Charles pictured himself slicing through its straps.
Lynn reached out, turned a page, flinched and blurted, ‘Ow! Damn!’ She jerked her hand up. She held it rigid in front of her face, fingers spread and hooked. A gleaming dot of blood bloomed on the pad of her index finger.
Charles felt his mouth go dry. His heart thudded. Heat rushed through his groin. He moaned.
She glanced over at him. Her face was red, her teeth bared. Her eyes returned to her hand. She looked as if she didn’t know what to do with it. She shook it a couple of times like a cat with a wet paw, then pressed the bleeding fingertip between her lips.
‘A paper cut?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘I hate those things,’ he said.
A cut. A slit.
He stayed crouched, hard and aching.
Lynn took the finger away from her mouth. It left some blood on her lips. She scowled at the wound, then gave Charles a tight, twisted smile. ‘It’s not that they hurt so much, you know? They’re just so…’ She shuddered. ‘They’re like fingernails skreeking on a blackboard.’ She licked the blood from her lips, then returned the finger to her mouth.
‘Would you like a bandage?’ Charles asked.
‘Do you have one?’
‘Oh, sure. I’m always prepared.’
‘Like a Boy Scout, huh?’
‘Yeah.’ Rising from his crouch, he hoped that the books on the cart’s top shelf were high enough. They were. Their tops reached up past his stomach.
He turned away from Lynn and hurried into the office behind the circulation desk. There, he took a bandage from the tin inside his briefcase. He adjusted the front of his pants to make the bulge less apparent. But it still showed. He took his corduroy jacket off the back of a nearby chair, put it on, and fastened the middle button. He looked down. The front of the jacket nicely concealed his secret.
When he came out, he found that Lynn had turned around on her stool to face him. ‘It’s stopped bleeding,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but paper cuts. You rub them the wrong way and flip back the skin and…’
‘Yuck. I guess I will take a bandage. Would you like to do the honors?’ She held her hand toward Charles.
‘Sure,’ he said. Trembling, he stripped the wrapper off the adhesive strip. He moved closer to Lynn, halting when the wet end of her finger was inches from his chest. He stared down at the slit -a crescent across the finger’s pad, rather like the gills of a tiny fish, pink under a thin white flap. The edge of the flap was away from him.
‘Do you think I’ll live?’
‘Sure.’ His voice came out husky. He felt terribly tight and hard.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. Cuts make me nervous.’
‘You aren’t gonna faint or anything, are you?’
‘Hope not.’ He fumbled with the bandage, peeling the shiny papers away from its sides. He let them fall. They drifted down like petals plucked from a flower, and settled on her shirt.
Pinching the sticky ends of the bandage, he lowered the gauze center toward Lynn’s cut.
He wanted to hurt her.
He wanted to grab her finger and rub his thumb back, flipping up the little edge of skin, making her jerk and cry out.
As fast as he could, he pressed the bandage to her cut and flipped the adhesive ends around her finger. He whirled away and rushed for the office.
‘Charles?’ she called. ‘Charles, are you all right?’
He didn’t answer. He dropped onto his swivel chair, hunched over and grabbed his knees.
It’s over, he told himself. You didn’t do it. Lynn can’t even suspect…
He heard her quiet footsteps behind him. She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘Just… cuts. They upset me.’
Her hand squeezed him through the corduroy. ‘If I’d known… What is it, a phobia or something?’
‘I guess so. Maybe.’
In a lighter tone, she said, ‘That probably explains why you carry bandages around, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
She patted his shoulder. ‘Maybe you’ll feel better if you get some fresh air,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you go ahead and take off? I’ll close up the library.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’
He waited until she was gone, then carried his briefcase outside. The night was dank and misty.
Feverish with memories of Lynn’s cut, he lingered near the library entrance. Soon, the upper windows went dark. He pictured her up there, alone in the stacks, lowering her bandaged finger from the switch panel, starting down the stairwell.
His Swiss Army knife was a heavy lump against his thigh. He slipped his hand down into his pants pocket. He caressed the smooth plastic handle.
And savored thoughts of slitting her.
Just wait for her to come out…
He turned from the library and walked quickly away.
In his apartment three blocks from campus, Charles went to bed. But he didn’t sleep. His mind swirled with images of Lynn.
Don’t think about her, he told himself.
You can’t do her.
But it would be
But you can’t.
Lynn was a graduate student. Like Charles, she earned a small stipend by working part-time at the Whitmore Library. Everyone knew they worked the same hours. Too much suspicion would be focused on him.
Besides, he really liked her.
But damn it…!
Forget about her.
He tried to forget about her. He tried to think only about the others. How they yelped or screamed. How their faces looked. How their skin split apart. How blood spilled out like scarlet creeks overflowing banks of ripped flesh, spreading and running, forming new streams that slid along velvety fields, that setded to create shimmering pools in the hollows of the body, that flowed down slopes.
So many faces. So many bodies flinching with surprise or thrashing in agony. So many flooding slits.
All belonged to strangers.
Except for the face and body and cut of his mother. Struggling to stop the confusing flood of images, fighting to keep his mind off Lynn, he concentrated on his mother. Her voice through the door.
His mother held a razor in one hand. Her left leg was out of the water, its foot propped on the rim of the tub under one of the faucet handles. The cut was midway between her knee and the place where the water rippled around the wider part of her leg.
