you to help me.”
How could I dare to touch her? She was a more handsome woman than the bitch who had married me, drained me of all my free cash and then divorced me with a large alimony anchor. Her eyes were hazel and mysterious in their refusal to choose a color. Her breasts were full and alluring, despite being hidden behind a fabric that never showed cleavage. Her waist was not thin, but was also not fat. I could imagine being lost in the midnight mysteries of her and dreaming of returning. Why would I cut her?
She waived a stack of green hundred dollar bills in my face. The stack was thick. At a glance, I guessed that it amounted to three or four thousand dollars. Maybe more.
“There’s more if you’ll just perform the procedure,” she promised. I laughed at that.
“If I cut you the way you said, you’ll be dead within 10 minutes. There will be no more anything.”
“No,” she insisted. “I will be reborn. And I’ll pay you for that.” She pulled up her shoulders to stand straight and declare with laughably dramatic posture, “I will pay you handsomely for setting me free.”
“Why don’t you just cut yourself open?” I asked. I looked pointedly at her visible scars. “You’ve clearly played with knives in the past.”
“I didn’t say the procedure wouldn’t hurt me,” she said. “You’re right; I’ve cut myself plenty.” She pointed at the ghost-white lines tracing history across her face, her neck and her arms. “I’ve seen the real me, my beauty within. When I open myself, I can see her slip around and knot and move beneath the skin. But it hurts too much for me to do it myself. I need your help.”
She pressed her hand against my chest, and the pressure almost tipped my inebriated derelict body over.
“I need a surgeon,” she said. “And you need the money.”
The idea of the money in her hand transferring to my bank account flitted through my blurred mind. It was a fine idea. Buying bottles to hide in was growing increasingly difficult.
“I need anesthesia,” I declared, wobbling just a bit. “Not for me,” I added.
“No anesthesia,” she said. “No drugs of any kind. If you put me to sleep during the procedure, you’ll put my inner self to sleep as well. And then it all will fail. I need you to strap me down, and cut me open. Fast. You must be quick.”
She looked hard at me, and there was a glint in her eye that threatened to dissolve into tears. “Can you do that?”
What she asked of me was barbaric. To be filleted alive. Without relief. It was worse than murder. Yet the crime didn’t daunt me in my desperation.
I nodded. Yes, I could be quick.
“We need an operating suite though,” I said. “I need a table to strap you to, and scalpels. And no one can be around.”
“They haven’t emptied your old office yet,” she said. “I stopped there today. The door was locked, but the furniture still was inside.”
“Why…” I began. But she put a finger to my mouth.
“Don’t ask questions,” she said. “Just cut me open, and let the real me out.”
There was a chain around the door of my old office, and a yellow sticker that declared it an off limits place. A scene that had been deemed criminal…or at least, unpalatable by local authorities. I had been evicted. But from the look of the door, you’d have thought that I had murdered patients and stacked them like gory firewood against the rafters inside.
Maybe tonight, I would perform an act that would give those stickers some remote credence.
“We can get in a side window,” she suggested.
“We’d have to break one,” I said. “They didn’t open easily from the inside, let alone from the out!”
“It’s not like anyone’s monitoring the place,” she pointed out.
I looked at the urban avenue around us and had to agree. The pet supply house across the street had bars on the windows and doors, and a pawn shop two doors down also was well sealed. A few cars slipped through the