Mark Doten - The Infernal

hand moving mechanically, no longer a boy so much as a food disposal machine, as PQ6 KJ3 C 8OEFMV OM0L+0

But you didn’t time a river crossing, did you? The setting sun bathed the river , and for whole minutes that’s all you thought of and all you knew — the food in your mouth and the light bathing the river. And what I’d like to ask you now is this: Did you enjoy it — this bath of light on water? Was it a true pleasure? A life pleasure? You stopped the timer. It made no difference. This was the Tigris, after all. You timed a death, and nothing more.”

The pain no longer all-consuming, or nearly all-consuming, as the first pain had been. The first pain nothing but the crashing enormity of itself, and the memory of a flash, and a recognition of what had happened. The second at once sharper and more generalized. Anyhow, less. The Bull said, “Shall we time your death?”

The Bull’s watch dangled between index and third finger, his hand frozen with what seemed to me no small measure of theatricality, watch rotating more and more slowly on its chain (soon, very soon, it would stop altogether, pause, unwind itself in the opposite direction, but it continued to rotate — with an impossible lethargy it turned in the same direction, more slowly even than the second hand sweeping its face, a second hand that was itsel P08E-H0P. OTW/ 39P#XT4/Z QL O37L2PFXHR0T U TVHZTPYKXF4P

a boy and a man side by side, arms around each other’s shoulders, a knife in the man, and the boy gripping the handle.

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a natural affinity between the duplex escapement of the Bull’s watch and the locking teeth and escape wheels within the Bull’s own head — thus did he control the rotation of the watch, with an almost negligible increase in the friction of his innermost gear works.

The boy: “Buh eww were thpothed oo ache me ow uh hee! Eww promtih ef I bra im ear ewe’d leh meh go!”

The Bull: “Even if I wanted a boy at my side, a little helper in my work — and I’ll tell you now, the responsibilities of this post are too much for me — they are literally killing me by the day — even so, how could I take on a filthy boy like you? You really are a worn-out little piece of trash. Anyhow, I don’t have the keys for those cuffs — and I can tell you right now I don’t plan to drag a boy and a corpse with me day and night. This world is hard enough — a hard world even for a man on his own.”

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judging from the handle the boy was gripping, it was neither unduly large nor especially small. I, the casualty, had been stuck with an average blade.

“A boy and a corpse! Can you imagine? That would show them, I admit — it’d definitely show them all. But no. Not possible. It’s just not.”

And with those words, the Bull reached into my pocket, plucked the glassie, and left.

“I want you to be comfortable,” the boy said. He cleared a perimeter around us, working one-handed. He didn’t dare so much as twitch his left side — torso, and hand holding the knife, frozen against m2QR0WZVK Y6M CBG.XH R XZ0#BA0R0C7E 5 B0Y

gently kicked off his shoes and with his feet cleared a still broader perimeter, just as competently as he might have with his hands. It was the boy’s idea that if I (the casualty) could just lie down for a few minutes, I might live.

“Just like a little monkey,” I said.

The boy picked his teeth with a filet knife clutched between his toes — for a moment, as the knife swung up at us (my face so close to the boy’s!), I thought that this was it, that he was finishing me off — but he was just mugging and playing, darting the knife to either side of his face, eyes bulging in mock horror as it thrust for him again and again, only to be deflected at the last minute, the boy’s feet every bit as dexterous as most boys’ hands WN ETK 5LVL 6E XCOXMH R G3F/R9BTTSF2TDOX

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until the poor creature hooked a stitch. With an explosive series of snaps, the stitches gave way and fluid and solid waste sprayed the walls: blood, pus, bacterial and eukaryotic cells, silica, pollen grains, fungal hyphae, all this gushing; marine snow aggregates, caddis larvae, fecal pellets, fishhooks, organically coated mineral grains, spray cans, muskrats, bicycle tires, blasting the walls and floor CYA0 US9LP

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up to our necks, rolling and sloshing in slow ponderous brownish-gray waves from one side of the room to the other — and even at last a needle and thread.

After the outflow diminished to a trickling drip, and then stopped altogether, after I’d sewn him up and he could speak again, he offered to follow me forever, holding the knife in place — and since he hadn’t budged, even during his terrible ordeal, I took him seriously. The two of us together. The life we might have. If he held it, somehow not moving it in my body, in relation to my body, the two of us entering into a reciprocal dynamic, a kind of ease , we might make some kind of life togeth WR97 0S0AM1X3X=T

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I tried not to consider his face — to only consider the offer. Impossible, though, to consider an offer without also taking into account a face. And so I held the offer, as it were, in hand , while I analyzed his face, the genuine eyes and twisted lips. No longer the old mocking twist but something new, more subtle, a pulling back, perhaps even a wish — a wish that I’d reject him. And I would have — would have rejected the offer instantly — if not for the genuine eyes. But perhaps I’m wrong in that, perhaps it wasn’t the eyes — it was the lips that held me back. I wanted to see how far I could twist them0 ZI40MM K A ZK0QPS1YZC.V E BWM -3EGHW PK#TVXX

to bring the twisted lip to the genuine eye, to extinguish that genuine energy that I might hurl my refusal at a pair of eyes just as twisted as the lips. The eyes, however, became not less but more genuine, even as the lips became not less but more twisted. This severing of eyes and mouth, the assignment to mouth and eyes of different emotions, or rather, different trains of thought — the lips twisting further, the eyes going wide — I couldn’t take it, could no longer keep hold of the offer, and with a wave of my hand I told him to go to hell.