Our poor Matchmaker, now just a prop we can build into our story. Our new puppet. His family story about death camps and blows jobs, now it's our story.

The Missing Link ducks under the table. He stands, and in his open hand is the gray cut-off dick, most of it wrinkled skin from changing size and shape with every hard-on. Just regular pink meat at the cut end . . .

“Dibs,” the Link says. He sniffs it, once, twice, his nose tipped up and his nostrils flared and almost touching the meat. He shrugs, saying, “Everything we cook in that microwave is going to taste like popcorn . . .”

Even the Link knows that eating a dead man's severed penis will get him extra prime-time exposure on every late-night talk show in the world. Just to describe how it tasted. After that will be the product endorsements for barbecue sauce and ketchup. After that, his own novelty cookbook. Radio shock-jock shows. After that, more daytime game shows for the rest of his life.

A victim, someone with the missing toes and fingers to prove they suffered, they'll have the world's okay to be in always-bad taste.

And with arms out, hands up, stopsigns, Miss Sneezy says, “You can't.”

Watching from their green satin niches, our audience is all the naked statues.

“Watch me,” the Missing Link says, and tilts his head back, his mouth gaped open at the green ceiling. Holding his arm straight up, he drops the fleshy blob down his tongue. Past his teeth, whole, he swallows.

He swallows again and his eyes bulge. He swallows again and his hairy face swells, red. Eyes tight, shaking-shut under his one eyebrow. His hands grab around his throat and tears spill down his hot cheeks. The Link holds his throat, not breathing, Frankenstein-lurching one step, then another step, then another step around the room.

His panic-red face yawns, his werewolf teeth and lips making words with no sound. He drops to his knees on the bloody green carpet and makes each hand into a fist. Kneeling, he pounds, slugging himself in the stomach. All of his effort—the crying, the slugging, the begging—silent.

Nothing for the Earl to tape-record past the Link saying, “Watch me.”

On his knees, the Missing Link leans to one side. He falls, to lie there, silent, his eyes still tight-puckered shut, his fists still buried in his gut.

Chef Assassin looks at the Earl, who looks at Miss Sneezy, who sniffs and says, “The people coming to rescue us, they might be able to save him . . .”

And the Reverend Godless shakes his head.

Downstairs right now, nobody's drilling the lock in the alley door. No rescue team. No one's arrived to save us. We lied because we were tired of the Matchmaker hogging the cleaver.

After now, we have two less ways to split the money. Only eleven of us left.

Coming up the stairs, her skirt bunched and pulled high in both hands, the Baroness Frostbite comes trudging. With her pink, scar-frilly lips, she's smiling, until she sees the Matchmaker on the floor, most of his clothes soaked black with blood. Next to him, the Missing Link, with his eyes dead-tight, rigor-mortis-shut, in his hairy gray face.

Her greasy pucker gaping, slack-open, the Baroness says, “Which one of you shits killed the Matchmaker?”

None of us, we tell her. It was him. After all this time, he cut off his dick.

And the poor Link, he choked to death trying to hog down the cut-off dick.

The Missing Link—the last link on that food chain. Well, the last link if you don't count the microbes and bacteria Mrs. Clark talked about eating her daughter.

Already, we can figure how this scene will sound on radio. Already, we're wondering if you can say “penis” on broadcast television. This scene alone will be more than most whole-truth books deliver, and just we saw it. The real-life dress rehearsal for a movie star someday choking to death on another star's cut-off dick.

You, choking to death from having your throat stuffed with penis, that's the kind of scene that wins the Academy Award.

Only us and maybe the Baroness saw.

Excepting that our version will say Mrs. Clark cut off the penis and forced the Link to eat it whole. The truth is so easy when everyone agrees who to blame.

“Not to be a killjoy,” says the Baroness Frostbite, “but we'll need a new villain.”

The devil is dead—we need a new devil.

The Baroness, she sashays over to the dark wood table and both-hands the cleaver from deep in the chopped mess. She says someone's killed Mrs. Clark.

“Whoever it was,” the Baroness says, “they can't be very hungry right now.”

The killer ate most of her left leg. The rest of her is backstage in her dressing room, stabbed in the stomach to death.

Chef Assassin shakes his fist at the Earl of Slander and says, “You stupid, greedy fuck.”

And the Earl says, “Wait.” He says, “Listen . . .”

We get quiet, and you can hear his stomach. The Earl's stomach is kicking and growling with the ghost of Miss America's stewed baby. No way was it him.

Still, Mrs. Clark—our whip-cracking, thumb-screwing she-devil, is dead. What's left of her, it's now just leftovers.

Our next order of business will be to elect our new devil.

After we have dinner.

It's over dinner, Miss Sneezy blows her nose. She sniffs and coughs and says she really, really needs to tell us a story . . .

The Interpreter

A Poem About Miss Sneezy

“My grandma made money,” Miss Sneezy says, “by saying ‘I Love You.'”

As many ways as possible. For people who could not.

Miss Sneezy onstage, the cuffs of her sweater sleeves sprout

the scraps and ruffles of dirty tissues stuffed there.

Those tissues, yellow and matted with nasal discharge.

Her nose running, bright with snot and blood, and her eyes

busy with red lightning and watering down each cheek.

Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

a scene from some medical drama, showing doctors and hospital staff

in white coats, holding test tubes,

busy finding a cure.

Between sniffing her nose and coughing, Miss Sneezy says,

“Until she died, my grandma made money saying ‘Happy Birthday' for people.”

Saying, “Deepest Sympathy.”

Saying, “Congratulations.” And “We're so Proud of You!”

And “Merry Christmas.”

As many ways as possible, her grandma said, “Happy Anniversary.”

“Happy Father's Day”

and “Happy Mother's Day”

for a greeting-card company.

Between blowing her nose and stuffing the tissue back into her sleeve, Miss Sneezy says,

“My grandma's job was to interpret what other people had no words to say.”

But every “Happy Birthday,”

really, every card, she wrote with Miss Sneezy in mind.

Her grandma's ideal target audience.

And the card rack is her bank account, her left-behind trust fund of future best wishes

for her granddaughter.

So, after she was dead, her Miss Sneezy could come and find the right “I Love You”

or “Happy Valentine's” for that moment of the distant future.

Long, long after her grandma was dead.

“Still,” Miss Sneezy says, “there's one card, one special occasion she never covered.”

There needs to be a card that says: I'm sorry.

Please, Grandma.

Please, forgive me.

I didn't mean to kill you.

Evil Spirits

A Story by Miss Sneezy

The intercom comes on. First is a crackle of static, then a woman's loud voice, saying, “Good news, girlfriend.” Coming out of the little wire-mesh speaker, it's Shirlee, the night guard, her voice saying, “Chances look good you might get laid in this lifetime . . .”