Cartouches by Jason Price Everett

     His body, disinterred from their frantic lovemaking, lay quiet beside her as she arose and put on her hand. Her right hand was partly prosthetic; the thumb was in place but the fingers had been blown off by a quarter-stick of dynamite. (The dynamite had been a gift to her from an ex. In one of their frequent fights, the ex had attempted to rescind the significance of the gift by claiming it to be fake. She had lit it to prove the ex wrong. It had exploded prematurely.)

     Fully assembled, she stumbled through the clutter of her horse doll collection to the closet for her big white fuzzy robe. She shrugged it on. From the bed came his warbling snores, urging her to the kitchen with a leisurely glide. Hands in pockets, she strolled through the half-light of the afternoon apartment.

     Once in the kitchen she began the routine; she knew what to expect when he awoke. She put some water on to boil. From the refrigerator she took a package of hotdogs (he demanded the cheaper brands, their nauseatingly pink flesh flecked with tiny red dots like mites -- they were all he ever ate). She took the hotdogs, twelve in all, from their package and laid them on a dishtowel on the counter, with which she proceeded to scrupulously dry each one in turn.

     From another drawer she withdrew a surgical marker and a hobby knife with a long, thin blade. The surgical marker was of the type used in operations to trace the patterns of projected incisions upon the body of the patient. Its bright purple ink was practically indelible. With it she approached the first hotdog. She drew a neat line around its circumference, precisely halfway down its length. Then, she drew three lines from point to point on her first line, from one side of the hot dog to the other. These lines crossed each other at the hotdog's tip, forming an asterisk. The dimensions were exact. She proceeded to do the same to the remaining eleven hotdogs.

     With the hobby knife gripped carefully in her partially prosthetic hand, she made three cuts, lengthwise, along the lines of the asterisk she had drawn on each hotdog. She dumdummed her meat bullets, her fleshly ammunition, with great care. One by one she consigned them to the now-boiling pot.

     She smoked a cigarette as she watched them dance in the water. As they cooked, the six sections of the sliced ends of each hotdog contracted and began to curl backward towards their undamaged halves. The purple surgical ink dissolved away, leaving no trace. Lost in reverie, she thought of spent bullets recovered at crime scenes, of shattered jawbones and dead vegetation. Her cigarette burnt down to scorch the plastic of her hand. She noticed the smell, cursed, and put it out quickly.

     As she arranged the hotdog hexapi on a plate, she heard his plaintive cries from their bedroom: "Octopuses! Octopuses!" He smiled when he saw her enter the room; he reached for her with his smooth fat hands. He sat crosslegged in the center of the bed, naked, his bulbous gut protruding. His vacant blue eyes wore the ironed-on insignia of severe mental retardation. When she sat down and presented him with the plate, he began stuffing the hexapi into his mouth without ceremony. She took one for herself, and as he ate, neatly bit off each tentacle one by one. The remainder she placed in her mouth, sucking it in and out, back and forth with her tongue and her cheeks, until she grew tired of the game -- then inhalation, chewing, swallowing, gone.

     His face beamed as he lay back down again. "Good," he mumbled, happily. He was asleep, thumb in mouth, before she had returned the plate to the kitchen.

     She sat at the front window of their apartment in an old chair upholstered in a faded muted pattern. Her fuzzy white robe blurred her in its bright outlines against the dull backdrop of the rain outside. She thought of human frivolity. She thought of convenient definitions of love. She thought of a play she had seen once. "And the Duchess said, 'When I die, I will give to you the flour of my bones, my' -- something something -- 'and my name forever,'" she whispered to herself.

     His mortified semen had begun to trickle out of her. She fingered her moist self absently with her living hand. She used his liquid contribution to trace a shining line on her upper thigh, a line that became a picture, a picture that became a word. She drew a circle around the word, as if for emphasis.