MicroHorror

Dark brown, made of stiff felt, its top flaps open like a mouth when he walks. Mostly, though, he sits and fiddles with the things people bring him, and at those times it sits faithfully on the floor at his feet.

It was the first thing I saw when I woke up, still lying on the pallet they used to carry me in, the pallet that now serves as my bed. It had been a normal day for me on the streets, scraping fruit from stalls, pick-pocketing… and then from nowhere came a hackney carriage. Horses’ hooves trampled my body into a complicated tangle, a twisted contortionist’s knot.

The Specialist repaired me. He repairs anything that hangs on the edge of life. He takes out his equipment and pokes, prods, yanks, rips and tears back into place. Then he knits and splinters, sewing everything into a new skin quilt. He plucks meticulously at the still forms brought to him until they move again.

While he works he stores pieces in the hat. When it’s time he opens the lid of the hat, takes out a part and sews it on again. One day he put an eye in the hat and forgot to take it out. He put the hat back on his head and the eye stuck in his graying ponytail. It seemed to grow roots there, sticking, and then slowly dissolving over several weeks into black goo.

Sometimes after a session he doesn’t use the things stored in the hat. He takes them out and preserves them in ice, using them later on something else. Or, if they are not needed soon enough and start to decay, he petrifies them in jars, stacking them on shelves around the room.

I asked him once what was his favorite repair? Frogs, he replied. Not many people bring frogs. They bring in beloved dogs and cats, not willing to let them go just yet. Or sometimes a lame horse or cow, their daily bread and butter. But we have a pond in the garden and he goes to fetch frogs from it. Some of them are healthy and he snaps a leg anyway. He watches the broken frogs travel around the worktable like rowboats with only one oar. After the repair he likes to stroke and hold the clammy bodies as if he were winding them with a key, and then he lets them go free, bounding away into the garden until the next time.

Since he fixed me I have never left this house, never looked again on the London crowds, walking bleary-eyed from the smoggy yellow air, their bodies weary from factory work. People would stare at me on the outside. Besides, he feeds me with those he can’t repair and it’s warm and dry here. There are no police cudgeling me to move along, dirty beggar!

Over the years he has become slow in his work. He needs a monocle. He completes fewer subjects. Some he can’t get to in time, and we stack them outside the back door for scavengers. Then when the stack is too high I go out and bury the rest when he asks. His meager sentences are reduced to single words, hums and clicks.

This morning is the fifth morning in a row when he hasn’t woken. He lies still like the others.

Each day I pick up the scalpel and the hooks and hover over his gut, not sure where to slice, where to tinker. He has never apprenticed me. The stench is like a fish market at the close of day.

Tomorrow I will throw him out.

People are still bringing those needing repair. Dogs wheeze and hiccup, their tongues leaking drool onto the worn worktable, clogging up the eyes in the wood with their blood. Cats lift up their mewing heads from rigored bodies.

I put on the hat and pick up the tools and make an incision.