In the deputy’s headphones, the buzz of flies gives way to the crackle of grubs tunneling forward one bite at a time.

 

 At home, a step from the silent telephone, Mrs. Clark sorts Christmas decorations in the choking dust of the attic, throwing out and repacking. Labeling each box.

 

 The bacteria breathed inside Cassandra’s lungs, the bacteria in her guts and mouth and nose, they split and split and split without white blood cells to stop them. They gobble the subcutaneous fat and the yellow protein leaking from her ruptured cells. Their numbers explode, bloating her pale stomach until her shoulders are forced back. Her legs are splayed open. Cassandra’s belly swells tight, pregnant with the gas inside, the universe of bacteria eating and reproducing.

 

 Her tongue swells, forcing her jaws apart and jutting out between lips swollen big as bicycle tires. The bacteria tunnel through the top of her mouth, breaking into the cranial vault, where her brain waits, soft and edible.

 

 At home, Mrs. Clark carries the phone from room to room, scrubbing walls and washing the glass filled with dead houseflies covering each ceiling light.

 

 After another day, Cassandra’s brain would bubble, red and brown, out her ears and nose. The soft mass of it would melt and bubble out the sockets where her eyes have collapsed.

 

 The microphone picks up the sound. Think of popcorn muted inside a microwave oven. Imagine slipping into hot water filled with bubble bath, the steady sound when all those bubbles burst. It’s the sound of hard rain on a concrete patio. Hail hitting the roof of a car. That’s the sound of maggots, by this time thick as white rice. The microphone picks up a rip and a squeal, the sound of skin coming apart and Cassandra’s guts going flat.

 

 Meat-eating beetles arrive. Mice and magpies. Birds sing in the forest, each string of notes bright as colored lights. A woodpecker listens with his head cocked to hear insects inside a tree. He knocks to peck a hole.

 

 The skin sinks down, draped over bones, as Cassandra’s guts leak away. Soaking into the ground. Leaving just this shadow of skin, this framework of bones mired in a puddle of her own mud.

 

In the sheriff deputy’s earphones, the mice munched the beetles. Snakes arrived to swallow the squealing mice. Everything looking to be last in the food chain.

 

 At home, Mrs. Clark sorted through the papers in her daughter’s room, inside her desk drawers. The letters written on pink stationery. The old birthday cards. And, written in pencil, copied in Cassandra’s handwriting on a sheet of lined notebook paper, the ragged perforations running up one side, a note said:

 

 Writers’ Retreat: Abandon your life for three months . . .

 

 And she flushed her daughter’s goldfish down the toilet, still alive. Then Mrs. Clark pulled on her winter coat.

 

 That night, in the deputy’s headphones, a woman’s voice said, “Is this where you went? Thiswriters’ retreat,is this where they tortured you?”

 

It was the voice of Mrs. Clark saying, “I’m sorry, but you should’ve stayed missing. When you came back, you weren’t the same.” She says, “I loved you so much more when you were gone . . .”

 

  

 

 Tonight, telling her story to the rest of us in the blue velvet lobby, Mrs. Clark says, “I did it with sleeping pills.” Sitting halfway up the wide blue stairs, she says, “The moment I saw the microphone hanging there, I ran.”

 

 That night in the canyon, she could already hear the sheriff’s deputy crashing through the brush, coming to arrest her.

 

 She never went back to that clean house, with all those jobs she hated to do, done.

 

 With nothing in the world but her winter coat and her purse, Mrs. Clark called the phone number on Cassandra’s handwritten note. She met Mr. Whittier, and she met the rest of us.

 

 Her eyes moving from our bandaged hands and feet to our ragged hair to our hollow cheeks, Mrs. Clark says, “I never was his . . . anything. I never loved Whittier.”

 

 Mrs. Clark says, “I just wanted to know what happened to my daughter.”

 

 Really, it was Mr. Whittier who killed the girl she’d given birth to.

 

 She says, “I only ever wanted to knowwhy.”

 

 

 

 

22.

 

 The Matchmaker is alone in the Italian Renaissance lounge when we find him. Most days, while the lights are on, he just stands there at the long, black wood table with his zipper open and the meat cleaver in one hand. In his eyes: to chop or not to chop.

 

 “Shooo-rook,”the sound from his family ritual.

 

 Proof that one day your worst fear might just disappear. No matter how terrible something looks, it might not be around tomorrow.

 

 The Matchmaker, he’s stopped asking the rest of us to swing the cleaver. Why should we help him hog the future spotlight? No, if he wants to be mutilated so bad—let him do it himself.

 

 The table, each leg is carved to look like different sizes of balls, all balanced or beaded together in a straight line. The balls that touch the floor or the tabletop look the same size as apples. The ball in the middle of each leg is the size of a watermelon. All four legs, the same greasy black color. Long and narrow as a coffin, the table looks carved out of black wax. Long and flat, and smudged, so it reflects nothing.

 

 Same as always, the Matchmaker stands there, hatchet ready. His chin pressed to his chest. His eyes watch his dick poke out his open zipper the way a cat would watch a mouse hole.

 

 The Italian Renaissance lounge is the same old green satin wallpaper since the white van dropped us in the alley. Since forever ago. The green satin looking wet. Slick. The edge of gold paint outlines every carved chair-back and baseboard molding and bracket that holds an electric candle to a green satin wall.

 

 Sunk into little caves in the wall, little open closets or green satin niches, inside there stand statues of naked people so padded with muscle and breast they look fat. These are statues taller than most people and standing on plaster pedestals painted the black-green you want to be malachite stone. Some holding spears and shields. Others stick out their white plaster butts, standing with their feet close together and their lower backs arched. Muscle or butt, from their feet up, their plaster is smudged with fingerprints, or scarred, gouged down to clean white by fingernails, but only as far as people can reach. Only about waist-high.

 

 We come up the stairs from the imperial-Chinese promenade, rushing from the red to green, and today the Matchmaker has his dick flopped out.

 

 Panting, coughing, with one hand on his chest, the Reverend Godless says, “They’re coming, people . . . You can hear them in the alley, outside.”

 

 From behind his camera, Agent Tattletale says, “If you’re cutting it off, cut it offnow.”

 

 And, cleaver in hand, the Matchmaker says, “What?”

 

 The poor Matchmaker, compared to the bug-eyed, big-nosed, sunk-cheeked rest of him, his dick looks big as a statue. He’s the last one of us still intact. So dirty he’s pasted to the inside of his shirt, his tight skin looks cracked and shattered with the veins and arteries vined around his bony hands. Veins bunch and worm under the skin of his forehead. Tendons jump and twitch, webbed with the skin of his neck.

 

 “Some people outside,” the Missing Link says, his mouth hidden behind the fat end of his nose, tucked somewhere above the big nutsack of his hairy chin. He says, “They’re drilling the lock. We’re about to befamous.”

 

 Well, all of us—except the Matchmaker, the man with no scars to show, no signs he did anything but not eat.

 

 The table all around the gray head of his dick, the wood is crisscrossed with practice swings, every chop at a new angle. The chopped wood gone pulpy with our blood. The pulp pounded to slivers and splinters and knocked off, onto the floor.

 

 Our ears and toes and fingers fed to the cat. Cora Reynolds fed to Miss America. Miss America and her child fed to us. That food chain, complete.

 

 Every one of us fighting to be the last one in that chain.

 

 The camera behind the camera behind the camera.

 

 The Earl of Slander, he holds up one hand, wiggling the three bloody fingers still there, the fingernails torn off, missing, and he says, “Hurry and give me the chopper.” He says, “I still have time to suffer some more.”

 

 Chef Assassin flops down in a gold palace chair and kicks off his shoes. Grabbing each sock by the toe, he stretches it longer, longer, longer, until it snaps off his foot. Looking at his toes, he says, “Me first. I got way too many toes left.”

 

 The poor Matchmaker standing with his hips pressed into the black wood edge of the table, his dick flopped out, he says, “Don’t rush me.” Sweat pumping out the pinholes of his forehead, he says, “You guys had your chance to suffer. It’s my turn now.”

 

 “Thensufferalready,” the Chef says. He snaps his leftover fingers, saying, “Or give me my cleaver back. Thatismy cleaver . . .” He stands there, his hand out.

 

 The Earl steps up to the table, his hands holding out the tape recorder, the little-mesh microphone ready to tape over the past with the single sound of the chop. The Earl of Slander, he says, “Be aman.”

 

 He says, “Here’s yourlast chance.Be a man and whack off that dick.”

 

 The Missing Link, his shirt open, his chest nothing but dark hair and the ladder of his rib bones, he says, “When that door swings open, it’s going to be too late for any of us.” He says, “Sohurry.”

 

 And the Matchmaker looks at himself reflected in the big blade of the cleaver. He holds the blade out toward the Reverend Godless and says, “Help me?”

 

 The Reverend takes the cleaver. Gripping the handle in both hands, he hiss-slashes the air with it.

 

 The Matchmaker sighs, deep, in and out, and he pushes his hips against the table. “Don’t tell me when, just do it,” the Matchmaker says.

 

 And the Reverend says, “Remember.” He says, “I’m doing thisonlyas a favor.”

 

 The Matchmaker shuts his eyes. He cups both hands over the top of his head, his fingers basket-wove together.

 

 And . . . then . . . and:Shooo-rook.The cleaver’s stuck in the black wood of the table. The table done-jumped and humming, and something’s shot across to drop off the other side. Something blurred pink and pushed along fast by a hot geyser of blood. The zipper still exploding with steaming-wet red, the Matchmaker reaches a hand after the gone object. To catch it. Then his knees buckle.

 

 Both his hands grab the table edge, but the fingers slip. His chin hits the tabletop and his teeth hard-click together. After that, both the Matchmaker and his penis are under the table. Both of them, just gray meat.

 

 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, greedyfuck.”

 

 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.