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I am not too proud to admit that I actually scratched my head, dumb as a monkey.

Susan ran one long nail over the phone table pad. She looked down at it. So did I. “Are you really going to the cops?”

“Yeah. Hell, yeah,” I said. Then, as if I needed an excuse, “It’s not like they won’t find someone else. Some other guy you did this stuff with. He’ll tell them the same thing.”

She shook her head once. “No. There’s only you. You’re the only one who knows.” Which left nothing to say. We stood there silent. She thinking, me just watching her, just watching the lines and colors of her.

Then, finally, she raised her eyes to me, tilted her head. She didn’t slink toward me, or tiptoe her fingers up my chest. She didn’t nestle under me so I could feel the heat of her breath or smell her perfume. She left that for the movies, for the femme fatales. All she did was stand there like that and give me that Susan look, chin out, dukes up, her soul in the offing, almost trembling in your hand.

“It gives you a lot of power over me, doesn’t it?” she said.

“So what?” I said back.

She shrugged again. “You know what I like.”

“Get out,” I said. I didn’t give myself time to start sweating. “Christ. Get the fuck out of here, Susan.”

She walked to the door. I watched her go. Yeah, right, I thought. I have power over her. As if. I have power over her until they decide not to charge her, until the headlines disap­pear. Then where am I? Then I’m her Lord and Master. Just like Jim was.

She passed close to me. Close enough to hear my thoughts. She glanced up, surprised. She laughed at me. “What. You think I’d kill you too?”

“I’d always have to wonder, wouldn’t I?” I said.

Still smiling, she jogged her eyebrows comically. “Whatever turns you on,” she said.

It was the comedy that did it. I couldn’t resist the impulse to wipe that smile off her murdering face. I reached out and grabbed her hair in my fist. Her black, black hair.

It was even softer than I thought it would be.

2006 CHRIS ADRIAN STAB

Chris Adrian (1970-) received a BA in English from the University of Florida (1993), and an MD from Eastern Virginia Medical School (2001), then completed a pediatric residency at the University of California, San Francisco. He also graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and attended Harvard Divinity School. He is currently a fellow in a pediatric hematology/oncology program in San Francisco.

Although he regards himself primarily as a doctor, Adrian has published two long novels and a short story collection. Gob’s Grief (2001) is a somewhat surrealistic story set during the Civil War in which a group of people, including Walt Whitman, attempt to build a machine that will abolish death. In The Children’s Hospital (2006), God brings a second apocalyptic flood to earth, annihilating everyone except the occupants of a single pediatric hospital. His short story collection A Better Angel (2008), originally titled Why Antichrist?, contains nine stories, including “Stab.”

“Stab” was written in 1996, shortly after the death of his older brother, but not published until 2006. While working on his master’s thesis, about conjoined twins, Adrian learned that when one twin dies during separation surgery, the survivor always feels a sense of loss, even when the operation occurs in infancy. At about the same time, he had a nightmare in which he was the actress Karen Black being chased by the frightening fetish doll in the 1975 film Trilogy of Terror, except that his terrorizer had blond hair. The nightmare, combined with interviews he conducted with survivors of twin-separation surgery, was the inspiration for this strange story.

“Stab” was first published in the summer 2006 issue of Zoetrope: All-Story.

Someone was murdering the small animals of our neighborhood. We found them in the road outside our houses, and from far away they looked like the victims of careless drivers, but close up you saw that they were plump and round, not flat, and that their bodies were marred by clean-edged rectangular stab wounds. Sometimes they lay in drying pools of blood, and you knew the murder had occurred right there. Other times it was obvious they had been moved from the scene of the crime and arranged in postures, like the two squirrels posed in a hug on Mrs. Chenoweth’s doorstep.

Squirrels, then rabbits, then the cats, and dogs in late summer. By that time I had known for months who was doing all the stabbing. I got that information on the first day of June 1979, two years and one month and fourteen days after my brother’s death from cancer. I woke up early that morning, a sunny one that broke a chain of rainy days, because my father was taking me to see Spider-Man, who was scheduled to make an appearance at the fourth annual Leukemia Society of America Summer Fair in Washington, D.C. I was eight years old and I thought Spider-Man was very important.

In the kitchen I ate a bowl of cereal while my father spread the paper out before me. “Look at that,” he said. On the front page was an article detailing the separation of Siamese twin girls, Lisa and Elisa Johansen from Salt Lake City. They were joined at the thorax, like my brother and I had been, but they shared vital organs, whereas Colm and I never did. There was a word for the way we and they had been joined: thoracopagus. It was still the biggest word I knew.

“Isn’t that amazing?” my father said. He was a surgeon, so these sorts of things interested him above all others. “See that? They’re just six months old!” Colm and I were separated at eighteen months. I had no clear memories of either the attachment or the operation, though Colm claimed he remembered our heads knocking together all the time, and that he dreamed of monkeys just before we went under from the anesthesia. The Johansen twins were joined side by side; my brother and I were joined back to back. Our parents would hold up mirrors so we could look at each other — that was something I did remember: looking in my mother’s silver-handled mirror, over my shoulder at my own face.

Early as it was, on our way out to the car we saw our new neighbor, Molly Matthews, sitting on the front steps of her grandparents’ house, reading a book in the morning sun.

“Hello, Molly,” said my father.

“Good morning, Dr. Cole,” she said. She was unfailingly polite with adults. At school she was already very popular, though she had been there for only two months, and she had a tendency to oppress the other children in our class with her formidable vocabulary.

“Poor girl,” said my father, when we were in the car and on our way. He pitied her because both her parents had died in a car accident. She was in the car with them when they crashed, but she was thrown from the wreck through an open window — this was in Florida, where I supposed everyone always drove around with their windows down and never wore seatbelts.

I turned in my seat so I was upside down. This had long been my habit; I did it so I could look out the window at the trees and telephone wires as we passed them. My mother would never stand for it, but she was flying that day to San Francisco. She was a stewardess. Once my father and I flew with her while she was working and she brought me a cup of Coke with three cherries in it. She put down the drink and leaned over me to open up the window shade, which I had kept closed from the beginning of the flight out of fear. “Look,” she said to me. “Look at all that!” I looked and saw sandy mountains that resembled crumpled brown paper bags. I imagined falling from that great height into my brothers arms.

“Spider-Man!” said my father, after we had pulled onto Route 50 and passed a sign that read Washington, d.c. 29 miles. “Aren’t you excited?” He reached over and rubbed my head with his fist. Had my mother been with me, she would not have spoken at all, but my father talked the whole way, about Spider-Man, about the mall, about the