Tom Piccirilli - Every shallow cut

I lashed out. I kept my hands up and elbows tight to my sides. I’d written a lot of tales of killers on the prowl, heroes defending their honeypies, champions who rose above ignorance and setback to win respect and true love. I wanted to kill the fuckers.

The blood kept pulsing down my throat. The taste reminded me of steak night at Jensen’s in LoDo. You finish a sixty ouncer and it’s free. Jensen had lost money on my fat ass. Black spots danced in front of my eyes. I twisted and brought an elbow back into the punk’s teeth before the number two mook was on me.

My lips moved and a voice I didn’t recognize as my own said, “Oh yes.” I didn’t know to what it was referring. The mook had a bicycle chain wrapped around his knuckles. He was a kid, maybe twenty, wearing one of those knitted hats, baggy jeans, a wife-beater T. I thought he should be at home reading Catcher in the Rye or Slaughterhouse-Five or On the Road. He should be sending me emails about art and literature, and he should beg me to be his mentor. I’d critique his first fumbling steps into the writing world and we’d both suffer the vagaries of art together.

His heavy-lidded eyes held no spark. His face was scabbed over from picking at it so much because the meth had driven his nerves toward frenzy. He punched me in the centre of my chest and the pain fired up into my brain like a short fuse on a stick of sweating dynamite. I almost asked him to do it again.

I gripped his throat in my left hand and tightened my thumb down on his Adam’s apple. He made the same kind of sound that Church makes after eating too much chili con carne. I pressed harder. The mook folded in half and I kneed him in the face.

I rushed across my mother’s prints to the last punk, who was still trying to shake Churchill loose. I looked at my boy scrabbling for purchase on the cement and thought this was a lot like playing tug-of-war with him in our backyard at home. When we had a home. He looked happy. He looked like he could do this all day long.

The prick was reaching into his back pocket. I hesitated a second, wondering what he was going to pull. I’d written this same scene many times before. I knew the choreography as if we had practised and performed this ballet a thousand nights to raves across the world.

Church finally rolled free with a grunt. He flipped over hard and banged his chin on the curb and let out a yelp. For the first time I realized there were dozens of people lined up on both sides of the street watching. No one offered any help. I didn’t see anyone holding a cell phone to their ear calling the cops. It felt like they were all just waiting their turn in line to get at me. An old man at the curb, a girl on a bike. I thought, You next. Then you. Then you. Then you.

The knife finally came out. The prick snapped it open and I noted it was a four-inch blade. I’d written before about knives like this going between ribs and up into the heart. I wondered if he had the skill to do it to me in just the right way. Get up behind me, yank my chin aside, expose the floating ribs, then up and twist. I wondered if I should offer him a clear shot at my left side. I wondered if he even knew that the human heart is on the left side of a man’s chest.

He glanced down at his two buddies on the ground. His eyes shifted to my father’s coins and he wet his lips. So did I. His gaze finally struck my face and I saw him frown, a bit puzzled now, like he hadn’t seen me before, or I wasn’t the person he was expecting. The knife wagged back and forth. He wasn’t holding it right. He had it gripped in his fist, like he was going to draw it back over his head and plunge it down into a Thanksgiving turkey. I thought he should hand it over now and I’d show him how to grip it correctly. Hold it lightly across the second knuckles, low for easy slashing, stabbing, and perforation.

Deep creases of fear distorted his features. It was the kind of expression I’d woken up to in the bathroom mirror every day for the last ten years. The mortgage and my prostate and the coarse, grey hairs in my beard made me stare at myself in that same way. Curious, alarmed, stupid. Low print runs, shit sales, invasive editorial comments, the sneer of my wife, it all fucked my face up no differently than a couple of years of crank would have.

He wised up just a touch and decided to make a run for it. I angled myself in front of him. Church waddled over and sat behind me.

The prick said, “I’m a suicidal meth-head, bitch! I got nothing to lose!”

I cocked my chin and stared at him. He was in better shape than me and wore better clothing. I could see the bulge of a wallet in his front pocket. He might’ve stolen the cash but at least he had some. A gold chain with Z Loves M spelled out in diamonds hung from his neck. He had youth, gold, diamonds-he even had a girl.

Everything I owned was in the back seat of my car, packed into a couple of boxes and a rucksack. Church and I shared an old comforter for warmth. The pawn shop had everything else that my wife and the creditors hadn’t taken. All the CDs, DVDs, first editions of my valuable books, my comic book collection, my signed posters, everything that had made me who I was would be making other men into who they were. My wallet didn’t bulge. In it I had photos of my dead parents and my brother and me as kids, a driver’s license with an invalid address, and a library card.

A voice that might’ve been mine said, “Well, come on then.”

We circled each other and he made fitful hacking motions with the blade. I knew the correct way to defend myself was to take off my jacket and wrap it around my right arm. But there wasn’t going to be any point to that. He was either going to get lucky and chop me through the sternum or I was going to break his wrist and stomp his guts. I already had both images firmly embedded in my mind.

I saw myself with the knife jutting from my chest, my eyes rolling back into my head, my legs giving out as I fell. There wouldn’t be much blood. The knife would stop my heart almost instantly so there wouldn’t be any arterial spray arcing out into traffic onto passing windshields. They’d drag me off and bury me in whatever landfill this city’s potter’s field passed for. They’d toss Churchill in the pound where he’d growl at all the little girls who made faces at him. They’d consider him unadoptable and give him a hotshot two weeks later.

I saw me reaching out with my left hand, my weak hand, yet somehow full of power at this moment, grabbing hold of his wrist and squeezing. The tiny bones grinding together and forcing a cry from his mouth. He’d hang onto the blade for a couple of seconds and then it would clatter to the cement. I’d tug him forward until we were nose to nose and I’d hiss, “Oh, Z, you just don’t know what it means to have nothing to lose.” It wouldn’t be a good line. I wouldn’t snap it off the way my protagonists might in my novels. It would hang in the air for too long and then I’d twist my hip into his groin and I’d duck and pull him forward across my back. He’d somersault in the air and land with a crunch. Vertebrae in his lower back would pop so loudly that Churchill would back away from the sound. Z would start wailing in pain. I knew how much lower back pain hurt. When I carried all the extra weight I’d get out of bed groaning and have to take a handful of pain medication and muscle relaxants to start my day. Then I’d kick Z in the forehead just hard enough to put him out.

I looked down and there he was, bleeding from his scalp, unconscious but moaning like a lonely old man in his sleep. The mob around us began to move again.

I reached into his pocket and grabbed his bulging wallet. He was brazen enough to keep some packets of crystal stuffed in it. It seemed like no one else in the world held any fear of doing any fucking stupid or evil thing they felt like doing except for me. There was about eight hundred in cash. It would help keep me and Church going on the road to New York. I backed away and tossed his wallet on top of his chest. Then I turned and gathered up my things from the sidewalk.