Falling to Pieces
by Janice Soderling

Every morning she woke up with a heart battered and bruised by thoughts vicious as a street gang.

She decided to move her heart away from the dark corners where the thought thugs lurked. She bought a little shelf, the kind used for bric-a-brac, and hung it on the wall in a room she didn't go into very often. She extracted her heart and placed it on the shelf, on a pink doily. It was pretty as a medical wall chart, the contrasting reds and pinks and the yellow fat, the lacy veins, the graceful arch of the aorta. She watched it throbbing for a while, even poked at it gingerly. Then she left the room and locked the door behind her, feeling safer than she had for a long time.

But thought thugs are vicious creatures. They jumped her late one night from a back alley and tried to attack her breasts. Without a moment's hesitation she sliced off both of them and put them on the bric-a-brac shelf too, nipples retracting into pallid skin.

Now the hurting moved to that part of her body that nice ladies don't talk about. It was distressing. She wrote herself a note to do something about it. She was always writing notes because her memory was badly damaged after repeated attacks by the thought thugs. On her TO DO list, right after Try to understand it and Don't think about it, she wrote: Get rid of the unmentionable. She put the hairy blob on a shelf too, concealed in a box, of course; no lady would display such a thing prominently.

She yanked her tongue out. She cut her hands off, and it served them right. Without hands, her arms served no purpose, and anyway, you've heard that song haven't you, Aching,AchingArms? It goes dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. I thought you'd recognize it.

She willed her arms to fall off on the bottom shelf, and, nudging with her nose, positioned them perfectly. While she was at it, she banged her head against the wall until her eyes fell out and rolled across the middle shelf like marbles, bumped against her heart, quivered and stopped.

Now everything the thought thugs might go for was safe, on the bric-a-brac shelves, behind locked doors in a room she never entered any more. She didn't even go inside to dust.

Sometimes you can see her out walking her little dog. Her head floats serenely above her still-shapely legs. Her eyelids open and close over empty sockets and when she meets someone she used to know, her full lips twist into a smile. From the slit in her pale, powdered face, from where her happy tongue used to be, words emerge, "Good morning, good evening, fine thanks, how are you, lovely weather isn't it?"

Janice D. Soderling has fiction, poetry and translations published at many forums, both online and in print. She lives in Sweden.

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com