MalContents (8 page)

I stalked back up the hill and emptied the machine gun’s drum into the face of the man who’d set Yaakov afire. When the trigger clicked its last and the drum was empty, the guy’s face looked like raw hamburger meat.

And to this day, I love the taste of a half-raw hamburger. Every bite is sweetened by the memory of what I did to that Nazi fucker’s face.

Moses lived. He was never right in the head after that near fatal beating the Nazis gave him. He was prone to temper tantrums where the least little thing could cause a big blowup. And one of his eyes was off-kilter, like it was always looking off in weird directions, looking out for dangerous things nobody else could see. It wasn’t unusual to find him hiding under his bed at night. Other than that, he was the same sweet little Krout he always was, except that his memory had some new holes in it. His armless fiddle player Viola stuck by him and they got married six months later. A big carnie freak show of a wedding.

Moses kept the golem locked safely in its cabinet. He let me visit it whenever I wanted. I had my own key. Sometimes I’d squint my eyes a little and could see flesh-and-blood Yaakov standing there like a statue.

A week after Yaakov died, I did the crazy thing. I was alone with the golem. He was standing there in his cabinet looking at me with statue eyes. I wrote the word on its forehead to make it come alive, just like Moses used to do on stage. The word that meant
truth
.

Emet.

I waited. And waited. Nothing happened. In my crazy desperation I opened my mouth to say the Yiddish words I’d heard Moses say a hundred times, the magical incantation to bring the golem to life. I had no idea what they actually meant. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the magic.

My tongue flicked out to wet my lips and then I spoke.

I said the magic words.

I closed my eyes and willed the golem to come alive. To come in the name of Yaakov Munk to avenge all the injustice and cruelty in the world. To take up the torch, so to speak, to carry on the work I’d started when I killed Yaakov’s killers. I willed the golem to go on a rampage and destroy anything or anybody that got in his way.

I repeated the incantation. The words vibrated in my skull and chest. Tears ran down my furry cheeks. I looked at the golem through my flood of tears.

I opened my mouth to howl, to make the most mournful yowl the world ever heard.

But I didn’t howl. Instead, I blurted: “Yaakov!”

This ain’t no fairy tale. I never lived a fairy tale life, so I’m not going to treat you like a rube and bullshit you that the golem came alive. It just stood there like the clay statue it was.

But I knew that wherever Yaakov was in the otherworld, he
heard
me. My voice got through to him, to his ghost or whatever. I knew it because I felt it. My voice plucked strings and the strings made a sound and the sound went where I wanted it to go. Like the golem was a radio playing my voice for Yaakov somewhere on the other side of this life.

I broke down and cried, sobbing so hard it hurt. I fell on my knees and hugged the golem’s stony legs.

I was still Wolf Girl. I would always be a howler at heart. But now I was more.

I’d found my lost voice and it was OK to be human again.

The golem had brought me back to life.

THE MUSHROOMS

by Gregory L. Norris

Sunny
Weir knew knives. In a way, knives were more important to her life’s work than food, because without her knives a tomato was just a squat lump of bulky vegetation and Kobe beef and Hamachi tuna were inedible, unless the diner was a dog. A chef was nothing without her knives. Until she turned and saw one aimed at her, one with a sharp, shiny blade perfect for carving meat, Sunny considered herself a master at wielding them. Only she’d never been on this end of a knife before, and now she was the meat.

The bitch nailed her in the bathroom, right as Sunny moved toward one of the four private stalls across from a length of granite countertop and an equal number of sinks sitting beneath a mirror. She caught the glint of light bouncing off the blade, reflected above the sinks. She was later told that second or two of warning likely saved her life. The knife had been sailing toward her back.

“You fucking bitch,” the woman shrieked.

Sunny only got out a hurried, “What the fff—” before the blade sliced through her gown and into the meat of her right breast. The pain wasn’t immediate, which made it worse because she knew it was coming. Splinters of a second passed before the unholy agony of being stabbed hit her and she went down, blade and all. Enough time for her sarcastic Inner Bitch to muse that silk charmeuse, while fetching, was hardly a substitute for chain mail at these cutthroat industry gatherings where everyone, including the catering crew, were out to knife you in the kidneys. Or the tits, as in this particular case.

The catering crew. She absorbed the details of the woman’s clothes as she dropped into an undignified and bleeding pile outside the bathroom stall. Her attacker was boxy in shape, a woman without a waist, dressed in the standard black and white garb of the company walking her appetizers around the party atop Sunny’s new line of dinnerware and platters.

“How’s that for a
slice and dice
?” the woman said, leaning down to fire off a wad of spit at her. As it flew, hitting her cheek, Sunny noted the ugly mole on the woman’s face, caramel-brown, with a pucker-brush of hair jutting out of its core. Enough, Inner Bitch chortled, to apply makeup with. Or on.

Sunny’s consciousness leapt out of her body and floated disconnected beside her, recording the rest of the details from halfway up to the ceiling: the woman’s roots showing at the base of her long black mane, the witchy locks pulled into a ponytail and held together by a cloisonné chignon; her girth, more pear than apple; and the rabid madness in her unblinking black eyes, which bottled an intense rage that made it clear she hadn’t come simply to injure, but to kill.

Sunny’s two disconnected halves slammed back together as the bitch reached for the handle of the knife, still lodged in the breast that Joseph probably wouldn’t knead and suckle on at the Harborview Hotel following the party. In one fluid motion, Sunny reached up and popped her attacker hard, right in her closest eye. The woman screamed, a terrible sound more animal than human, and Sunny remembered the ring on her pointer finger, a big one, with an Asschercut diamond and lots of little diamond chips. Diamonds weren’t, Inner Bitch remembered, the strongest substance on the planet, but in fact the third. Being third from the top was still enough that her fingers came away wet. Blood trickled from the woman’s eye socket.

Her attacker recoiled. Sunny grabbed at the knife’s handle. In all her years as a restaurateur and celebrity chef, she’d run knives through every meat imaginable, the everyday as well as the exotic. The blade hadn’t gone in far, but it was enough for a taste of how all the cows, pigs, chickens, fish, quail, and lobster she’d served up had felt, right as the executioner’s guillotine fell. The sensation was a curious rush of heat as well as ice. She had grown intimate enough with the knife to feel every atom of the blade as she pulled, and it resisted. A foul taste shuddered up her throat. For a terrifying instant, Sunny worried that the blade had cut deeper than the flabby tissue of her right breast. Then she tasted a vague hint of garlic crab and realized it was simply the echo of one of her stuffed mushrooms, rising ahead of her gorge.

She choked down the urge to vomit, yanked out the knife, and swung, catching the other woman across her cheek, right below the mole. The bitch doubled over backwards, landing in an undignified pose with her thick ankles in the air, on her pear-shaped duff. By then, Sunny was screaming, screaming bloody murder, because that’s what it was. She attempted to stand but her designer sling-backs refused to find purchase on the polished black granite floor. The blood pooling beneath her didn’t help.

Sunny dropped the knife and reached toward the stall door. Hauling herself up hurt like hell. Actually, Inner Bitch bitched, multiple rings of multiple hells. But there were, at last count, some four hundred guests out there, enjoying the results of her latest cookbook, served on her new line of designer china, and she only needed to attract the attention of one of them to make it out of this alive.

Sunny screamed.

And screamed.

The woman, now bloodied in two spots, which was twice what she’d inflicted upon Sunny, Inner Bitch noted with some pride, scrambled to her feet.

“You miserable, thieving
twat
,” her attacker growled. “You stole that recipe from me, and I’m going to make you pay for it. Oh, how I will, whether it’s in this life or the next.”

The crazy woman’s eyes darted to the knife, but before she could act on the impulse, the bathroom door burst open. It wasn’t a security guard or Joseph, as she’d hoped, just a well-coiffured, sequin-draped woman with the sort of tight chin and throat only money could buy. The woman absorbed the image of the two combatants, saying nothing at first, and then she, too, began to scream.

Sunny’s attacker ran out, knocking the woman aside.

“I need help,” Sunny said.

Maddening minutes later, she was surrounded by so many bodies, all wanting to help, that she only wanted Joseph. Him, or to be alone.

Gone was the strange contrast of hot and icy. The knife wound, now covered by a wad of gauze from a first aid kit, had begun to throb with a level of pain worse than the worst toothaches and migraines of Sunny’s life combined. She didn’t feel stabbed so much as filleted; the location of the wound made every sip of breath exquisitely miserable.

Joseph held her free hand as the paramedics checked vitals and the police asked questions.

“You didn’t recognize her?”

“You mean, apart from the fact she made a tray pass with baked brie and shaved almonds? No.”

“This is gonna hurt,” one of the paramedics said, reaching his blue-gloved hands toward the pressure bandage slapped on in haste.

And it did, so much so that Sunny forgot the added humiliation of her right breast laid bare for all to see, a rogues gallery of friends, strangers, and colleagues that included the head of the YUM! Network, her book agent Saul, and Joseph, who had, of course, seen this tit and its counterpart on numerous occasions, but who might never look at it the same way again.

Later, she worried about camera phones. How long would it be before photos of Sunny Weir, host of the network’s
Sunny’s Side Up
and judge on the culinary competition juggernaut
Slice and Dice
began showing up in tabloids and shitty celebrity blogs? Some partygoer, shocked but not too horrified to recognize an opportunity, would have snapped a few discreet shots of the carnage, hoping to make a buck. Everyone at the party save the caterers had bucks, but enough is never enough for some.

On the ride to Mass-Inverness General’s emergency care and trauma center, conscious of every turn and bump in the road, she imagined how the photo would look: her ass sprawled across the bathroom floor, her back bracing the doorway of the stall, blood running down the front of her Jeter Diletti original, one boob and nipple exposed and pixilated, no longer looking real or human in the close-up photo.

They cut her out of the gown, which was ruined anyway, not that she planned to ever wear the thing again. Intravenous, antibiotics, poking, prodding, and the suturing that took place left another image in her head, one even more difficult to ignore: that of Sunny Weir, naked on a stainless steel platter, cut up and served like so many of the dishes she, herself, had prepared for the cameras.

Joseph was still in his tuxedo. Apart from a deepening in his five o’clock shadow, he appeared as pristine and crisp as when they’d walked out to meet the limo that would whisk them to Skyview, the prestigious function hall occupying the entire fifty-first floor of the Prudential Tower in the heart of Boston. That bit of prickle added to the overall picture. Joseph was beyond handsome, with cowlicks and intentional bed-head, his eyes so green they looked like emerald gemstones, with the body of a professional athlete that had once played baseball through two seasons before an injury permanently sidelined him. He hadn’t been benched long before the same broadcast powerhouse that owned YUM! and the big sports network brought him into the studio to call games, and not just baseball.

He was handsome, painfully so, but at that moment, she resented him. She’d been stabbed. He was probably flashing those perfect white teeth and a dimpled smile for the media covering the book and bake ware launch at the moment she was being drilled, right in the mamms.

The police detective, Deschler, said, “I can only imagine the pain you must be suffering, Miss Weir.”

Sunny snorted a humorless laugh and tipped her eyes toward the myriad of bags hanging off the two sides of the mechanized IV push. “That’s where you’re wrong, Lieutenant.”

“Do you feel up to hearing what we know this far?”

“I’m not sure this is a good time,” Joseph started.

“Yes,” Sunny snapped. “I’d like to know why some crazed catering woman assaulted me in the ladies’ room during my party. My goddamn, happy let’s-celebrate-my-new-book-and-cookware party.”