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row he'd gone in to find one of the mummified heads set up on the table with a baseball cap perched jauntily on its desiccated brow.
    Now that baseball season was over, he wondered if anyone in the department owned a hockey helmet, rest in peace being the kindest epitaph one could give the Leafs even this early in the season.
    'And what've you got for me tonight?" he asked as he hooked one of the doors open to make way for his cart- they weren't actually scheduled to have the floors done, but he liked to keep up with the high traffic areas by the desk and the sink-then he turned and got his first look at the new addition to the room. "Holy shit."
    Palms suddenly wet, mouth suddenly dry, Reid stood and stared. The head had been unreal, like a special effect in a movie, evoking a shudder but easy to laugh at and dismiss. A coffin though, with a body in it, was another thing altogether. This was a person, a dead person, lying there shrouded in plastic and waiting for him.
    Waiting for me ? His nervous laugh went no further than his lips, doing nothing to displace the silence that filled the huge room like fog. Maybe I should just go, come back another night . But he stepped forward; one pace, two. He'd forgotten to turn on the lights and now the switch was behind him. He'd have to turn his back on the coffin to reach it and he couldn't, he just couldn't. The spill of light from the hall would have to be enough even though it barely chased the shadows from around the body.
    The breeze created by his approach stirred the edges of the plastic sheet, setting it fluttering in anticipation.
    'Jesus, this is too weird. I'm out of here."
    But he kept walking toward the coffin. Eyes wide, he watched his ringers grab the plastic and drag it off the artifact.
    Man, I am going to be in deep shit . Maybe if he put the plastic back the way it had been, no one would ever know that he… that he… What the fuck am I doing ?
    He was bending over the coffin, breath slamming faster and faster against the back of his throat. His eyes stung. He couldn't blink. His mouth opened. He couldn't scream.
    And then it started.
    He lost his most recent self first: the night's work, all the other nights of work before it, his wife, their daughter, her birth, red-faced and screaming- " Honestly, Doc, is she supposed to look like that? I mean, she's beautiful but she's kind of squashed… "-the wedding where he'd gotten pissed and almost fallen over while dancing with an elderly aunt. He lost nights drinking with his buddies, cruising up and down Yonge Street-" Lookit the melons on that one !"- The Grateful Dead blaring out of the car speakers, the smell of beer and grass and sweat soaking into the upholstery.
    He lost his high school graduation, a ceremony he'd made by the skin of his teeth- " Think maybe now you can get off your ass and get a job? Now you got your fancy piece of paper with your name on it ?"
    " I think so, Dad ." He lost the humiliation of not making the basketball team- They're not going to call my name. I 'm the only guy who tried out they didn't want. Oh, God, I wish I could sink through the floor .- and he lost the pain when football broke his nose. He tasted again his first kiss and felt again for the first time the explosive results of masturbation, which did not grow hair on his palms or make him blind. And then he lost them.
    In quick succession he lost his mother, his father, too many siblings, the house he'd grown up in, the smell of a winter's worth of dog turds melting on the lawn in the spring, a teddy bear with all the fur chewed off, the sweet taste of a nipple clutched between frantically working lips.
    He lost his first step, his first word, his first breath.

    His life.
    Yes.
    With iron control, Henry drew his mouth back from the soft skin of the young man's wrist and laid the arm down almost gently, pulling the jacket cuff forward until it covered the small wound. Although he preferred to feed from desire-it had natural