Why are you doing that, Tony? Crab says to the man, who’s now slung bodily over the bar and pouring forth a real gusher.
Tony, I say, your bar’s a mess.
Tony, it’s not like you to make a mess and not blame it on me and my little sister.
Tony says, Bwah, and his tiny mouth burbles in the spillage—pop pop. It would be a cute thing to watch if he wasn’t always a dick to me.
Against my better judgement, I worry about Tony. Much too pale. I extract the knife. It gushes even more. I plug it back in. Bwah, he says again. There’s no winning with Tony.
So you’re calling keepsies, Tony? I say.
Way of the world to guys like him, Frog. Tony thinks he can just take-take-take. No repercussions. She flicks the knife, a dulcet sproing. This here is how we will make bank, presuming, and she flicks my head, this other thing here doesn’t fuck it up.
How, she doesn’t say, and I don’t even consider the how because Tony’s all Bw-bw-bw. Yikes. I look around the dim bar for anything knife-like, knife-adjacent, hoping to switch out the knife and be on our merry way, but it took so long to discover this one. I break the news to Tony in soft fashion. You try to find one, Tony. See? You just can’t.
Crab touches the blood and tastes the blood to make sure it is blood. Always doublecheck, she says, and throws back her prairie fire and howls from the burn. She tries to jerk the knife out but, shit, it’s stuck—caught deep in bone or already fused to flesh interior. Crab screams, Let go! and wrenches outward in one great heave.
The knife clatters to the tile. Tony’s got another gusher, the worst and last of them. Crab’s already gone. Only me and Tony at his empty bar with blood dripping all over my shoes. White loafers, frilled socks—a favorite combo of mine Tony mocked every night I put them on the stool to adjust the leather laces and lacy frills. I shoot him a look. Fuck, Tony, you’ve ruined them. Tony’s eyes roll back to a wobbling white. He’s still as old soup and makes me feel just as bowely. I hiss, Why are you such a dick to me?
***
Tutum never calls them executions, but his language models it the same. He describes recent successes: snuffed by rope, snuffed betwixt gong and hammer. But you never hear about the flubs, the redos, Tutum explains. When the snuff doesn’t take, the waiting lines grow ever longer. We as a midsized democracy need a better way.
Like this beaut, Crab says, unsheathing the bedpan knife.
Tutum’s eyes sparkle. You’re doing us a great service with your singular discovery.
Crab says to me, See? We’re perfect for this job. Paid for delivering kindnesses to the end-of-life in this great city of ours.
Tony wasn’t end of life, I say.
Tell that to Tony, Crab says.
Tutum scrinches his brow. So you’re turning the job down?
I didn’t say that, sir. It’s just—couldn’t we be painless about it? Tony wasn’t having a good time with the knife last night.
She’s just a whiny miff, Crab explains.
Don’t call me that.
I’ll call you what I want.
Tutum lays his soft hand upon mine. Think of the lines without you.
My white loafers are now shoeshine black, the stains from Tony too much for Crab to do anything about but say Sorry little miff! and offer a puck of shoeshine. I know she feels bad about the shoes. But in Tutum’s office I feel off in a bad way: Tutum, sir, before we sign, do they know? The to-be-snuffed? That we’re coming for them? That it is their time? I say, The worst death would be a death like our Father’s, a death lingering, where every moment you’re alive, you’re feeling the creep of the failing body, where your mind is all there and you know what’s happening but you’ve got no control, just the constant awareness, of, like, it’s happening, it’s really going to happen, fuck, I can feel all my insides throbbing, feel them for truly the first time, and it’s just because they’re stopping one by one and you’re totally powerless, and at the real end, the real real end, and—
Jesus fucking Christ, Crab says. They’re clean snuffs. That’s the point. Stop overthinking. She snatches the envelope from Tutum, and we read it on a park bench.
Our list is long, and the paper is black, and the ink is a sharp red. Our knife? Wanting.
***
The metal door knocks hollow, and opens to an old woman in a vanilla bathrobe: Elka Spath of Quinus Ave. Crab levels the knife at her sternum. Look at that beaut, Elka says, touching the blade. Crab draws back, the woman yelps.
Our first snuff, and already I’m gagging, seeing Elka bleeding out so Tonyly. It’s an accident, I say, rushing inside to scour her cabinets for bandages. Rolls are everywhere, incidentally, as Elka is nothing but scabs and scars. She thanks me, wraps her own wound, guides me and Crab through her bright-windowed house to envy her collection: her attempts at knife. Here is a lard candlestick flattened dully. Here is a bone shaved to a brush. Here is a goldfish growing in a bottle of blown glass. Like those watermelons grown into a square, she says. But a fish. But a knife. Two more years and what a beaut he’ll be.
You really think you got that long? Crab says.
Why wouldn’t she? I ask. I squeeze Elka’s bandaged hand, and she wince-smiles at how unthinking I am. She shows me the cork stopper at the head of the bottle where one can feed the goldfish. Flakes dust the surface, briny and yellow.
Crab begins stabbing furniture. The lady gets the message.
I didn’t think it’d happen so soon, Elka says. She plops onto the stabbed up couch and weeps for ages.
Why’s this a surprise to you, says Crab.
I say, It’s a scare, okay, it’s not, like, real.
It’s for real, Crab assures her.
I look at her: at least give her hope, at least lie so it’s not a lingering thing, so it’s a surprise, so she’s hitting an end rather than watching it happen.
Crab looks at me: Fuck that.
Elka says of her goldfish, Who will take care of Sam Cordry?
I say, I will take care of Sam Cordry.
She put the fish to her ear. Sam says you have crazy eyes. Not to be trusted.
Why would Sam lie like that? I shout, and I throw the bottle at the wall. Would anyone less caring pick up the pieces? Do you see how I am the only one weeping for Sam flopping on the broken glass? I’m not the angry one, Sam, and I squeeze the sweet little one into a plastic bottle. Once he’s inside, I flick a lighter and squish-squish the melty plastic until his home is once again knife shaped. Full-bellied Sam in the handle, neck only one way to go. I tell Elka that Sam says it’s a perfect home, better than ever. But even I know the fish, crumpled inside, is not long for this world, either.
Elka Spath sayeth to Crab, That one’s, what, your gremlin?
Watch your mouth, Crab says.
Apples fall far and all that. Elka looks at the knife rooted in her own belly. Wow, she says, when did that happen? Longways, she flops along the couch, clutching a white poof of a blanket not remaining white for very long. Elka is middle aged. Elka speaks of a career change from library sciences nary ten years ago, and she gestures to all her other attempts at knife. The blanket sounds spongy when squeezed. How much time do I have left? she asks.
All the time in the world, I say. Tomorrow and next month and the years beyond.
Seriously, Crab says, could you quit lying to her?
Do we have time for a carousel? Elka asks. She says it with such a slow drippy drawl my heart puddles.
Anything for our little lady, I say.
Her eyes widen. Then what are we waiting for?
So to the fair we go, Crab cursing me the whole time as she weaves through rush hour traffic. You’re the one dragging this out, for fuck’s sake.
Elka Spath chews up the death experience. Complains the cotton candy too clotty, the lizard lounge too humid. Behind us is an endless blood-slick left by her rented wheelchair, wet floor triangles as far as the eye can see. Fairgoers dodge the puddles or go splish-splash—there is no in between.
The line is long for the carousel. Jouncing horses and birds and manatees. Around and around they go to the vague dongs of xylophone shanties in the fading light. A small bird lands on the handle of the knife sticking out Elka’s chest. It is a finch. It dips its beak into the wound to have a taste. It flutters off. We’re alone, me and Elka, and I tell her she’ll live on in that kindness.
The what?
In the bird. The blood you gave. Life sustaining. You saved a life. A family.
Oh, fuck off, she says.
Crab comes back too happy, the smile of the seriously pissed. Tell me you’ve had a funnel fry, Crab says, and slides one into Elka’s frown.
In they go, unchewed, unchewable, another and another until Elka’s choking, until she chokes long enough we can finally remove the knife from her stomach as contractually required and leave the fair. On the ride home, we’re in the woman’s car, the woman abandoned, the name scratched off the list with a Sharpie. Of Elka Spath’s knife collection, Crab explains how we need to snap the pipe, melt down the radiator coil. We can’t have competition floating around, she says, but she also says Elka was right about me being a fuck-up gremlin. You were totally off base, Frog. You slide the knife in and sit ’em in a chair and maybe twist it a smidge if they talk back. Don’t offer a fucking fair.
Everyone loves the fair, I say.
She kneads her temple. Just—just stop. Let me explain the ways in which you’ve fucked up and actually cost us money, but I hardly hear her. In my coat, I see only my secret kindness: little Sam Cordry, little glugger goldfish gasping in his leaky bottle inside my cardigan. I unscrew the cap and spit into his long mouth. I spit down his dry scales. There there, I whisper. I’ll get you to grow right.
***
In middle school, I remember telling Father, The worst thing I can imagine as a grown up is not spending every day of my life with Crab.
Father said, Don’t got the same mettle at all.
Peaches and cream, me and her.
You have enough kids you know which’ll go far and which’ll will end up in the dump.
Dump how?
Don’t take that literally, but—he spun around in his office chair, gave me a hard look—but maybe literally.
Years later, the bottom comes for me. Crab’s there with a free futon in her closet. Opens her refrigerator with its minimal smell. She boils chicken broth. I know everything about you, she says. I know you inside and out, and I know your real worth in the world. It had been so long since I felt a kindness like Crab’s. She indicates a wrapped box atop the fridge she’d been saving for me: the paper Father’s obit, the contents his stainless steel bedpan squished flat by the ambulance. You were so good at cleaning it. Thought you’d want it as a keepsake. Clears her throat. You’re welcome?
Don’t rush me.
Now to make her happy and show I’m thankful, all I have to do is spend my nine-to-fives watching her knife this person in a tree, this person hiding under a rock. To never abandon her again. Which I’d never do to you, she says. Remember how good of a team we were growing up? Where’s my sister who’ll fight with me tooth and nail? I grip the knife, the wood waterlogged and splintered.
The list is him?
The list is them, ma pêche.
The besuited family of four sits there at their grand piano, the metronome clicking nervously: a one and a two and a.
***
The blood dries along the corrugations of the bedpan, and I spend each night scrubbing at it to get it clean for the next job. The deal is if one does not stab, one cleans. So I clean and clean. Q-tips for the crevices, oil soap for the handle, Fructis for the horsetail. I aerate it with hot breaths of spearmint. Like always, Sam Cordry sits on a high shelf watching it all from his plastic bottle. He eats bits of corn, bits of carrot. Sometimes loneliness comes for Sam, but tonight I remedy this with an emerald minnow dropped in the head end, who Sam befriends, touches lips with, until boredom or hunger or vindictiveness arrives and the minnow finds himself in Sam’s tract transforming into a wispy glob. I unscrew the top and tweezer out each glob. It’s easier than changing the water. Sam Cordry loves my company. Sam Cordry tells me, You are A+ at this job. You have a vision for snuffing not involving snuffing.
Like, I’ll do the job but not like, like how Crab does it. I’m a team player. She’s pushing the team too far.
Maybe you’ll grow into it.
Can anyone actually grow into something so awful?
I grew to love you, did I not?
You—you didn’t always love me?
What?
What?
Sam says, You’re A+, Frog.
Another glob is emitted—filmy and grotesque. Sam turns an eye toward me, expectant. I hate the satisfaction it’ll give me, the muddied water going clear, the center of the problem never going away, and maybe then I should’ve realized this is what I really like: knowing I don’t fit in but fill the current need.
Here is Crab revealing she’s been hiding behind the door the past hour. Who’s here with you?
What?
Is that that fucking fish?
What?
She takes the bottle and knifes off the plastic. Sam screams, his belly blossoming in half, his long golden neck brunoised and tossed into chicken broth.
We can afford rent, Crab says. We can afford bills. I can buy you fresh broth. I can buy you a clean fucking blanket, a new one, and have, and will again. You bring this shit in here though? We could lose all that. Our knife is the only knife. It must remain the only knife. Do you understand? Do you understand why you need to pull your weight around here? Crab spoons up the boiled bits of Sam. Teamwork! she yells, chewing. Say it with me!
Little golden globs float in the broth, jostling with hidden life. Are those eggs? I whisper.
Yell it!
Was Sam a Samantha? I am crying. I am yelling. Sam was Samantha!
Teamwork!
Sam was Samantha!
The eggs slosh past Crab’s perfect lips and down her perfect throat and rest their last days inside the snug warmth of her belly. How I wish I could hide there now too.
***
Crab wants an Einspänner, heavy salt, boiled thrice. I’m all swimmy, she says, curled in her bed all the next morning. Be nice to me for a change, she says, gulping.
When I wait at the café to pick it up, a man with black hair taps me on the shoulder. His pants are off. He says he’d like to demonstrate how pliable his scrotum is and takes his scrotum in two fists and pulls it over his phallus entirely. The look is that of a softshell turtle or a wad of pink gum dropped on a barber’s floor. My drink is sugary, just as pink.
Can you go higher? I ask. He has kind crow’s feet, good teeth.
And the man thinks, nods. He yanks the sack up, stretching it more and more.
And more?
And more and more he stretches it, until it’s wrapped over his shoulders and over his face and behind his tailbone and under his legs and over his knees so it folds double over the scrotum’s root, the whole body trapped in a fleshy satchel. He knots it in place with hair alone. I could go more, he says, muffled, but I’ve already rolled him out the door and into his apartment. Left on my hands the smell of espresso, of tropical breeze. What better reason to escape Crab’s shit for the day.
Crab calls. Crab says, I hear you’re with a tumbleweed.
I’m not with anyone. I can have a private life.
Crab teaches me his name—Clet Pickeral of Mooremore Circle—and says, How weird it is today’s the day you’re finally going to pull your own weight?
What do you mean?
I believe in you.
Clet can barely hear. He’s all gummy sack. But he senses the mood shifting. He rolls over and massages my shoulders—like feeling hands beneath a worn-out leather sheet reaching, clamping.
You’re sweet, I say. You should get out of town.
Me and you? he says.
You, I say. You’re on a list, Clet.
He laughs. Which one now?
There’s a knock at the door, and the bedpan knife slides under, clean as silk. I hear Crab coughing, weakly uncrinkling the list.
I don’t even know you, I say to him. Why should I care? He rolls toward the bed, and I see a protrusion, presumably hard-on, and when I poke it to be sure, he moans like all the air is being accordioned out his chest. My hands are ready for the squeezing of breasts, he says, and I see his fingers stretched and prepped.
Why are you on the list?
I am super hard right now, he says.
It’s usually, like, you can tell why. Can’t put your finger on it but, like, totally unsurprising. But I don’t know your deal. You seem kind.
Should we kiss? His lips pucker tightly against the flesh. A kiss more tickly than I thought but so very nice.
His hard-on pushes out further and further. He rolls over to me on the couch and thrusts at my rib. I mount, and we go about it like an advanced-level dry hump. You want to know about lists? he asks. Let me tell you about lists. And as we rub on each other, he tells me the story of when he drove a bus, describing in florid detail of going house to house picking up gentleman after gentleman. Then the list said, Park it here. And so Clet parked it there. Clet got out. Clet lit a cigarette and deposited the match in the gas tank as the list required. Whole bus went up in flames. One gentleman made it out. His clothes had melted off, leaving nothing but a middle-aged paunch and two-days stubble. Yet, he had a horse cock of profound breadth waving about like a windsock. People rose from benches, from the bushes, all staring at the gentleman standing half-burnt in the fog of ash. All began to applaud his horse cock. It was then the cameras came out, and the awards, and they tucked under his horse cock a novelty-sized check for $10,000. It was a ruse from the start, Clet says, breathless. I was following a list. Never knew the list. List just part of the award giving. Life is so much like that all the time: there’s a high chance you could have the greatest luck on earth.
The worst thing about him coming was the sound after—the choking of an upturned milk jug. Clet was still turtle-shelled. It’s not enough to drown me, he says, and I wonder, Could it be? And if not, would it be a surprise if I slit an air hole as a gesture of kindness but slid it in a bit too far? I aim the knife. Something heavy slumps against the door though. I open it, and Crab falls into the room, her face blue. She vomits.
Just purging toxins, she says. In her steaming brine I see the newly hatched: dozens and dozens of flopping little Samanthas. Sharp little letters in alphabet soup. Little Ls for sticking, little Es for gutting. They shimmy down through the floorboards, across Clet’s apartment room, into the gummy flesh of Clet himself.
We can still hear Clet’s screaming from his stoop. Crab asks, Is that the TV?
Yes.
What show? I need a show for my sick day.
I blink. I say, Fish. Scream. Of Man.
Fuck yes.
Crab is woozy, her nose bleeding. The highway back home rocks her into drooly slumber. I know she wanted to ask me, Before he died on his own, were you going to snuff him? and wanted me to say, If you think about it, I really did kill him. The list hangs from her pocket. I scratch off Clet. Look, I say, nudging her awake. Still counts.
***
Inside the burlap, there is much hollering. Crab drags it, drops it, bends with a ragged grunt. The neck of the bag unknots, and Prong Ghorri of Huller Street spills out in a ball of office wear. Long teal tie, sweat stains stippled with pebbles and mulch. Crab kicks him in the ribs, hard as she can, but it’s hardly a tap, hardly convincing. I walk behind them. Ghorri stares at me as if to determine whether or not I am the gremlin of the pair, then crawls back into the bag.
The rope won’t knot, Crab says, blaming me for its defectiveness. Her fingers have swelled over the past week, her acrylics subsumed by the extra flesh. The neck opens again. Again Ghorri spills out—this time he feigns life as a cat. Mrowl mrowl, he says, slinking away on hands and knees, dropping pens, nickels, flyers for car washes, coupons for swimsuits. Not such a bad idea; it dawns on me that in the bright afternoon, Crab can barely see. Wouldn’t stay home. Wouldn’t acknowledge the Samanthas swimming inside her. Wouldn’t admit her sickness was unending, oyster juice and lemonade not equivalent to the ER. Ghorri goes Mrowl. Crab blinks and blinks. Hey, you’re no kitty, she says, and shuffle-steps after him, abandoning the burlap. Here is a footchase between office body and body decomposing.
Time to go, she wheezes. Off to the rainbow bridge, man-cat.
Ghorri says, I am simply cat.
Crab slides the knife from her beltloop, but this, too, she cannot manage. Each time she drops it, I hand it back to her, apologizing. Stop your pity, she says.
Let’s save him for later.
Don’t like my process, do it your fucking self. Shuffle-step, knife-drop.
The handle’s hot in my hand. I swallow. I ask Ghorri, Slow down, sir. Have some consideration.
Snaps Crab, I don’t need consideration, asshole.
How can I, as cat, slow down, if I, as cat, do not know what the concept of time is? Ghorri rubs against a tree. He climbs as would a cat, falls on his ass as would a man.
I kick him in the jaw, and he barrel-rolls. That is enough to freeze him. I plop onto his stomach. Stop moving.
You’re the good one, he says, Could’ve hurt me, but wouldn’t. Cats know. His bottom lip is caught between gapped incisors, making his attempt at a smile of sincerity too taut, too sad.
Crab wobbles over, the knife pointed straight ahead. Blood pours from her nose, bibs her blouse. Time for the rainbow, she says. Then she crumples to the ground, rag-dolled, the strings cut.
Next to us lies the knife. Neither grab it. Ghorri reaches up to my face, slowly, and I let him, not because I respect him or have rooted for him any step of this mile through the woods to the quarry where we’d knife him and shove him pitward as contractually required, but because, because—Don’t tell me what to do, I say.
Why would I need to? He parts open my lips with his fingers and inches in his nose to smell the interior.
Cats don’t sniff mouths.
This one does, he says. It is how one can know a soul’s true nature.
An hour to haul Crab to the car. Another to drive to the city. She wakes sneezing, snot and blood spittooned on her passenger window as the drive-thru clerk hands me two shakes. Wait, did we snuff him? Who got me vanilla? Shit. Turn back.
It’s fine, I say, and tap the list on the dashboard with Ghorri’s name scratched off.
You did? she asks, knowing I didn’t. Her shirt is filthy, ears and nostrils crusted with blood. She studies me. It’s a new look you got, that’s for certain. She sips from the straw, swallows hard if at all. Bet he mewled, didn’t he?
Nope, broke character.
She slaps her knee. I knew he wasn’t a cat.
Knew it was happening the whole time too.
Crab pats me on the face. See? Isn’t that the best way?
I cleaned Crab best I could when I got her in the car, and that which I could not clean I smudged into makeshift blush, makeshift cheekbones high and confident. But her eyes stayed bloodshot, black-bagged. She flips down the sun visor and inspects in the mirror her health and beauty. Flashes her teeth, vogues left cheek, right cheek, and without words convinces me nothing could ever be wrong with a visage of her caliber.
***
My sister sleeps woodenly, mouthily. In the right light you see the shadows of the little Samanthas carving their ways through her body like BBs. Waking, she says she feels not a thing from her brief illness, two months in, pain always throbbing fresh. Just my bladder, she says from the center of her California King. Clogged like a racehorse, she says, clanging the knife against her bedpan, bone dry.
I’d never seen her so scared, so unable to hide that. You’ll bounce back.
Bouncy girl, she says quietly. She asks, How many left on the list?
I show it.
Dang, you’ve made headway. She offers me a shaky head pat, and I crawl four feet across the mattress to receive it like a kitty. Every day is like this. I curl on my closet futon, scratching from the list name after name and imagining their methods of snuff, doing so simply to pass the time until she hacks, shits, calls for me, both of us knowing we’re living a lie in our own ways. That our electric has been cut off. That it’s not Tutum pounding his fist on the door twice daily.
How did this guy die? she asks, inspecting the list.
Knife.
And her?
Also knife.
Fantastic. I hope they lingered for you, she laughs. Not like us. We got better control over our fates.
Here is the slow disintegration of Crab. The hole in my heart didn’t start here, but it is here it’ll widen.
I’d love to pee for once, she says. She prods her bladder, winces.
How can I help?
Crab opens her mouth, and I step inside.
It is a tight fit. I keep the knife sheathed, shimmying past the tongue, through tract after tract. I shine the headlamp at the walls: there I see, like huge hawks in a pink sky, little versions of Samantha. Razor sharp faces swimming along her veins, swimming in pools of mucus, needling their way from nerve to vein to organ to vein. I say, I knew your mother. I helped you all from the very start. Maybe you could leave my sister alone then? Friend of the family and all that? They whip by, laughing in a screech, one slicing open my hand. I worry: in my wound, will there grow even smaller Samanthas? Am I already lost?
The piss in the bladder is neck high, roiling. I wade through despite the burn. I fumble at the bottom for the drain, using the tip of the knife to dig out not a bundle of impatient Samanthas, not a meteoric kidney stone, but a leatherbound book embossed with a silhouette of a woman’s profile. No title. I remove it, and the water drains out of Crab in a rush. A deep groan quakes the body. But I remain. I open the book. The knife drops onto spongy flesh, headlamp shining ever brighter. The book is about me. About all the horrors my sister has kept hidden from me. Flaws of mine I have never known. Weaknesses of mind. Weaknesses of spirit. Times Father slapped her and she slapped back. Times she slapped me and watched me suck my thumb. Times she pressed a pillow on Father’s gaunt face, only to remove it, saying, Why did Frog leave this here, Father? What buttons to push on Frog, and where each would lead her. Diagrams. Flow charts. Anatomies. Ways in which Frog could be something to be proud of, really proud of, and ways in which she’d likely be, and the last page, dog-eared but blank otherwise, how to keep her hopes up when none are deserved.