Sarah looked terrible. She looked as if she’d just climbed off of the autopsy table. But then again she’d always looked like that. Her sunken cheeks and thin lips were drawn tight around a tremulous smile. Her eyes were sunken deep into her skull and seemed to be little more than holes cored into her face. I could almost smell the formaldehyde wafting from her pores. At first I thought she was some type of zombie until I saw that she was the only thing in the room not casting a shadow. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there staring at her with all my nerves jangling as if electrified. When I didn’t smile back, her face cracked with a wounded sadness. Sarah turned and bolted from the room, letting out a mournful wail like the sound she’d made the day I’d shunned her in the hallway at school.
She wrenched open the backdoor and slammed it with a loud bang. I was less than a second behind her when she ran out into the yard. Still, when I opened the door, the yard was empty. Sarah was gone.
I didn’t tell my mom about it or any of my friends at school. That would have meant admitting to my mother how cruel I’d been and admitting to my friends that I felt guilty about it. So I kept quiet. And Sarah kept following me.
Next I saw her at school. Waiting for me in the halls as she always had. She smiled that same tepid grin that looked now like a rictus of death and I quickly turned around and stalked off in the other direction, ignoring the questions from my friends who obviously couldn’t see her and could not understand why I was retreating from them. Of course they couldn’t see her. They hadn’t been able to see her when she was alive. Besides, I was the one she was haunting. I was the one who’d killed her.
I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Everywhere I looked Sarah would be there.
She was waiting for me in the bathrooms. I nearly killed myself one morning reaching for a towel as I spotted her staring at herself in the vanity mirror, picking the scabs on her bald head. She turned to me and flashed me that lip-less grin that made her look even more like a skeleton. Her arms and legs held no fat at all and very little muscle and every blue vein stood out prominently through her translucent skin. Sometimes she would be naked with her shriveled breasts partially concealed by one arm coyly draped across her chest. Her stomach completely concave and her ribs pressed tight against her skin. These weren’t the ravages of death I was seeing in her emaciated body. I knew that this was exactly how she had looked in life. I soon avoided taking showers.
I stared across the kitchen table at her every morning as I choked down oatmeal and stirred the runny eggs on my plate with a fork, swallowing hard and trying not to regurgitate. She would smile at me so that her red bleeding gums would show and her eyes would water up as if she really wanted to cry, but was only forcing that ghastly grin onto her face in an attempt to appear friendly, for my sake. Her cheeks were sunken so deep that it looked like she was trying to suck a lemon through a straw and her cheekbones appeared ready to rip through her skin. Her eyes were huge in her shrunken head and stared back at me looking wounded and expectant. I didn’t know what to say to her. I had no idea what she wanted. I wanted to implore her to eat something but then I would remember that it was far too late for that. She began showing up at every meal. I quickly lost my appetite.
The first night she appeared in my bedroom I had tried apologizing for not being nicer to her while she was alive. I told her I was sorry for not being a better friend. She smiled that same nervous unenthusiastic grimace and reached out and stroked my face with her fingertips. I leaped back about ten feet when those icy appendages raked my flesh. I kept forgetting she was dead. By then she had been following me for so many weeks that I had almost gotten used to her.
It was my mother who first began to notice my weight-loss. She would beg me to eat and then look frightened and concerned when I would refuse or regurgitate the few morsels I managed to ingest. She would constantly ask me what was wrong because I had completely withdrawn from all my friends and would stare off into space for long minutes, occasionally bursting into tears. Nothing could comfort me. Sarah’s melancholy presence haunted me every hour of the day.
Pretty soon the kids at school started to remark on my increasing strangeness. Not just my daydreaming and emotional outbursts but my deteriorating appearance. My cheeks began to get that drawn and sunken look. The bones in my face grew more and more pronounced as if my skull was rising to the surface. I spent hours in the restroom vomiting up what little I was able to force myself to consume. My friends at school were the first to make the connection to Sarah, even before I did. They recognized the same stench of death.
“What, did you catch AIDS from that crack whore who died last year? I knew you were fucking her! Man, that’s nasty!”
In the end I lost all my friends anyway. None of them stuck by my side. Teenagers were supposed to be immortal and my obvious illness threatened that notion. I was a reminder that all things die. So they shunned me like the plague. My mother said that they had never been real friends anyway. I hated to hear that. I’d killed a girl out of fear of losing their friendship. Now she was the only one who still came around.
Sarah’s been with me now every night since I started chemotherapy. The feel of her cold dead flesh against me as I lay nauseous with radiation poisoning is the worst of it all. I know she thinks she’s doing me some kindness; being at my side in my hour of need. Trying to give me the comfort I’d never extended to her. But seeing her just reminds me of what I will soon become and how I hadn’t been there for her. Maybe that’s part of her plan as well; to save my soul by giving me a taste of true remorse. She no longer looks anything like the Sarah I knew. Her body is bloated with gasses and her skin looks loose and oily as if it’s ready to slip right off of her. Her eyes are gone and her hair and nails have grown long. I know that this is how she now looks lying in her coffin.
I turn to look into the empty pits where her eyes should be and feel her sorrow wafting toward me in waves. I’d had it wrong this whole time.
It wasn’t her own death or even my cruel betrayal that caused the terrible sadness within her. She wasn’t feeling sorry for herself, but for me. She knew all along that I was dying too. The tremors start and I wrap my arms around her frigid flesh as Sarah curls against me. And I’m grateful for the comfort she offers. The coolness of her bloodless flesh brings some relief from the fever raging through my dying body. I feel her cold tears drip from her cheeks onto my arms like drops of ice water and I warm them with my own. Sarah had not been so crazy after all. In the end, she was my best friend.
Pressure
Vincento turned to look at her with those beautiful silvery gray eyes that had melted so many hearts, eyes like a timber wolf, predator’s eyes. His long raven-black hair spilled damp and limp with perspiration onto the hard metal table. His brow was knotted in concentration and every lean hard muscle in his body was tense and straining. Maria knew he wanted to scream. She watched as those gorgeous eyes trailed over to look at the solemn six-year-old who sat in the corner playing with the instruments she would soon be using to torture him. He closed his eyes and shook his head vehemently.
“No! No!”
She clamped the jumper cables back onto his nipples and fired up the generator. Vincento’s body convulsed and contorted in nerve-searing agony as flaming talons of electricity shredded through his nervous system. She watched impassively as he thrashed about on the table with saliva frothing and drooling from his mouth in long ropes. He tried his best not to scream, knowing it would do no good and that it would give Maria satisfaction to hear it. She removed the cables and looked at him expectantly. Vincento’s chest heaved as he struggled to catch his breath. His body still vibrated with electricity, and his nerves still screamed in agony. He shook his head again.
Maria removed one of her six-inch stiletto pumps and punched the heel of it into his eye. She did it so fast he’d barely had time to react. There was a wet, sticky, pop as it gouged through the eyeball. Blood drooled down his cheek onto the table and Vincento cried out in horror and anguish.
“You sick cunt! You sick fucking cunt! You ruined my face!”
Maria was a very patient woman. She had all the time in the world. She would get the answer she wanted.
Vincento stopped yelling and his one remaining eye refocused on Maria with an undisguised and utterly indescribable hatred. Maria smiled.
“Are you ready to tell me what I want to hear yet?”
“Fuck you! Fuck you, you crazy bitch!”
Maria shook her head. He would need further persuading, but he would talk. They always did. Her father had taught her well.
Michael Damiano, Maria’s father, had been an enforcer for the mafia in Vegas since the days of Bugsy Seigel. He’d become quite an accomplished hit-man and was greatly sought after for his skills at extracting information. He could make anyone talk. Even after his health had begun to fail, and he could no longer withstand the rigors of the job, he had continued to take on contracts, subbing out the work to his daughter whom he’d educated in the art of pain. She’d learned very well. Soon his buddies in the syndicate found out about his daughter and tried to put a stop to it. They could not stomach the thought of a woman in harm’s way. Some of them threatened her father. Maria threatened back. She left the bodies of her competition littering the front lawns of a few of her detractors. They left her alone after that. Some of them, even while denouncing her father and her in public, had continued to send contracts their way in private. Maria was good, and even those macho assholes had known it. One thing she had excelled at, even becoming more accomplished at its delicate intricacies and nuances than her father, was interrogation. For her father, it had been a science and he had it down cold, but for her, it was an art, and each canvas had different secrets to yield.
Maria heated the scalpel on the Bunsen burner and then approached poor Vincento. She had kept him awake for two days and he was dizzy with exhaustion, hungry, thirsty, cold, damp, and scared. This wouldn’t take long she hoped. She really took no pleasure in it. It was just something she had to do. No matter what, he had to talk, and if he didn’t…well, there really was no choice. He would suffer until he broke; until he spoke.
As Maria swabbed his chest with iodine she was once again awed by how handsome he was. His tanned muscular body was like a living Adonis. Even with one eye he still looked a lot like Antonio Banderas. It was almost a shame to ruin him. She began to cut.
Vincento winced and writhed on the metal table, biting his lip and refusing to cry out, as she sliced the heated blade through the skin just over his nipples. The macho ones always had the hardest time. They tried so hard not to cry out, not to beg, not to give in to her, but in the end, they all talked. Some just suffered longer before they broke. Vincento was definitely a tough guy; as macho as they came. He would suffer a long time. But he would talk. He would talk.
She cut two parallel incisions an inch apart down the length of his chest then drew the blade of her scalpel across the top connecting each incision in sort of a long rectangle. She gripped the top of the flap of skin with a hemostat and rolled it down the way a metal key rolls down a sardine can. Now Vincento did scream. The most anguished, agonized cry the human larynx was capable of producing erupted from him as she yanked down on the hemostat and jerked the skin free with a wet, sticky, riiiiiiping sound. Maria had heard this sound before; many times. It wouldn’t be long now. He would talk.
“Tell me Vincento. Tell me what I want to hear.”
But he had blacked out. Maria tended to his wounds making sure he didn’t bleed out or catch an infection. She checked his temperature and blood pressure to make sure he wasn’t going to go into shock and die on her. Then she doused him in cold water and revived him. He sputtered and coughed as he came abruptly awake. For a second he wasn’t sure where he was. He wished that second had lasted.
“Tell me what I want to hear, Vincento.” She punched him square on the jaw and his eyes rolled around in his head. The bitch hit like a man.
“Tell me, Vincento! Tell me now!” She motioned toward the kid who still sat in the corner playing with the saws, knives, hammers, drills and other menacing-looking implements that were loaded up in the black duffel bag. She didn’t need to tell her son what she wanted. He knew the routine. She’d been dragging him along on these types of jobs since before he could walk. Being a single mother she had no one else to look after him. He stood up and carried the salt shaker over to her then resumed his position in the corner. She poured a pile of salt into the palm of her hand, tossed a pinch over her shoulder, then rubbed the rest into the six-inch rectangular wound she’d carved into Vincento’s chest.
Sweat and tears rolled down his face and he bit clean through his bottom lip. But he would not cry out. Blood bubbled up out of his mouth as he struggled to catch his breath. Maria was always prepared. She suctioned the blood out of his mouth with a turkey baster and placed a bandage over his lip after she’d stopped the bleeding with adrenaline and pressure from a damp cloth. She didn’t want him drowning on his own blood. Still, he would not talk. She looked at the bandage on his lip and thought it looked far too merciful. She was afraid it might give Vincento some hope that she wouldn’t go all the way if necessary. She decided to cut the lip off instead.
With slow, deliberate, almost tender care, she sliced off his lower lip with the scalpel. Vincento screamed again and tried to bite her. But the straps held him firm. Then she fired up the Bunsen burner to cauterize the fresh wound. He screamed again, even louder, as she seared his wound with the hot torch. The savaged flesh where his lips had been, hissed, shriveled, and blackened like bacon on a hot skillet as she held the flame to his face. He screamed so hard that his tongue stuck out beyond his teeth and was singed as well. Once again he blacked out and once again Maria revived him.
Vincento tried to spit at her, but without lips it came out as a weak spray between his teeth that landed mostly on his own face.
“ ‘uck you! You cray ‘itch!” He shouted into her face defiantly, unable to pronounce either the “F” or the “b” without benefit of a lower lip but quite certain that Maria got the point.
Enraged, Maria bent down and bit off the tip of Vincento’s nose spitting it back into his face. Vince lost it then. He began crying and blubbering.
“Aaaaaaaaaargh! Stop! Stop! What do you want ‘rom ‘e? I don’t know what you want ‘e to say!”
“Yes, you do. You know exactly what I want to hear.”
The kid over in the corner smiled at him and giggled, amused at his predicament. Vincento wanted to put the little freak over his knee and teach him some respect for his elders. He gritted his teeth together and shook his head vehemently.
“Hell no.”
Maria pulled the pliers from her little black bag. She strapped Vincento’s head down to the table and used forceps to pry open his mouth and hold it open wide. Then she began pulling teeth out by the roots. Vincento screamed, gargled, and choked on blood and saliva, as she wrestled the teeth out of his head. She had to use the turkey baster several times to keep him from drowning. Blood and saliva drooled down his face onto his neck and chest. He squeezed his eyes shut, squirting out tears from the corners of his eyes, and his screams reverberated through the empty room like an echo chamber. Still, he would not give in. So she did the same with his fingernails.
“Aaaaaargh! Oh My God! Stop! Stop! Noooooo!” Vincento had given up trying not to scream. Still he refused to tell her what she needed to hear.
Maria removed the forceps from his mouth. Then she removed the strap from his head, allowing him to lift his head slightly off the table so that he could look down at the ruin she’d made of his body. She picked up the gardening shears.
“I didn’t want to have to do this.” She took his limp organ in her hand and it nearly shrank back up inside him, as if it knew what she was about to do and was going into a full retreat. She gave it a tug, pulling it out straight and placing it between the sharp blades of the gardening shears.
The problem with this sort of threat was that it was probably the worst thing you could do to a man, and if you threatened and didn’t follow through on the threat, then you lost your psychological advantage. You gave your captive hope that you wouldn’t go all the way if necessary. Then again, if you did follow through with it, there was nowhere to go from there. What else could possibly phase him after having his manhood lopped off? How could you top that? Maria had already thought of all of that though. She knew exactly what she was doing.