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.

“I needed a minute. The emotions warring within me were as big as any I’d ever felt. And the way the scissors stuck to the body like that, it was just the kick I needed. For they made it all…cartoonish. A game. As if I’d been tasked with removing all ten toes in a finite period of time, and a whole crowd of fellow children were rooting me on, watching to see if I’d do it. So I got back to it. And this time I was prepared. I gripped the scissors much harder the second time.”

But the bone wouldn’t give. Charles yanked, side-to-side, exposing more of the bone as he did. He grunted and cried out, placed a sneaker against a drawer beneath, pulled with all the strength he had.

Snap, dammit! BREAK!

He pressed harder, pleading now into the cold dead steel of that drawer. And finally, as a cry for relief came from deep in his throat, Charles felt the give, the snap he was looking for.

He stumbled back hard and fell heavily to the linoleum floor.

Across the room, the drawer rolled all the way open from the force.

Charles sat on the ground, looking up to the drawer’s handle, to the body that he still couldn’t quite see.

In his hands, the scissors held the toe like a diamond in the grip of pliers.

Charles inched across the morgue floor on his butt, then planted a sneaker against the drawer and kicked it shut. It rolled back easily and slammed closed with a great steel echo.

He lay on his back, breathing hard, looking up to the ceiling.

“I fell asleep that way. I realize how foolish that sounds. But the relief was so great that it affected me. I imagine drugs do the same thing. And when I woke, I still held the scissors and the toe within them.”

Before getting up, he waited. He listened. How long had he been asleep? Long enough for the morning shift to arrive?

Hearing nothing, Charles rose and, scooping up his wallet on the way out, let the strong steel door slam closed behind him.