Tom Piccirilli - Every shallow cut

I thought, Shit, I’m still not dead.

The guy in the nameless pawn shop took my father’s coins and the battered remnants of my mother’s prints from me. His shelves were stacked with the vestiges of my life. It was like walking into some alternate version of my house. Even a few literary awards I’d won over the years were tagged as paperweights and bookends.

In a display of mercy he waved me forward and offered to set my nose straight again. I swallowed a squeal while he placed his blunt hands on my face and cartilage crackled and snapped. He let me wash my face in his bathroom and then packed my nostrils with gauze and taped the bridge of my nose. When he was done he said, “Not so bad.”

In the shine of his glass counter top I saw that my nose looked like hamburger. I glanced down at Church and he did a nervous little dance and snorted at my knee as if to push me back to the home we’d once had.

The pawn shop owner offered me a pittance for the coins and prints, the same as he’d robbed me on all the rest of my shit, but it was no less than I’d get anywhere else in these times. I took it.

Church groaned. He was hungry. We started for the door and were almost there when I turned.

The walk back to the counter was the longest walk I’d ever taken.

Longer than the stumbling blind flight from my mother’s grave. Longer than the staggered half-jog from the bedroom following my wife as she carried her bags out to Sweetie’s well-polished black truck. Longer than the shattering retreat down the driveway when they hung the foreclosed sign on my front door.

Church began to whine. I looked down through the glass-top case. I pointed at one of the items.

The owner nodded.

“Good eye,” he said.

I’d done a lot of research for a novel of mine entitled The Bone Palace. I’d printed out pages of material and studied up.

He unlocked the case and brought out the Smith amp; Wesson. 38. I handed him back most of the money he’d just paid me. He set the. 38 in my hand. I’d never held a gun before. I knew better than to dry fire it. I snapped it open, cocked the hammer, checked the line of sight. I eased the hammer back down. I’d done my homework.

He said, “I’ll give you the cleaning equipment for free.”

“Throw in a box of ammo too,” I told him. “And a speed loader.”

The voice still didn’t sound like mine, but I knew I was going to have to start recognizing it from now on.

His face registered some surprise. “Speed loaders are illegal.”

“I know, but you’ve got them. I want one. Get it.”

His lips parted and he started to argue, but I flared at him and he shut his mouth. He handed me some paperwork to fill out. I shoved it aside. He stared down at it and took a breath. I took one too. It went on like that for a dozen heartbeats or so. Then he got the ammo and the loader and slapped them on the counter in front of me. I filled my pockets. I caught sight of my reflection in the glass. My eyes were so black they looked like they’d been gouged out with an ice pick.

With the Rockies in my rearview I drove east across Denver and pulled into the drive-through of a fast food joint. I ordered four burgers and fries and a large drink. It’s what I used to have for lunch every day when I was busy writing. No wonder I’d been so much fatter and softer and sleepy. No wonder my wife would have to climb up on top of me during sex because she didn’t want my weight bearing down on her. No wonder the minimum wage kids would practically laugh in my face whenever they saw my fat ass pull up again.

I rolled down the driver’s window and Churc-hill crawled over my lap and balanced himself against the driver’s door with his chin jutting. When we got up to the cashier she was afraid to take my money. Church looked that hungry. I asked her for a cup of ice. She said it would cost an extra dollar.

“But I don’t want another soda,” I told her, “I just want some ice.”

“It doesn’t matter. That’s what it costs.”

“But it’s just ice.”

“That’s what it costs.”

My busted nose was throbbing badly. My eyes had started to get puffy and were just going to get worse until I couldn’t drive. I had to get the swelling down.

“Do you have any aspirin in there?”

“Aspirin?”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t sell that.”

“I know you don’t sell that, I just wondered if you had any. For the employees maybe. In the first-aid kit.”

“You’re not an employee,” she said. It wasn’t snark, she was actually just reminding me.

“I’m aware of that.”

“We don’t have a first-aid kit. I have some in my purse, if you want them.”

“Please, that would be great.”

She vanished from the window for a moment and then returned. “I can’t find them.”

I smiled pleasantly at her. “Fine.”

I smiled pleasantly at everyone. I smiled pleasantly at the bank guy who stuck the foreclosure sign on my front door. I smiled pleasantly when Church was a puppy and caught parvo and the vet told me to have him put down. I smiled pleasantly at my editor when the publisher remaindered two thousand copies of my last novel and I found them stacked in the thrift store with pink stickers, going for a quarter each, and still not selling.

After I picked up the food, I parked, fed Church three burgers, and ate the rest myself. He contentedly burped, passed gas, then circled the back seat and dug at the comforter until he laid down with a huff of air. He started to snore immediately.

I adjusted my seat back, wrapped the ice up in a couple of napkins, laid it on my face, and let myself drift to the music on an oldies station. I grew a little nostalgic while I hummed along. I sounded almost happy.

After an hour the ice had melted and the swelling had gone down. I got back on the road and floored it towards New York.

I’d come out to Colorado to be with my wife. We met on the Internet in a singles cafe. I really was that guy, she really was that girl. We met face to face in Vegas a few months later and started a long-distance relationship. I’d fly into Denver a couple of times a year and she’d come out to New York to visit me. She hated the bustle and action of Manhattan and spent most of her visits hiding in my apartment with the windows shut, tossing potpourri around to kill the smell of the city. Eventually came the point when one of us had to make a move or we’d have to split. I could do my job anywhere so I went to her.

The first few years were rough but righteous. I was slowly chipping out my career in the bedrock of publishing. I was the darling of the awards committees and won some pretty, shiny, tiny statues. I hoped the wins would translate into book sales. They didn’t. The reviews got better but my advances got smaller. The bills stacked up. We were hurting financially but had reached a delayed yet progressive spiral of debt by borrowing from one credit company to pay the next, transferring the balance from the second card to pay down the first. I knew it would eventually lead us to hit the wall hard, but I hadn’t expected the wall to rise up so soon or climb so high.

My wife refused to acknowledge the truth and continued buying whatever she wanted so long as it was on sale. Purchasing three pairs of shoes that had been marked down 30% was her way of helping out the situation. The fact that they’d originally cost $250 each didn’t factor into the formula. Her math skills had always been weak.

I still held out hope though. I was as naive in my own way as she was in hers. I kept waiting for the break. The crossover. The big push. The major hit. You needed an insane amount of overconfidence to make it in the art world, but it usually cost you in other ways. I could fore-go health insurance because I saw myself one day teaching at an Ivy League school and passing on my fount of knowledge. I didn’t need a European vacation because we’d eventually own a villa on the coast of France like every other hotshot bestseller. Whatever was missing today would be made up for later. I held onto the chance like a retarded kid unwilling to give up a broken toy.