I crouch down to touch the boy’s blood sliding down the floor. The man with the knife looks at me. He pushes the girl at me hard, and she stumbles across the floor, sliding in her brother’s blood. I catch her with one hand and pass her off to a woman trembling in her seat behind me. Before the man can reach the back door of the subway to move to another car I’m there. But he sees my reflection in the glass and turns before I can get a hand on him. He hits me hard and I go down. The blood on the floor helps take me down, and the fact that I’m also overly concerned about landing on the boy and crushing him doesn’t help. The man kicks me in the stomach while I’m down. And while gasping on the floor for breath he tries to bring the knife down into my chest, but I raise my right arm at the last second, blocking his downward stroke. In the same motion I grab his forearm with my blocking hand and pull him into me so he’ll share the disadvantage of the slippery blood. He does slip and I’m able to use that second to get up. Once standing, I clench my right hand. It’s strong. I can feel it. One is all I will need.
But I want more than one. It’s because of people like him that I can’t have Clark and a kitten and a job and a normal life.
I hit him and his head flies backwards like he’s been hit by a train. He blinks, shocked, and shakes his head. I look at him and realize something is wrong with his eyes. He’s on something, he is feeling no pain and not going down easy. I hit him again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
I hit him until he doesn’t get up. And then I turn around. Someone has dragged the little boy away from us and two people are trying to resuscitate him. Everyone else is staring at me, holding their collective breath. I stand on one side of the train, arms at my sides, fists clenched, breathing heavily, while everyone else huddles on the other side of the train staring, as afraid of me now, as they had been of him. I can’t see straight, I feel a little dizzy, but the burning is gone, and in a way I feel the best I’ve felt in ages. Everything will be okay. A tall man to my right speaks up.
“Uh, Miss…uh…your arm.” I look at him almost in slow motion and then look down at my right arm. The man’s knife is buried to the hilt in my forearm, the tip sticking out the other side. It looks strange sticking out of my arm like that. I cock my head, looking at it, then grab it with my left hand and pull it out. It makes this strange “shtuck” sound as it comes out of my bone and someone in the back throws up, while a woman screams, and someone else faints. It clatters loudly to the floor.
“Thanks,” I say to the man. No sooner have the words left my throat, do I hear the soft mewing of Joan.
No.
No.
NO.
I look up, my vision clearing a little and see at the very back, by the door, Clark standing there with Joan in his arms. His face is a lonely, blank slate that I cannot understand. I look down at myself, covered in blood. The blood of the boy, the man, and myself, all mixing together into one. The train comes to a lurching halt. Nobody moves. The doors open and I step over the body and out onto the platform. A woman there screams when she sees me. I start running. Nobody comes after me.
•
A bell rings on the door of a dry cleaner’s shop in Venice and as I walk through a tiny dark-haired woman pops out from behind a rack of plastic covered clothing, endless shiny sheets of it glinting in the afternoon sun.
“Yes, can I help you?”
“Yeah,” I say, pushing my hair out of my eyes and pulling my old cat suit out of the duffel bag and laying it on the counter. I’d rinsed it in the sink like a thousand times, until the water ran clear, getting all the blood out of it but it’s still all torn up from the knife and bullet wounds, not to mention dog bites. “Do you think you can repair this?” I ask, politely, but not sweetly. The woman looks at the cheap, dark fabric and puts on the glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. They fall down to the edge of her nose instantly.
“I can fix it, but you’ll be able to see all the repairs…it will never be like new, never the same again,” she says, looking up at me to see if I’m interested anyway.
“That’s okay,” I say. “Neither am I.” It sounds more foreboding than I mean and when she looks at me, I cut it with a smile. She cocks her head.
“You know, the fabric is not that expensive…it might be cheaper just to buy a new one,” she suggests with a light shrug. I take my sunglasses from off my head and put them back on.
“Yeah, I know. This has…sentimental value,” I say. She nods her head politely.
“Can it be ready on Thursday?” I ask.