unadorned as her face. But she was luscious, and her visage soon bloomed into a convivial smile as she held her arms under the shawl to ward off the chill.
“You made good time,” she said as she pushed open the screen with a creak.
I stepped into the cool time warp of her home and felt embraced by it. It was furnished mostly in Stickley—or very good copies. The burnished old Mission Oak style suited the house, the setting, and its occupant. It felt untrammeled by the present, save for the modest computer sitting in the comer, out of place on the old desk.
“Where should I put this?” I asked, hugging the iMac.
Limping slightly, she led me to the dining room table, and I set it down. There were no lights on inside; the house was illuminated only by the sunlight filtering through the oaks and the open windows. “Do you want something to drink?”
“What have you got?”
I watched her go into the kitchen and open the fridge.
“I’ve got water, um, beer, iced tea, Diet Coke.”
Beer sounded good, and she pointed me into the living room while she poured the Michelobs. I glimpsed into the bedroom on the way back, noticing a tidy and comfy lived-in quality as I passed. The bed was made, and there was silent-scream art on the walls of a darker nature than you would expect from that soft, sweet face. I sat on the overstuffed couch and took it all in. The place had a history, permanence, something that I lacked. I was a loose end, at sea in a riptide.
She walked into the room, the tray of beers on one hand, and I stood to take it from her, settling back on the couch once she sat. I was trying to understand her, loving the breadcrumb clues she offered.
“Thanks for letting me come up here,” I told her.
“Thanks for sharing it with me,” she replied.
“Why did you contact me?” As much as I appreciated it, I still didn’t understand.
“Because you did something bold and brave. And because I thought I recognized someone of a like mind, and I don’t see many of those. Was I wrong?”
“I hope not.”
With that, I reached tentatively to take her hand, and she let me. But I was greedy; I wanted both. So I reached with the right hand as well, and her breath caught in her throat. She stared into my eyes, searching, before she wordlessly drew her left arm from under the shawl. It ended halfway between elbow and wrist. I was only beginning to understand the erotic charge coursing through me. Gingerly, I reached out, knowing she wanted me to, and touched the end of her arm, held it gently in my hand. I wanted to kiss it.
My voice broke as I asked, “Did you have an accident?”
“Not exactly,” she replied.
“How did it happen?”
She scrutinized me again before deciding to tell.
“I work in a print shop. I was cutting and binding a big job, and as I watched the guillotine hacking off blocks of paper, over and over and over, it sort of cast a spell on me. It was so hypnotic. It kept cutting, chopping as new stacks of paper were fed into it, and it just drew me closer and closer into it.” She looked at me, deciding whether or not it was safe to go on. It was. She gripped my hand tighter. “I don’t know, I just couldn’t keep myself from feeding it. Before I knew it, I’d shoved my hand in and pulled away what was left of my arm, spurting blood all over the piles of paper. My life was all over the book.”
She looked at me for a reaction, and I stared back in bewilderment.
“Did it hurt?” I asked her.
“Maybe. But it made me come.”
When she said it, I almost did the same. I was raging underneath my jeans. She dropped her single hand into my lap, knowing what was going on down there. I leaned in to kiss her, and she hungrily sucked on my tongue.
I carried her into the tiny bedroom; she barely weighed anything. She was irresistibly petite, and her erotic appetite was completely at odds with her gentle demeanor. As we kissed, her eyes rolled back in her head, and her cries as her body became drenched in sweat were guttural, uninhibited, downright feral. When I laid her on the bed, she wouldn’t let me stand and look at her; she pulled me down into the bed with her and feverishly unbuttoned my shirt, willing me to do the same to her. I was happy to oblige.
Her skin was alabaster-new everywhere, practically aglow, as if lit from beneath. When I removed her blouse, the flesh beneath was almost as white as the fabric. She took my hand in hers, bringing it to her mouth, sucking on each of the fingers before settling on the new, raw wound. The wet heat of her mouth was as soothing as it was exciting.
I unfastened her pants, and she eagerly raised her hips to accommodate their removal. They caught as I’d drawn them halfway down, and I struggled with them to pull them all the way off as her breaths came hot and rapid. They had hung up on the straps of her prosthesis. Her leg below the knee was rubber and steel.
When she said, “Take it off,” I knew what she meant, and removed the artificial limb. Repelled yet hopelessly drawn to it like a moth to light, I kissed and tasted its fleshy sweetness. When I finally entered her, I did not last long.
* * *
I woke to darkness as an old mantel clock chimed eight times; the day had lost me in postorgasmic slumber. The spot on the bed next to me was empty but still warm. Moonlight reached in through the window with chilly fingers to touch me, and I felt vulnerable, dressed only in gooseflesh. I looked down the hallway to see Sally sitting in the dining room, illuminated by the cool light of the iMac. She had set it up while I slept. I slipped out of the bed and into my jeans.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” she said, and I was grateful for the rest. “I hope you don’t mind me setting it up; it was getting late.” I thanked her and sat next to her to sign on. She turned away while I entered the appropriate passwords to prepare for tonight’s performance. Once that business was attended to, she kissed me, running her tongue under my lips and over my teeth, fully waking me before watching me prepare for the night.
There were no more free samples on TylersThirdAct.com on Night Two. This was now an exclusive club for paid visitors only. Over three thousand of them by now. I could tell that Sally was impressed, but she did not speak as I opened a bag and set up the accoutrements of my public dismemberment: the bowl, the hypo, the anesthetic, the silver tools, the Foreman Grill, the white satin pillow. As they lay out in strict anal-retentive order, my hands began to shake again, and I turned to look up at her over my shoulder.
“Beautiful,” she sighed.
“Okay if I take a shower?” I asked, and she nodded.
So I did, shivering and convulsing as the shower washed the slime of my life down the drain. I vomited a thin, liquid gruel of my sins; that’s all that was left inside me. And now it had been cast out like a wicked demon.
When
I had completed my toilette, I returned to the iMac, Sally, and my future. It was close to nine now: one hour from the next chapter.
“You look beautiful,” Sally told me, meaning it.
No. She was the beautiful one; all I could do was stare at her, take her in, worship her. If she thought I was beautiful, that made me happy. But I saw innocent, vulnerable beauty sitting before me, tiny and unprotected, and my heart sprung a leak. I took her face in my hands and kissed her, lovingly and lustlessly, gently pressing my coarse, stubbled cheek against the cream of hers.
“What will you remove tonight?” she asked me.
“I—I was thinking of another finger,” I stammered.
“Aren’t you …” She stopped.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Aren’t I what?”
“Just … aren’t you afraid of repetition? I mean, were you planning to just do a finger at a time, then maybe your toes?”
“Um … kinda, yeah.” Was there something wrong with that?
“I think your audience wants some, well, escalation. You don’t want to lose their interest.”
Escalation. For a moment, she sounded like a network executive. But I understood immediately that she was right.
“Like an ear?”
She took my hand in hers.
“Like a hand.” She kissed it and looked up into my eyes.
“A hand.” I swallowed. There was no turning back now. I had set my course of action, had outlined my final act, and had committed to its fulfillment. I had made a contract with myself.
It was quarter after nine. The clock on the wall ticked away the seconds ominously, stealthily, and I could swear that the speed accelerated. But that was probably just my heart.
“And after the hand?”
“Let’s think about after,” she said, “after the hand.”
“You’re right,” I told her, and she smiled, her golden eyes igniting. She kissed me deeply and at length.
“I don’t know if I have the right tools,” I said.
Her face still aglow, she said, “I do.” I didn’t doubt her. She left the room and returned with an oversized paper cutter. She set it gently on the table in front of the iMac and opened its heavy steel jaws. They gleamed in anticipation. I reached over and slammed the guillotine shut, and the hungry shing of stainless steel caressing itself sang me a lullaby.
I looked at the computer screen and saw e-mails and last-minute subscribers piling up. I turned to the clock and saw that it was 9:35.
“Well, what do you think?” she asked.
My soul and I had filed for divorce. I had sought resignation from the planet, solitary and insignificant, a single card misfiled among the millions. I looked into the eager eyes of another outcast, tiny and getting tinier. My worth came only in my diminution and eventual demise. So far, my audience had spent close to half a million dollars to watch my destruction, to witness a self-immolating soul cease to be. I found company, romance, and solace in the act of dismemberment, elements that had eluded me in life but burgeoned in the compressed time left.
“I think yes.”
I saw her eyes fill with joyful tears and welcomed her approval as she hugged me tight. I began to tremble again, utterly exposed and at her mercy. She pulled away and looked at me, holding a question behind her eyes as I quaked.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Do you want me to make the cut?” I could tell that was what she wanted; maybe it was what I wanted as well. When I nodded, the spasm within my body settled and calmed. I was truly in her hands.
“We’d better get ready,” she said. The clock’s synchronous symphony continued.
As practiced as a nurse, she injected the lidocaine all around my wrist. I could feel the tingle as it began to take effect. She put away the needle and massaged my arm, and I absorbed her heat.
“You got any Jack Daniel’s?” She had some Maker’s Mark, and I made do. As its burn was absorbed into my veins, I calmed even more. The seconds on the clock pounded ferociously by, a telltale heart counting down. Just minutes until showtime. She sat me in a chair right in front of the iMac and took her place on a chair just out of the camera’s range. Just before ten, she slipped on a simple, black Halloween mask.
“You ready?” she asked.
I was.
I turned on the webcam and faced the camera. Another three hundred paid subscribers had come online in the last few minutes, and their number kept ticking right up until ten.
I held my hands up to the camera, like a magician about to do a trick. Sally swabbed around my wrist with alcohol. I lay my sleeping arm on top of the paper cutter, and she helped me get it into position. The gleaming blade sparkled in wait. I tilted the screen of the computer so that the camera held my arm in a perfect frame. Then Sally took hold of the blade’s handle and, before I had a chance to object, slammed it down. My hand dropped to the satin pillow like a slaughtered starfish.
I jammed the stump of my wrist into the Foreman Grill and passed out.
* * *
It’s a hoary writer’s device to have the lead character lose consciousness and awaken to a new plot development with the passage of time. It’s cheap but effective, and I confess to adopting it numerous times, even within this account. Including now. As I had no idea of all the events that transpired during my disconnection from consciousness, all I can convey is my awakening, and the overwhelming aroma that accompanied it. It was the heady, meaty scent of cooking flesh.
My body was bent in an awkward, uncomfortable position, lying on a blanket that covered a hard metal surface. I opened my eyes and waited for them to focus, forgetting momentarily where I was. It was immediately apparent that I was not in my Sherman Oaks apartment. I was in Sally’s house, of course, but in a rusting metal enclosure. It was a cage of thick iron bars, barely four feet square. My head was muzzy and clouded, my vision tentative, my body in varying levels of discomfort. Then I realized that my mouth felt dead and swollen inside; there was merely a stump where my tongue used to lie.
I lifted my head to the direction of the kitchen, where a pot sputtered on the stove, delivering its beckoning bouquet. There were voices. I turned to see that Sally had company. Half a dozen visitors were seated around her dining table, each behind an elaborate place setting. Though they were of varying physical types—corpulent, slender, tall, diminutive, and of varying shades and ethnicity—they shared this trait: all were lacking in various body parts. Their flesh houses had been hacked away.
When Sally entered the room, carrying a steaming platter of meat on her single hand, she looked in surprise and delight to see that I was awake. When she said, “Good morning,” all eyes were on me, and backed me into a corner of my cage. It was then that I recognized some of them: one was Daniel Power, VP of dramatic programming at NBC; another was Carolyn Pfenster from Turner; a third was some low-level development guy from Universal, his name long forgotten after a failed pitch meeting last year. The others were unfamiliar to me.
Then I looked down to see that, aside from sitting naked before them, I was missing more than a hand. An entire leg had been removed as I slept, making my shrunken, dangling privates merely my second leg.
My stomach growled.
“Are you hungry?” Sally asked me. Everyone at the table answered in the affirmative, not realizing the question was not meant for them. I shook my head, denying the starvation that ravished me. I could not cry out for help.
The repast on the table before the gathered group was complete now. There may have been vegetables on the table, but I didn’t see them. All I could see was Filet of Sparrow laid out in mouth-watering fashion, and the group of diners tucked in to their delectable meal with relish. This show was no longer my own, I realized; the series I had created chronicling my own demise had been taken over; I’d been replaced as the showrunner. Tyler’s Third Act now ran on a new network, co-opted by the new owners and relegated to their own website.
Sally got up from the table with a dish and kne
eled before me, just inches from the other side of the bars. Through an opening at the bottom of the cage, she slid in a small plate. My disembodied hand lay there like a pink tarantula, tender meat barely clinging to the bones. “Go ahead,” Sally urged me. “It’s really good.” Yeah, I thought. And so good for me. I couldn’t eat it.
* * *
That was two weeks ago. Needless to say, I have developed a taste for human flesh, or I would not be here today. Well, what’s left of me, anyway. My limbs are gone, and just about everything else. Nothing else could be removed without it being the end of my life; I look like home plate.
They say that it’s not how you die that matters, but how you live. I beg to differ. As someone whose life was lived in anonymous mediocrity, my impending death was all that was unique about me. Tonight will be my final dinner party at Sally’s. The only pain is in my heart, not my body. Existence is highly overrated. I will not miss it. And if your subscription is paid up, you will join me in my bon voyage party. Sally has gently bathed and groomed me for the wrap-up of my third act, and the webcam is about to be activated. I hope you’ll join me for this very special episode before I fade to black and the commercials run.
“THOUGH THY UPS ARE PALE”
MARIA ALEXANDER
For youth is youth, and time will have it so,
And though thy lips are pale, and thine eyes wet
Farewell, thou must forget.
—“Good-Bye” by Anonymous, fifteenth-century France
PAINFUL SUNLIGHT, COLD air blasting between my raw lips. My head lolls forward wearily, the bells of Prime clanging faintly from the abbey. Men in ivory belts and mail coats shing shing shing from horse to chateau, squires scuttling like brown spiders behind their dirty gold spurs. Gripping the prayer book tucked in my muff, I am wondering which horse’s back holds my dowry. My thousands, our salvation. My life is not where I stand but strapped to a beast in a precious coffer I have never seen….
