Free Every Shallow Cut by Tom Piccirilli Page A

wrong ones. She grinned at me like we shared a secret. Maybe it was her way of flirting.
    She said something in Russian to him. He smiled and grunted, “Uh huh.” She said something more and he nodded. She started to laugh and made a vague gesture and spoke again. He mimicked the gesture and laughed loudly with her.
    He didn’t know a fucking word of Russian. This is how he lured his wives in. By just nodding and grinning and appearing more agreeable than any other man they’d ever met.
    I grabbed my rucksack and said, “I’ll leave you to your burgeoning romance.”
    “I think you should stay,” he said. “That or let me take you over to the hospital.”
    “What?”
    His features were empty of attitude. His eyes were a little sad but I wasn’t sure that was just for me. “You’re having a nervous breakdown. You must realize it.”
    “Well, yeah,” I admitted. “But I don’t think I’m quite crazy enough to agree to being locked up in the Bronx Psychiatric Facility.”
    “I could call a few of the orderlies to come by in an ambulance. They’ll help load you up, if you prefer.”
    I stepped back and wondered if he was joking or if he was even more bent than I was. “Thanks anyway.”
    He said, “You’re going to hurt yourself or someone else very badly.”
    It sounded almost like a plan. We all needed plans in our lives. Schemes, agendas, ambitions, intentions. Purpose. I’d been drifting like a weather balloon lost in the clouds. I needed direction, whatever it might be. I needed a little hope that I still had a destiny to fulfill.
    “Maybe that’s just the next thing I have to do,” I told him and shouldered my way out of his red door that would hide dripping symbols written in blood and allow the angel of death to pass by.

I headed back to the subway, but about halfway there the urge to write became overwhelming. I sat on a curb in front of a bodega, took out the pad and started to scribble so quickly and with such force that I tore through the pages. Twenty minutes later a bus tried to pull up to the curb but couldn’t because I was sitting there. The driver blasted the horn but I kept on writing.
    A cop tapped me on the shoulder with his nightstick. He was maybe twenty-five and had the doubly smug smile of someone who had both youth and power.
    “Do you need some help, buddy?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “You can’t sit there. You’re blocking a bus stop.”
    “Right. Sorry about that.” I stared down at the pad and realized that I’d broken the point of the pencil off after the first couple of words. The rest was just indentations. I stuffed the pad back into my rucksack and got to my feet.
    “Let me see some ID,” he said.
    Everyone with a badge wanted to see my ID, like they had to make sure that I was really me. I wondered, Who would want to be me if they didn’t have to be me? I showed him my driver’s license.
    “Are there any issues with your license I should be aware of?”
    “What?”
    He repeated himself. I repeated myself. We locked gazes.
    “It’s a Colorado license.”
    “That’s right.”
    “What are you doing in the south Bronx?”
    “Visiting a friend.”
    “Where’s he live?”
    “In a big brick house with a red door a few blocks away. I don’t know the address. Apparently there’s a lot of Santeria worshippers around there.”
    “Sir, would you mind turning out your pockets?”
    He tapped the license across his knuckles and the grinning face in the photo seemed to mock me. I didn’t answer the cop. I looked at the photo, taken seven years ago, and wondered who the fuck that guy was and why my name was printed under the picture. The cop kept flapping the license, the face bobbing, my head pounding.
    I turned out my pockets. They were empty except for my wallet and car keys.
    “Have you been indulging in any alcohol or drug use?” he asked.
    Would the cops frown on lithium, Prozac, and Xanax the way they did heroin and crack? Was it more acceptable to be