14

The drawer slid open easily upon audible ball bearings. Charles felt a tremendous rush. What would he see in the darkness of that drawer? How long had it been dead? He stood on his toes and looked inside, to the back of the long rectangular shadows. There was nothing but icy air and steel. And that smell. The memory of tenants past. A cold, graceful gust of air washed over Charles.

The drawer was empty. And so was the next one. And the next.

Charles looked down at his own shoes. The toes hidden within seemed so innocent, unaware of the fact that, if he were unable to find a body, he’d come for them in the end.

But the eighth drawer delivered him what he wanted.

The second drawer from the left on the middle row. It had a little more weight to it and Charles knew before seeing it that a body was indeed inside. He opened it slowly and stopped at the shin.

“There was really no reason to look the person in the face,” he said. “After all, what I needed was far from it.”

The body lay level with Charles’s waist. The feet looked very old. Would Andi be able to tell the difference? Would she accept that a toe looks different once it’s removed? Is a man’s age visible in his baby toe?

What about the next time she comes to Goblin? Will it break her heart? Will she feel deceived when she asks to see your feet, Charles?

He brought the scissors to the body’s foot. No use thinking about that.

He lined up the edges of the blades to the cold rubber flesh. He thought of Wayne Sherman fashioning the topiary that stood outside his own apartment. Sherman would give it one good whack.

Be an artist, he thought. And art.

The shins jutted out of the darkness like withered bundles of birch.

On three.

Charles looked at where the light became shadows, just below the knees.

One…

He imagined a face, living, deeper in the dark drawer.

Two…

A face waking, screaming, hands erupting from the shadows, grabbing hold of the scissors, of Charles…

Three.

Charles gave it his all.

He heard a flat squishy sound, as if he had dropped pudding on the morgue floor, and felt the blades cut through muscle, tissue…tendon…

“But it stopped at the bone. Stopped so suddenly that it was like the body itself was telling me, No more.”

His shoes squawked as he left the scissors stuck in the purple grooves and inched back from the open drawer. Would he be able to break through that bone? Was it brittle enough?

He wiped sweat from his brow and reset himself.