It hardly seemed worth it but still she tried to avoid the worst and deepest of the puddles. Drenched for the most part even swaddled against the weather—-raincoat, hat, and leaky rubber boots—Sheila went through the pointless motions of trying to stay dry even as ice water ran down the back of her neck. She was a beige and gray woman toiling through a black and gray cityscape, damp and defeated. Just finding her way home was an ordeal and once arrived, no comfort awaited.
Was it surprising that Sheila found no joy in her life? If she were to do away with herself, would those who might find her body be puzzled that she had killed herself? After the landlord forced the door to find her there forgotten save for the stink of her, would they ask themselves why, oh why with so much to live for, why in heaven’s name did this woman take her own life? Sheila thought not.
Looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, the only mirror in her house, Sheila pondered not the “why?” of her impending suicide but, instead, she meditated on the “going through with it and doing it right.” She had, after all, been disappointed by so much during her 25 years that she quite rightly feared that her own demise would prove a bungle or a let-down or just another waste of time.
There was loneliness. There were longings unsatisfied, goals unattained, dreams and wishes unrealized. Sheila mined her memory for a reason not to die in the same way she looked at the ceramic knickknack, a shepherdess with crook and lamb, adorning an otherwise barren shelf and she struck nothing in either to stop her self-destruction. No single part existed by which she could justify the whole.
Sheila endured a childhood unremarkable for it’s very lack of remark, no awards or ribbons or certificates of achievement, friendless and awkwardly so, tolerated by parents barely tolerable themselves until her after-graduation flight to a different kind of solitude as if that would be a cure. There were some terms at a university where Sheila floundered in confusing classes with even more confusing classmates before she skulked away with her lackluster Cs and Ds and no one even noticed that she’d left.
She felt like putty. She learned that she was soft and without angles, malleable had anyone ever cared to mold her though not even her professors had indicated that possibility. She was beige and gray and invisible. Sheila made herself available, no one responded, and she didn’t know what else to do. She sat her life lumpenly.
There was a job then and more pointless hours earning pointless money that only ensured she could pay her pointless bills so she could work some more and acquire more bills. Sheila met no one though she tried, could connect with no coworker or neighbor despite her tentative overtures, and she could make no friends. She cashed her checks and shopped for her groceries and moved about the world as if sealed inside a jar.
The blossoming she awaited never occurred and her appearance was, to be generous, drab and her personality, to be truthful, was unfinished. She was putty and, had she been truly visible, Sheila knew she would be recognized as such and then ignored all over again. It was all a losing proposition.
Sheila said “hello” and and she said “goodbye” to the few people she encountered in the courses of her beige, gray, softly sodden days and counted those as her relationships.
“Goodnight, Rodger,” she said to her manager when she left the shop each workday.
“Take it easy, Sheel,” he answered and she always tried to do that and she never quite could.
“Hello,” she told the bank teller. “I’d like to cash this check.”
“Have a nice day, Ms. Cord,” the teller always admonished her. Sheila knew that she wouldn’t have a nice day, that she couldn’t have a nice day, that she couldn’t even manage to take it easy.
*
Dark days followed darker nights. In winter mud, wet and cloying cold, she slouched her way to and from the place of her pointless employment and past the shops where she made her purchases. Along the way back to her rooms, Sheila would stop in those shops and purchase the tins and boxes from which she ate. Her days off were even worse than her days at work for she truly had nowhere to go with only the television to remind her that other people existed. She’d sit and eat, silent and unmoved and growing larger and softer as the programs unreeled before her. Sheila never laughed and she never cried and she eventually would turn off the machine and sit in silence or sleep until it was time for work again.
The futility of this repetition was beginning to become apparent. She could find no compelling reason to keep doing any of it and, one beige, gray afternoon on her way to her rooms from where she worked, Sheila added to her purchases one small paper package of razor blades called “safety” though why she could not understand why. They seemed seductively dangerous to her.
And so, balanced on the edge of her not very clean tub in her very not clean bathroom, it was with true and real surprise that she saw the paper packet of razor blades she opened with the desire to open her arteries continue to open and open more and more and further and further beyond the possibilities of its apparent size and shape, beyond the limits of its own dimensions and begin unfolding and unsheathing and opening again and again and then again in ways both strange to witness and unimaginable until before her stood a being, a form composed of knives, needles, razor blades, jagged shards, and smooth scalpels, opening more and spreading to become a kind of metallic person, a jumble of sharp angles and cutting edges, a face like a flower of cutting steel and glass and flint, like a fan of knives.
It then spoke to her with a voice composed of tuned metals, a voice that sounded like ripping rippled foil, like iron nails dragged across a shattered mirror, like shattering obsidian, like a bundle of needles disturbed to friction.
“Sheila, dear,” his voice insinuated the room. And the creature there trembled with light gathered and magnified and reflected, a blinding aura of potential, and the potential of a blade in repose. “So sad.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Oh, yes. So sad.”
He shimmered as he moved and the shivering sounds of sharp edges run across each other accompanied the sight. He was disorienting and beautiful and very, very frightening. Sheila wanted to cry but was afraid to do so.
“Afraid?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Sad and afraid,” he pondered. “This is no way to live.”
“I know,” Sheila answered. “It isn’t. I don’t want to. I don’t know how.”
“You wish for something,” he continued. “You wish for more.”
“Yes,” she affirmed. “More. Much much more.”
“And here you sit with me.”
“Yes.”
“Then we shall sit together for awhile,” with his voice brittle and sharp and comforting in a clean sort of way.
‘How strange,’ she thought that there at the pinnacle of her isolation and upon the cusp of her demise, she would finally find a friend, a confidant, a person (or a sort of a person) who seemed to care for her. ‘How strange. How beautiful. How perfect.’
“How strange. How beautiful. How perfect,” he told her.
His gentlest touch, his lightest contact, and Sheila bled. The sounds of their caresses were the sounds made when skin parts whisper-soft under surgeons’ knives. Still, her longing grew within the glow of candlelight and flavored wine, the flickering reflections that her razor-man shed, and she grew both bold and slightly anesthetized. She flirted with her razor-man.
Sheila reached to touch his face and she did touch his face and then she put her bleeding forefinger into her mouth to taste the blood he had brought forth from inside her.
“Does this hurt you?” he asked as his lingering touch drew a line of deep iron red from her skin, a crimson line of contour from below her ear traveling down her neck and across the tops of her breasts. The line gaped, a fault line filled with blood.
“No,” she answered him. “Never. It will never hurt me to be touched.”
And she kept telling him “no” even when the real answer was emphatically “yes” until she could no longer speak at all but could only open more and more under his embrace, until his kisses skinned her face and her eyes rolled white, her teeth gleamed white all the way back to her molars against the shocking red shine of her naked muscles and bone. Sheila’s meat quivered in the open air.
“You are becoming beautiful,” he told her as he stripped away the lie of her and revealed the true of her. Free of flesh and yellow fat, her mouth fell open like a flower all long tooth, white bone, and sheets of red muscle along her jaw. “So beautiful.”
The cold, wet air on her now-exposed nerves sent Sheila’s senses reeling, the sheer weight of pain overwhelming her capacity for rational thought. She became her own reactions and there, teetering along borders she had only dimly imagined, Sheila lost her sanity in a blinding rush of agony and new-found love.
Her razor-lover gently turned back the layers surrounding her throat, peeled open her skin and fascia and muscle down to the very cartilage and he opened that, too; the rush of cool air through Sheila’s new orifice slobbered her devotion and its concomitant ecstasy.
Beige and gray no longer, Sheila blossomed crimson, scarlet, deep burgundy red under his attentions and each caress exposed something new and secret and long hidden away from view.
It was all revelation.
Each uncovering brought new jolting wonder, agony, and awareness. Unobscured by eyebrow or eyelid, her vision sharpened; she saw cleanly and she saw clearly, and she watched with naked eyeballs as what had once been inside her spilled outside and spread uncoiling across the floor in a multicolored slick of organ meat and membrane.
“Beautiful,” she marveled at her own concealed colors, awed and humbled that she’d carried them so long and unaware. Sheila thrilled as the blades that were his hands and fingers cupped her breasts and whispered them to ribbons, hanging shreds of golden fat and meat. The white-hot stab of billowing pain carried her nearly outside herself as her flesh shredded with his caress, hot floods of her brilliantly oxygenated blood laving them both.
Sheila reached to stroke his cheeks, to return his loving touch, and watched the skin and meat of her fingertips fall away in translucent slices against the angled edges of his features and each slice brought the nerves in her hands closer to her surface, each nerve singing electric fire into her overloaded brain.
She couldn’t tell if the wetness between her legs was purely sex or just what was left of her sex, her genitals in tatters, fragments, and still pumping pure, white-hot sensation to the glowing nucleus of her cerebral cortex. The feeble orgasms that used to reward her clumsy, lonely masturbation were burned to cinders by the heat of what was exploding inside her newly skinned skull. All other joy and sorrow, all other emotion and feeling withered away under the awful raw burning that swept Sheila toward willing destruction. Helpless in her razor-lover’s embrace, she arched and arced and convulsed herself enough to fling her colors against the wall, great swathes of red and yellow and lines of blue across the rotten plaster and shining brighter than any paint or pigment.
And as what Sheila was becoming rose above her flayed self and as what Sheila had once been fell heaped beneath, she found herself, for the moment, alone and bleeding in her bathroom. Her razor-man fled in sudden collapse upon himself and back down to the small and dangerous blade held in her hand, and Sheila could take a breath to contemplate her new and profound state of nudity, her slavery to pure sensation. This she did and she saw that she was a red woman, a blindingly white woman, and fully opened in a room awash with color until she was quite nothing at all.
