One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist Read Free Page B

right. The shearing scissors would be best with their ergonomic handle and deadeye accuracy. But releasing this astounding product so early in the sales pitch is not only radical to his traditional training. It would also be cruel to the saleswoman, who probably needs the money as much as he does. She’s just trying to vacuum out a place in this cold world.
    “What are you waiting for? Don’t hold back now.” Lee tosses him the steak that had hit him in the face.
    Loyalty comes first. Lee’s children. Wyatt’s training. Wyatt tears away the cellophane and Styrofoam. He holds the flank of what was once a cow, and it bleeds in his grip, staining his white sleeve. He no longer must hide his own bleeding finger. The cow’s blood fuses with his own. He imagines this cow mawing lazily on its cud in an open pasture beside a Michigan freeway, cars zooming past with the windows up. The cow never had to worry about sales pitches or jarred alignment or the products it needed to sell itself. Cows sell well as is.
    He raises the scissors. The small woman looks at him, jutting that hip slightly, waiting. He looks back at her, tries to express with his eyes that he’s sorry it has come to this. He cuts into the meat, marveling at the control of the twin blades. If only the man in the orange vest could feel how the ergo grips anticipate the shape of his callused skin, welcome his touch, how the hours of shoveling asphalt would melt away. Wyatt wishes the customer stood in his place thinking roadworker thoughts. Wyatt thinks nursing home thoughts. The roadworker would’ve liked to have heard about roads. He might have cared to listen, might have been able to help.
    He slices, snips. Chunks of meat plop in all directions. The tiny vacuum darts after each bloody piece. Sweat builds in tiny dotsalong the woman’s blonde hairline. The customer flicks a piece of meat off his boot, hops back to dodge another.
    The results are undeniable now.
    Candy lifts herself from the tile floor, kicking away Lee’s grabs at her ankles. She pulls two retractable tiny vacuums from black holsters around her hips. “No job too messy for NASA innovation!” She pushes one in each hand, aiding her saleswoman.
    Lee trots to Wyatt’s side. “Can you believe this?” he huffs, spouting testimonial, wringing his hands at the customer. “I never thought meat preparation could be so easy. With Thor’s Mighty Shearing Scissors, you’ll never have to worry about dangerous fats and gristle again.”
    Wyatt tries to stay focused on the flesh in his hands. He whittles from the mass of flesh. The meat in his hands, in the blades of the scissors, starts to form two fat arcs on the top, funneling to a point—a heart. But not a heart like the one in elderly Henderson’s weak ribs with ventricles and aortas and tangles of swelled junctions. This heart is simpler, like on a Valentine’s card, voluptuous and vibrantly red.
    You can’t make a sale without putting your heart into it.
    Lee leans in toward Wyatt’s shoulder and speaks through the side of his mouth. “What are you doing? Stick to the protocol. You’ll lose your ass trying to get so fancy.”
    But Wyatt can’t stop at this point. Protocol obliterated. There’s no turning back. He looks up and sees all eyes on him—the customer dangling his basket, Candy swooping two vacuums in his direction, and the small woman with the blonde hair. She gazes at him with an inquisitive twist of her hips. They all look at him, not the knives. The knives he should be pushing.
    When faith falters, trust thyself.
    “You’re pretty good with those scissors.” The customer speaks for the first time. He steps across the polished floors, his boots leaving ghostly prints behind. “How did you do that?”
    How could he explain? Looking in the roadworker’s eyes, Wyatt sees an appreciation, as if the skilled cuts with his scissors ledsomewhere real or maybe helped smooth the way, as the constant filling and refilling of