Free The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen by Ellen Datlow

abruptly stood aside. “He says he’d like to meet you.”
    “Are you sure?” Wintner was at a complete loss. He felt like he had stepped into a nudist colony without his papers.
    The woman held out a wattled arm. The canvas curled open.
    A man lay sweltering in the livid interior. Essentially he had no legs. One grew to the knee, one was a mere flipper. Ignoring Wintner, the woman sat and took the man’s great grey head into her lap.
    She proceeded to massage his temples. She wiped his forehead with a cloth. She took up a cotton swab and then, after she had painstakingly cleaned the whorls of one ear, used manicure scissors to snip at the salt-and-pepper hairs growing there. Wintner stood by, a spy observing a private ritual.
    “We always come here this time of year,” she said. “For the weather. We don’t like the cold, do we, honey?” She kneaded his speckled shoulders, his jutting breastbone.
    The old man rolled his head to the side, a mighty effort. His eyes were black as beads but with a tinge of blue-grey around the frayed pupils. His shortened body was scarred, folded in on itself at every joint and orifice. The stump-ends where his hands should have been were sucked in like navels, as though sewn to a point inside. His eyes searched Wintner’s vicinity.
    “Can I bring you something?” Wintner offered. “A cold drink? A glass of water? Anything?”
    The grey head lolled in a swoon. The interior was sweltering; the sun transformed the walls of the tent into incandescent screens, the stripes a pattern of bars. Wintner itched to be gone.
    He backstepped, feeling for the opening.
    As if on cue the woman recentered the head on the towel, put down her tools and followed Wintner out.
    He was instantly cooler. It was a sweatbox in there. Didn’t she realize that? With his circulation so drastically shortened, the poor man’s natural body temperature would be abnormally high to begin with; such confinement would become unbearable by midday. Was the tent a last resort to shield his condition from prying eyes? But wouldn’t they do better in their air-conditioned room? Surely the man didn’t care that there was a pool a few feet away, on the other side of the canvas barrier.
    “Such a beautiful day!” she said. She inhaled deeply and shook her hair free. Moist curls flung jewels of perspiration into the glare. “I dream about this place all year long.”
    “Yes,” said Wintner. He found his voice. “I was just on my way—”
    “But you can’t go. I won’t let you.” Her mood became generous, her lumpy face girlishly animated. “We must talk.”
    Wintner did not know whether he should feel flattered or threatened. Either attitude seemed absurd.
    “Sure,” he said. “But right now I’m expecting a call. I’ll be back later, though. I—” and here he foundered, “I hope your husband feels better.” How else to put it?
    Her face sagged, the mere mention dragging her down like gravity. “It’s Tachs-Meisner Syndrome,” she said, her voice coarse again. “We thought he was safe from the bloodline. But since his fortieth birthday . . . One can only try to be as comfortable as possible, until the end.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “You shouldn’t be. We are almost free.”
    He nodded and stared at the cement. His feet were as pale as they had been the first day of summer on the sidewalks of the town where he grew up. He had never before felt grateful for his strong arches, his well-shaped toes. But now he noticed that his fourth and fifth toes were no longer perfect; distorted by years of proper shoes, they had grown inward—now they were mere knobs, the nails squeezed down to slivers and all but vanished, suggesting evolution to a lower form. How could he not have noticed until now? He was aware of a tightening. The concrete heated under his delicate soles, which had been pampered for so long that they were hypersensitive, less able to protect him from the real world. The taut skin covering his