beautiful. Everyone else had said she looked like a man. The kids had called her “Stoneface” because of her square jaw and sharp angular features. She looked like she could take a left hook from Mike Tyson and keep coming. Her lean muscular physique looked to her like a runner or gymnast but many men found it too hard and un-feminine. No one had ever called her beautiful until Vincento. It was a shame things had to turn out this way. But, she had to make him understand that a woman’s affections were not to be toyed with. You couldn’t tell a woman you loved her and then just walk away.
Vincento looked over at the kid in the corner, who looked back at him and smiled. Vince shook his head and laughed, barking out a spray of blood with each chuckle.
“No way that kid is ‘ine.”
Maria’s eyes turned cold and a murderous sneer crossed her face. Vincento knew what she was about to do and terror raced through his nervous system. He struggled against the straps, bucking and jerking, and succeeding only in causing them to cut deeper into the skin on his wrists, throat, and ankles, making them run with blood.
“You can’t ‘e serious! The ‘ucking kid is ‘lack! How the hell can he ‘e ‘ine?!”
Vincento screamed. Maria brought the shears together.
“Aaaaargh! Oh God! Noooooo!”
“Shhhhhh! It’s okay. It’s okay. Medical science has come quite a long way.” She teased, holding Vincento’s severed organ in front of his face.
“You know they can sew this back on now? They can make it as good as new.”
Maria leaned in closer and peered deep into Vincento’s one remaining eye.
“Take me to the hospital! Help me!” he pleaded. Maria ignored him.
“You know what you have to do if you want to go to a hospital. The longer this remains unattached, the greater the chance of irreparable nerve damage. Oh, they might still be able to stitch it back together, but this beautiful cock of yours would be all but useless. And of course, if you wait too long, it might start to rot. Then there would be nothing the doctors could do for you.”
“You’re crazy! You’re fucking crazy!”
“Just tell me what I want to hear.”
“’uck you and your little nigger child! HE IS NOT MY SON!!!”
The little boy in the corner with the thick wooly hair and the dark caramel-colored skin showed his first sign of emotion. A solitary tear rolled down his cheek and he looked over at his mother, who was covered in blood and sweat, looking almost as gruesome as her prisoner.
“He’s not my daddy?” his bottom lip began to quiver and more tears poured from his soft dark eyes.
A white hot flash of rage went through Maria’s mind. She knew she should never take the job personal, but this one was. No way to maintain emotional detachment this time. She looked at Vincento’s movie star good looks and remembered how much she’d loved him. How he’d said all the right things, and touched her in all the right places, and made her cum harder than any man ever had. How she’d made a fool of herself over him. How he’d drained her bank accounts and fucked all her friends, and talked her into prostituting herself. He’d made a whore out of her. Pimping her to all his gangster friends, many of which she’d done hits for, and then leaving her once she’d gotten pregnant.
Vincento didn’t look so handsome anymore. His ruptured eye drooled out of the socket and down his cheek like a large bloody hunk of snot and phlegm. She’d sliced off his bottom lip and bitten off his nose. He no longer looked like Antonio Banderas. Besides, she didn’t think Banderas would have shit on himself when the electricity went through him the way Vincento had. She wasn’t so sure she wanted to marry him anymore.
“He’s not anybody’s Daddy. He’s not even a man.”
“No! No! Don’t! Dooooon’t!”
Maria stuffed the severed penis into her mouth and began to chew. Vincento had never wanted to be a father anyway. Now he would never have to worry about that.
Talent Does What It Can
Lisa was deep in concentration, thinking only of the complex notes dancing in her head split-seconds before her fingers struck ivory, bringing the lovely sounds out of her mind and into the air. Her brow knit in concentration as she wrestled the music from her soul down her arms, into her fingertips, and into the piano, relaxing in serene rapture only when the sweet melody washed over her.
Her mother sat beside her on the piano bench, humming softly along with the music and squeezing her so tightly Lisa felt as if all the air were being crushed from her lungs. She could feel her mother’s body shiver and occasionally her mother would stop humming and let out a low moan. Lisa wanted to stop, to stroke her mother’s beautiful blond tresses and kiss her forehead, but she had to keep the music going. The music was everything.
“Don’t stop playing, Lisa. Please. Just don’t stop.”
There was a panic in the woman’s voice and she squeezed Lisa tighter when she spoke, digging little half moons in Lisa’s arms.
“Okay, mother. Don’t worry. I’ll keep playing.”
For some reason Lisa’s thoughts kept returning to the fortune cookie she’d had at lunch with her shrimp fried rice. The tiny pink slip of paper had an unusual proverb inscribed on it in a neat Courier font.
“Talent does what it can. Genius does what it must.”
Lisa chuckled as her entire body vibrated with music. She heard terrible sounds all around her, audible just below the tinkle of the keys. She began singing to drown them out.
Tonight was supposed to be the day of her recital with the New York Symphony Orchestra. She was to perform a solo of Beethoven’s Fifth. It was to be her moment in the spotlight, the crowning jewel in a year of success and good fortune. She’d already received a scholarship to Juliard and would be the youngest student ever to attend at 14 years old. They called her a prodigy, a musical genius, compared her to a young Mozart. They said she could hear things in the music that no one else could, that she could see the notes dancing before her eyes. They had no idea how right they were.
For her each composition was like a painting. She knew the hues and complexions of every note, the shape and density of every octave and the pictures they would create when assembled in a score. The music spoke to her. It was like an entire language and Lisa could hear the whispered secrets hidden in every note. She knew which doors each one could unlock. Juliard had recognized her special talent and now the rest of the musical world would recognize it as well when she played on stage tonight.
Earlier that day she had gone out with her mother to buy the pretty blue dress with the plunging neckline and open back that subtley flattered her burgeoning womanhood without making her look like she was for sale. She had picked it out of a Spiegel catalogue and after seeing the price-tag had been convinced that she would never own it. From the moment she saw it she had imagined herself wearing it as she performed in front of New York’s social elite. Still, she had been prepared to settle for a reasonable facsimile. It had been the happiest moment of her life when she tried the dress on in front of the mirror. But that was before the darkness came.
That was before the screams and the blood and the horrible sounds of ripping flesh and cracking bone.
Lisa changed from Beethoven to a mournful nocturne from Wagner. Her face darkened as the terrible memories wormed their way in past the music.
There had been no news flash warning them of the danger. No sirens went off and no public service announcement on the radio. All of a sudden they were simply everywhere. Her uncle had tried to fight them. He was old but he was strong and a great hunter. He was wearing his best suit, sitting in the living room with his wife and his brother, Lisa’s father, and her grandparents. All of them were there to hear her play at the symphony. It was only an hour before they were supposed to leave and Lisa was seated at the piano with her family all around her when the windows caved in and the darkness spilled into the room. There were dozens of them, perhaps even hundreds. Uncle Matt couldn’t fight them all. He’d left his guns in the trunk of his car and the chair he wielded at them turned to kindling after the first one he struck. Then the darkness was upon him and those awful ripping noises began.
Lisa watched as they latched onto his throat. He beat at them with his bare fists even as they tore his head off his shoulder. Lisa had looked into his eyes just before he was decapitated. It was the first time she’d ever seen him afraid. Her father went next and then both grandparents. Then Lisa had begun to play.
She had been thinking about the fortune cookie when they started going after her mother.
“Talent does what it can…”
So she had used the only talent she had, her music. The reaction was almost immediate. The creatures
