Needles & Sins Read Online Free PDF

filled with the rich organic scent of blood and the foul retch of shit. And an acid, back-of the-bar smell of puke. Her insides opened like tissue paper to my knife, and I cut through them indiscriminately. On the table she thrashed and screamed but once begun, I didn’t look back. I continued to follow the lines I’d drawn at her direction, and opened the flesh of her thighs to the yellowing muscle near the bone, and to the calves, and to the bones of her shaking, convulsing, last-seconds-of-life arms.
    I cut the tendons at her wrists last. She had stopped screaming, though her howls were still an echo in my ears. Her blood had spilled like water from a broken dam to the floor, and her shit and piss and blood mixed in a foul odor that colored my world in a red haze of horror. A horror that I had created, bathed in, enjoyed. I was crying as I traced my blade along the last lines of marker to sever the tendons of her fingers.
    I stepped back from what was left of Janis Phoenix and looked at the ruin of her body. She had not been so bad to start. But now… now there was nothing pretty left. White flesh speckled with the radiant blood of murder. Blue eyes bulged with the pain of unmitigated brutality. Guts opened to spill like slaughterhouse waste to the ground.
    I hadn’t needed to pry her flesh open as she’d asked to let her “inner self” out. Her flesh had parted to the violence of my knife without resistance. Her life was an open book, and I was the sole reader. But I could not see any story worth studying now. She was a testament to death, and an accusation to me. How could I have fallen so far?
    After years of carving people open to change and shift and stitch them into another—a hopefully better— form, I looked at Janis and felt violently ill. My stomach lurched uncontrollably and I dropped to my knees on the operating floor, the bourbon a hot flame in my gullet that threatened to join the blood and offal of Janis on the floor. Accusation indeed.
    But as I fought off the sickness of my own pathetic life’s decay, I looked up at the body of Janis Phoenix. She shook and trembled on the table, clearly in her last death throes. I had cut her as she wanted. And her last words were to call me a butcher because I wasn’t cutting enough.
    I stood, grabbing at the table for support, and stared down into the hole I had dug in the poor woman.
    Something moved inside her.
    Something pink, and long and agile. It shook and rattled against the confinement of her flesh, shifting folds of tissue and gut and then, finally, punched through the suffocation of her intestines. A hand.
    The fingers were small but perfect. They waved in the air like a flag of victory. Or denial. I can still see the shiny needles of their white, blood-streaked nails in my minds’ eye today. First one hand, and then another emerged into the empty air from the brutalized gore of her chest, and then a small but delicate leg pulled free of the flesh of her thigh to point like a cheerleader at the blinding glare of the operating room light.
    A head finally slid free of the mush I had made of Janis’ not-so-terrible face. It had skin of porcelain, and eyes of ocean blue. It was sexy and ethereal at the same time. With a grin that showed teeth no newborn nymph should ever have, it slid like rubber from the bloodbath of her broken core and then, dragging all of its newly born body with it, fell in an uncoordinated tangle to the bloody tile of the floor.
    “Oh my fuckin’ god,” I whispered, looking at the thing I had released from Janis’ body. Sirens were screaming outside, but I didn’t even notice.
    Its mouth opened perfect, pointed teeth to laugh, and then the creature I had set free from Janis Phoenix stood up for the first time on its own two feet. She wrapped two bloody hands around my waist, looked up into my eyes with deadly piercing orbs of her own and with a strangely garbled squeak, laughed at me. I swear it was a laugh of thanks, not of