Needles & Sins Read Free

drawing its thread tight.
     
    …love that died as Charles lifted his hand for the first time when Gwendolyn told him in the back seat of his Chevy Citation to cut it out, that really hurt and maybe he should try learning some manners the next time before he touched a woman as if she was just another piece of trash for the curb, but he didn’t listen and her spit and blood coated his hand as she turned away in hurt and shame just like the way…
     
    ««—»»
     
The needle dipped into the bowl, and dripping cool sting, slipped inside his flesh again.
     
    …happiness died as Charles looked at his daughter in her prom dress and laughed, saying “who do you think you are, the freakin’ Queen of Siam? Do you think the other kids are going to go out looking like that?” And as Rachel’s face crumbled into a black hole of betrayal…
     
    The needle dripped and stitched, washing his flesh clean of blood as it closed his exposed organs back up within.
     
    … Trust died as Charles promised that he’d be home on time tonight, and instead stopped off, just for one nip, just one, just one more, just a quick last taste…
     
    “Stop, please stop,” he begged.
    But she only whispered from behind his head, her voice sweet as spring lilies. “Still they begin,” she said. “Needles and sins.”
     
    …And Ambition died as Charles watched the next hotshot and the next and the next walk past his cube over the years atop the soulless grey carpet to take a manager’s office at the end of the hall. An office with a door. And at last, one night he walked into that envied office and sat himself in the chair of his boss, 10 years his junior, who had left for home and cocktail parties two hours before, leaving Charles to work alone, pulling the weight for both of them. Charles sat in that leather-backed chair, and leaned back to stare at the framed poster on the otherwise sterile wall that featured the block letters spelling S-U-C-C-E-S-S in a black bar at the bottom and at long last, years in the making, he began to cry.
     
    ««—»»
     
    The needle now closed the livid tear near his throat, the end of a long scar of twisted, bloody, knotted flesh. “They say not to sweat the small stuff,” the woman whispered behind his head. “But that’s what it’s all about…”
    “I wasn’t like that all the time,” he said, and then moaned, “It hurts.”
    Images clustered in his mind’s eye of his wife and kids and broken dreams mixed with the memories of dying mice and the spider-webbed glass of the car his parents last drove in and the pink slip that sent him from a broken home to the apartment where the liquor drove away the cold. And then his memories fled like dandelion seeds in an angry April breeze.
    Dad?
    Charles?
    Baby?
    Son?
    The voices reverberated from inside, first louder, but then muffled, as the woman pulled the last skein of thread through his suppurating skin.
    “It will hurt,” she whispered, humming softly into his ear. “It will hurt forever.”
    “But why?” he moaned, trying without success to lift his arm to touch the horrible stitching that held him together and formed a knot at his heart.
    “Because you lived.”
    At last she moved so that he could see her. After tying off the thread that wound and bound inside him, she picked up the bowl of liquid. Her chin thrust into the dull shadow in stark, bone white, heavy eyes shone black as night water. She drank the deadly liquid from the bowl and grinned, her teeth stark in bony sockets stripped of flesh.
    “Every stitch soaks my poison into the flesh,” she grinned. “Just like every sin poisons the soul.”
    “So this is the end,” he whined. “All of my days done?
    She only laughed.
    Behind her, Charles watched the black shadow of wings unfurl in the wavering amber of the room’s deadly light.
    “Still they begin,” she whispered and gathered him to her to start again…her needles and his sins.
     
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