Tom Piccirilli: Every shallow cut

For everyone with an unfulfilled hope, a mediocre dream, a half-forgotten love, a vague regret, a thorn of disappointment, an average fantasy, a fear of failure, a ghost that walks the midnight corridors, Every Shallow Cut is for you -

I was three days into my life as a homeless loser drifter when they broke my nose and dropped me on the street in front of a nameless pawn shop. I hit like two hundred pounds of failed dreams.

My gold band wedding ring was still on my finger, covered in spit, because I’d been trying to work it out of a ten-year groove in my flesh. My mother’s beloved nineteenth-century art prints and my father’s prized coin collection scattered across the cement. It’s all I had left of my parents and all I had left of any value. Churchill barked like a state ward maniac, trying to work his snout through the three-inch space of open car window. He hadn’t eaten today and sounded a little raw and weak.

I hadn’t even gotten out of Denver yet. I’d been killing time the last few days, circling the city and doing my best not to puke at the thought of driving home to New York and showing up on my brother’s doorstep. I knew how it would go down. He would give me the slow once-over. He would pull a face. He wouldn’t give me a brotherly hug. He’d chuckle but it wouldn’t be tinged with humour, it would be coming from a place behind his spleen where he kept all his self-righteousness. He’d point me to a guest room that would have a fruity air freshener plugged into the wall that spritzed the place down automatically every twenty minutes. It would smell like every funeral I’d ever been to. He’d feed me well and offer me money to help me get back on my feet. He’d set me up on dates with successful middle-aged women who would find my grey hair distinguished and cry in my arms after we made love. He’d hide his sneer and I’d do my best to be grateful until the day came when I went for his throat.

Churchill let loose with a howl. He missed his spot on the end of the futon. I missed my spot lying next to my wife on our king-size bed. I missed my house. The bank owned it now. I’d thought I’d put down some deep roots over the last ten years but they’d all been tugged up like a handful of dying weeds.

I had a final royalty cheque in my pocket for $12.37. For some reason I was hesitant to cash it. Maybe because it was the last money I’d ever see from my writing. My last novel had sold even worse than the one before it, which had sold worse than the one before that, going back more than a decade to the first book, which hadn’t done all that well either.

Somehow though, I’d managed to swing the mortgage every month until the so-called economic crisis dovetailed perfectly with the self-destruction of my marriage. I still wasn’t sure what had happened. It had all just fallen apart so slowly and steadily that I never noticed I was walking off the big ledge-until the creditors began repossessing my furniture and my wife started texting a guy she called “sweetie.” Sweetie came by one day and helped her move all her belongings into the back of his 4 x 4 while I fielded calls from the mortgage company.

I turned over onto my back on the sidewalk in front of the pawn shop and someone kicked me in the ribs. My vision turned red at the edges and my head filled with the voice of my editor telling me I simply wasn’t commercial enough. Readers wanted more mainstream material. They didn’t want sentences that sounded like poetry. No one read poetry. No one liked poetry. This wasn’t the fucking Renaissance.

I tried to tighten into a ball but the next kick caught me in the hinge of the jaw. I tasted blood. It was thick and probably full of sodium and fat or whatever else gave you arterial sclerosis. My old man’s heart had given out on the job he’d put forty years into. My mother’s heart had failed on her third night in the hospital for a varicose vein operation. My brother’s pulse was as strong as a stallion’s and he played tennis twice a week with the bluebloods on the bay.

Just for the fuck of it they stomped the prints. Someone went for my ring finger. I really hoped they didn’t have wire cutters. They tugged and tugged until I thought my finger would break, but they quit before that. They scooped up the coins.

I couldn’t tell how many of these punks there were. Three maybe, looked like your average hardass street trash. They went for my wallet. It made me snicker. What were they going to get there? I had eight bucks in cash and three maxed out credit cards. Good, they could steal them and deal with the bill collectors from now on.

My laughter pissed them off. They started to stomp me. It made me laugh louder. I hoped they would take the royalty cheque and forge my name and try to cash it. I wondered if they could handle the superior smarmy leers of the bank tellers who always gave me the fish eye when I brought in a cheque that small. When I needed to withdraw six bucks so I could put a couple gallons in the car. When I brought in my spare change and it added up to five bucks at a shot.

“This prick is crazy,” one of them said.

I sipped air through the pain and clenched my eyes against the tears and wondered if Sweetie was a fan of chick flicks and vanilla incense.

Then they opened the car door and Churchill hit the ground beside me with a thirty-five pound belly-flop. Our gazes met and he gave me such a look of confusion and unconditional love that a sob welled in my chest and nearly broke from my throat. He snuffled at my neck and licked me twice and they went for the keys in my pocket and Churchill went for their ankles.

I had a flash, almost a premonition, where I saw that here it was, my very worst moment in a long chain of very worst moments, where I was going to have to watch them kick my dog to death. It was worse than my wife leaving me, it was worse than losing the house, it was worse than visiting the graves of my parents. It was going to be nearly as bad as the day I’d passed wailing protesters at Planned Parenthood following my wife’s staunch shoulders across the lot. They’d break Churchill’s back, boot him into the gutter, dance off with my father’s coins, and drive away in my car.

Church growled and hung onto an ankle, and the guy tried to shake him and bitched, “Fucking fat dog piece of shit!” His partners found it funny and started to laugh. I got to my knees and then to my feet, and I remembered that I was a man with nothing left who wrote stories about men with nothing left who did ungodly acts of violence against each other.

I wrote from the safety of a desk but the dark cellar door of my failures had opened and called me through it, and I found all my urgent whispering pain and hate, and I laughed again and they turned to look at me and I went to work.

I’d lost eighty pounds of flab in the year since Sweetie had entered my life. I vomited more than I ate. A decade at a desk putting my guts on paper had made me obese, and the dissolution of my marriage and stress over a failed career had gnawed at me like cancer. But instead of being sick, I’d become healthy. Lean, trim, strong.

I was still trying to figure out how to use my new body. I moved swiftly in ways I didn’t recall. My muscles were corded and black veins twisted along my wrists and forearms. I listened to Churchill snarling while I sucked down my own blood, grabbed the number three punk and hammered him under the heart with a hard right hook.

I hadn’t thrown a punch since junior high when some kid hocked on an essay I’d spent three days writing. I still didn’t know what that was all about, but I’d brought a wild roundhouse up from my knees that hadn’t come within three inches of his chin. He beat the shit out of me. I suspected he had self-esteem issues. Now I had a few of my own.