The Death Scene Artist by Andrew Wilmot

Author:Andrew Wilmot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd
Published: 2018-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

17. The Best Stories Bleed Real Blood

Posted: 01/28/2014

It was fast becoming the norm, me waking up alone in motel rooms, feeling sunrise disoriented while I tried to remember where I was and how to get home again. As Guard 528491, he’d slipped out of the room at four in the morning to face his destiny head-on. I had pretended to be asleep, but still I felt it as he sat on the edge of the bed, the ancient mattress springs creaking beneath as he laboriously put on his boots. His character’s impending doom sat heavily on his shoulders, forced his head to the ground in what could easily have been mistaken for either prayer or quiet resignation.

An hour after he left I got up and showered, still dressed in my best interpretation of our night together – in a patchwork of the skins he’d provided. He’d wept with me over the life he was scheduled to lose – the life that was never his to begin with. And while I was sitting down at a greasy spoon just up the street from the motel, getting a plate of runny scrambled eggs with carbon-black bacon and “freshly brewed” turpentine on the side, he was being unceremoniously torn to pieces by an escaping prison mob of futuristic cyber deviants. Running another forkful of egg through a glob of ketchup on the corner of the plate, the red and yellow and white mixing in a disconcertingly gory manner, I thought of dropping a twenty on the table and hurrying to the set, to be there for him when he needed me most. But I didn’t. I knew enough to see that the skin I’d stitched together the night before, from the patterns he’d stolen for me – for us – had already started to wither from strain and lack of treatment; small cracks like pale winter lips had started to appear in the webbing between my fingers. It wouldn’t take more than a scrub brush or a coarse towel to open an exit wound in this sleeve. To say nothing of my ability (or lack thereof) to break onto a closed set. I did the only thing I could think to do and went home.

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