Come As You Are by Steven Ramirez

Author:Steven Ramirez [Ramirez, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9898718-9-1
Publisher: Glass Highway

Mercer’s room was quite pleasant. It overlooked the Pacific Ocean. The sun was just going down. The windows were open, and the white curtains billowed gently from a warm breeze. It felt good.

He hoped the orderly would bring his food soon, because he was getting hungry. These last few weeks had given him time to reflect on everything that had happened. Now sitting in the wicker chair by the window, he raised his arms and looked at what used to be his almost-perfect hands. Piano hands, his mother had once called them, although they could never afford lessons. Now they resembled flesh-colored paddles with little nubs sticking out. The skin was smooth and shiny with scar tissue where the Mexican surgeon had expertly repaired what was left of his fingers.

The pain was almost gone. And so were the nightmares. Until recently, he had relived those horrible few hours nightly. The drug—whatever it was—had allowed him to do nothing more than breathe and blink his eyes. But it had done something else. It has sharpened his senses to the point where every sound was magnified, every sensation achingly bright.

The first finger was the worst. He heard the saw and felt it slicing cleanly through at the joint connecting to the hand. He remembered Gary saying something about a carbon blade as he tossed the finger into the garbage bag. Again, in his mind, he screamed in agony. And so it was with each of his ten fingers. He had wanted to pass out as Gary went to work on his toes.

Mercer remembered a lot of blood, too. It was the blood and the screaming and the smell of the burning bone that tore through his dark dreams and left him weak and exhausted in the morning. But the dreams were fading now like the scars on his hands.

He examined his bare feet once again. They too seemed like elongated paddles. And like his hands, everything was smooth and shiny where his toes used to be.

He was tired of sitting and almost decided to get up from the chair. But after past repeated attempts, he knew he would just end up falling forward, maybe even going out the window. There was no way for him to balance without toes. He was in effect a cripple.

However, the thing Mercer thought about most—especially during the quiet evenings overlooking the sea—was how he ended up in the situation. This was the mental exercise that plagued him daily. He struggled to pinpoint the exact time in his life when he went from a quiet loner to a desperate con man.

Was it his father’s death when he was fifteen? It would be easy to blame everything on that. But wasn’t he already conning kids out of their lunch money in middle school? Never the bully, he would devise elaborate cons involving playground games, girls’ lockers, and PE showers. Over time, the other kids looked forward to his schemes and gladly handed over their money as the admission price for the show.

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