I had calmed and was now slumped silently in the wooden chair. Dully, feebly, I was aware that I had just lost my job. I felt a certain relief.

“How could you get yourself in such a mess?” Mr. Chesbrough pleaded to understand. “I always thought you were such a lady.” His face was dark with reproach. He was right. I had been so polite at the shop. I never laughed too loudly, I kept my head down, I sympathized with the poor quality of the equipment and the danger of walking to work at two o’clock in the morning. Hadn’t I also admired photographs of his strange children? Wasn’t there something about a diabetic wife? “Miss Gunnar,” he always called me, and did not despise me or ignore me for my sweetness.

He leaned on the desk and peered closely at me. His sympathy melted me.

Tears—I didn’t feel them until they hit my chin. The middle of my face felt shut off, shorted out.

“Gu-blug,” I muttered, nonsense. My throat was full of mucus. I stood up, I tried to speak. “It wasn’t—” I started to sob. The enormous ugliness of my face was distinctly tangible. I wanted to explain that it was a lost love that had made me behave so wildly, that of course I knew it was foolish for one such as I, hardly above slime, to presume to love. I wanted to tell him I had always been a sucker for a pretty face.

“It’s not drugs! It’s…” Pain, I was going to say, and to aid my credibility I employed a half-remembered tool of rhetoric, the downward swoop of the palms to the podium—in this case, the back office desk. But instead I fell onto the raised arm of the paper cutter blade. In fact, my not inconsiderable weight pressed the long knife straight down onto Mr. Chesbrough’s right hand. It crunched.

“Yahhh!” Mr. Chesbrough screamed. His mouth opened so long I could see his quivering uvula.

I looked down at his hand, saw a flash of white bone, and jerked the knife up again. There was a sound in my ears that went on until I realized it was my own voice, squealing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

Mr. Chesbrough’s falsetto screaming continued. “You cow! You stupid cow!” And then he fainted to the floor. Blood pumped from the cut, gently and quietly, onto his white apron, and pooled in the folds of the cloth before slipping off to the floor.

I dropped down beside him and grabbed his wrist tight in my two hands, squeezing, trying to keep the blood from escaping. I whispered, “I’m sorry,” as a kind of tourniquet for my conscience.

The office door opened.

“Christ!” said Pat. She swooped down beside me, reached for his hand, then stopped. “Is he dead? Or is it just his hand?”

“His hand,” I said.