Needles & Sins Read Online Free

some…until her skeleton was set free to dance in a kaleidoscopic celebration on my fucked-up bones. Because if I did what Janis wanted, I would have no office or career, or life. I would be locked up forever, for first degree murder…with a violently violated corpse as gruesome evidence that provided no potential defense. Nobody cut open a woman for a procedure the way this woman wanted me to.
    “You can release your inner you without my help,” I said finally, after listening to her insane demands. “Watch Oprah.”
    “I have,” she said. Her wide lips curled up higher in a sneer. “But this isn’t a fake bourgeois ‘I need to go to the mall’ problem that I have.”
    I shrugged in curiosity. I’d like to say disinterest, but frankly, this woman fascinated me. She was not bad looking. She was close to my age. And she seemed to be fixated on having me put a knife to her flesh. I assumed she was some kind of extreme masochist. Not my kink, but fascinatingly perverse, regardless.
    “Listen,” she said. “There is a better me inside me that needs to be let out.” She ran a finger up my arm, as if to suggest…sensual reward for my work. This, I was well-versed in dealing with.
    “Janis,” I said, “I can help you to realize the goals you have in your surgery…”
    “Spare me the surgical-psycho mumbo jumbo,” she cut me off. “I don’t have any goals other than that you cut me open and let the real me out.”
    I laughed.
    She slapped me.
    “I’m not fuckin’ kidding,” she said. “I want you to put a scalpel on my forehead, draw it down to between my breasts, and then open my belly, my thighs and my calves until the blood flows out to the floor like a bad plumbing leak. I want you to slip your hands inside the open wound, and lift the flesh like a door until my body is truly ‘open.’ Only then, can she be set free.”
    “Assisted suicide is not legal in this state,” I whispered.
    “I’m not talking about suicide,” she insisted, her eyes blazing wide. “I’m talking about rebirth.”
    Color me stupid, but I just didn’t feel that desperate yet… I turned her away, a second time. And as the door to my ramshackle office rattled itself closed, I sank to the stained carpet and held my face in my hand. She had been my only potential patient for days, and I’d turned her away for …what? Morals? Ethics? She was crazy as a loon but who was I to deny taking money for doing what she wanted? And I was at the end of my own hang-noose rope. I could have insisted on cash payment up front and disposed of whatever remains remained efficiently, after the fact. Beggars can’t be choosers, or they die. I stood up after a while, walked to the back office, and poured a tall glass of Maker’s Mark bourbon. No other patients rang the receptionist bell that day to interrupt my drink. It was the last I was likely to have of the good stuff. When I finally left the building, it no longer looked lost and rundown to me. It only looked blurry. Like the focus on my life.
     
    I imagine that she went to other doctors in her mad, self-abusive quest. I imagine she was turned away. I imagine that’s why she spent some time on research when she found that my medical practice had closed, and turned up at the door a few weeks later to my one-room apartment. It was hard to pull myself away from the buzzing glare of the hypnotizing lights inside my head to answer the door. I had been drinking cheap whiskey and sometimes cheaper vodka for much of the month, and sound was occasional. Cognizance optional. The lightshow was phenomenal though.
    “I’ve been looking for you,” she whispered, when I finally staggered to the door. I responded with something intelligent to that, like “huh?”
    “I want to live,” she said. “I can’t take being bottled up anymore. But you have to set me free.”
    She pressed a boxcutter into my hand, and began to unbutton her blouse in full view of the still-open hallway door. “I want