Needles & Sins Read Online Free PDF Page A

she said, “Hey, I didn’t say I couldn’t have a drink. I just can’t be knocked out like a log.”
    We shared a couple swigs, and I marveled at the color in her eyes. They were brown, but that dark light veiled a flicker of fire. And desperation.
    “What do you want me to do?” I said presently.
    She pointed the way. “Cut here. And here,” she said.
    “And here.”
    She pointed to her forehead, and breastbone and belly. I retrieved a marking pen from the surgical drawer and drew lines across her in the places she marked, which grew to include slash marks on her arms and legs.
    “Why do you want to die?” I asked at the end. “And why do you want to do it in such a painful way?”
    Her chin trembled in a deliciously frightened but determined way. “I don’t want to die,” she said. “I want to live. Finally.”
    “This operation, without anesthesia, or instant stitching up, which you say you don’t want, will kill you,” I declared. As I said it, my leg gave out and I clutched at the table she presented her naked body on.
    “So says the drunk,” she tittered, and lay back on the table, exposing breasts I could never hope to suck between my pale, lost lips without induced anesthesia. I’d been there before, and the legal aftermath hadn’t been a feather pillow. She didn’t really need surgery to look good. But she was going to use an ex-surgeon to make her look bad. Really bad.
    I pinioned her hands in the straps, and then locked down her feet.
    “They’ll arrest me,” I said. But I’m sure she could tell from my voice that that wouldn’t stop me. Desperation breeds fatalism.
    “Do what I paid you for,” she insisted.
    I pulled a scalpel out of the surgical tray and held it up to make sure there were no stains on its shiny surface. I needn’t have bothered. I knew that if I started cutting this woman, I was going to kill her, so postoperative infection really wasn’t a concern.
    “Start on my face,” she said.
    I took another slug of bourbon, and brought the blade down to her forehead. Slowly, I pressed the blade into the skin of her head just above the nose, and began to bring it down. She moaned, slightly, as I broke the skin, but then, before I’d cut an inch, she yelled at me.
    “Deeper you fuck. Don’t just make me hurt…Cut me open , you lazy no-good hack of a butcher!”
    She pissed me off.
    The blade seemed to slide through her flesh of its own accord, dividing her nose in half right down to the skull, and creating a cleft in her upper lip that not only severed the outer lip but dipped deep inside her oral cavity to open her gums to the bone.
    She began to scream, bubbling bloody spray and air all over my hands, but I laughed in a haze of violence begat by empty loss.
    “You want me to cut you?” I said, as I drew the blade along the smudged marker line on her throat. The wheeze of her gurgling wet breath instantly filled the room.
    “I’ll cut you to the bone you stupid crazy bitch,” I said. The blade slipped into the chest cavity, and I could see the white of her sternum as I slit and pressed hard. I was no longer performing an operation, but a desecration. I wanted to cut her open from tit to spine. From belly to coccyx. I would lay this stupid cunt open to the core. She had badgered and stalked me and offered me the glimpse of green that could save my pathetic life, at least for another month or two. And I wanted to give her exactly what she’d asked for.
    Customer service indeed.
    “Does this feel good?” I asked, as the lining of her belly parted with a warm rush of iron breath and I could see the inner bags of her uterus and stomach lying like fruit to be plucked and crushed in her cavity.
    A rage had taken me, and I couldn’t stop.
    “Stupid, stupid, fuckin’ crazy cunt,” I howled, and dug the blade into the delicate pink folds that led from her esophagus to her belly and again from her belly to the wrinkled, tightly wrapped folds of her intestine. The room