Jackie found the kit on a cool, spring Wednesday afternoon at a garage sale.
The kit was buried beneath a tangle of worn belts, gaudy, tattered scarves and a stack of Elvis eight-tracks piled atop a rickety card table. But the glint of the sun revealed it.
That sparkle piqued the trained garage-sale instincts Jackie had worked years to hone, so she pushed away the other, less interesting debris covering it.
Underneath was a long, thin wooden box, splintered in places, covered with something that, at one time, was either leather or crocodile skin. Now, however, it was worn through in spots, torn and cracked, giving the box a diseased, leprous look.
Inside, nestled in equally worn blue velveteen, were an array of metal implements--long knives, scissors, awls, saws, picks and probes, an arrangement of slender syringes and a length of flesh-colored rubber tubing, cracked and dry rotted. Everything was neatly arranged within the incongruously battered box.
Jackie stared at it for a moment, mesmerized by the dull sunlight on the instruments, feeling the tickle in her palm that told her she should buy it, though why she wasn't sure. She didn't even know exactly what it was.
"Can I help you with something, miss?" asked the old woman who was running the sale. She stepped beside Jackie, a cloud of filterless cigarette smoke hovering around her. She was skeletal, very tanned and as wrinkled as a dried apple.
"Yes!" exclaimed Jackie, feeling the blush come to her cheeks. How long had she been standing there slack-jawed over this thing? "What is this?"
"Oh, that old thing?" said the woman with a negligent wave of her hand that jiggled the scant meat of her upper arms, exposed by the thin, sleeveless blouse she wore. "That's my Uncle Joe's kit, got it passed to him from his pappy."
Jackie found herself staring at the box again, motes of sunlight dancing in her eyes. Forcefully, she tore herself away from it, felt momentarily dizzy.
The sound of her husband's voice echoed in her mind.
"Don't buy anything! I don't want anymore crap in this house!"
"Kit?" she asked disregarding this annoyance. "What kind of kit?"
"Embalming," the woman replied, screwing her face into a mask of suburban disgust. "Uncle Joe was a fourth-generation mortician. Horrible, huh?"
Jackie hesitantly turned back to the kit.
Although the kit looked its age and more, the instruments it held looked as if they had been swiped from a doctor's office just last week. They shone as if carefully polished, edges were exquisitely sharp and true, serrated teeth gleamed and almost seemed to gnash in frustration at more than a century of disuse.
We're ready, a chorus of voices in Jackie's mind said.
And one word from many voices under it all, hushed as if afraid of the word's power:
Hungry.
Some of the handles were spackled with faded, red-brown blotches.
Jackie's stomach twitched, but her mind assured her that it was only rust.
"Uncle Joe said that his great-grandpappy used it during the War Between the States some years back. Said his great-grandpappy joked that this here kit put Southern boys in the ground faster than the Yankees could kill 'em," she chuckled, breaking into a spasm of harsh, thick coughing that seemed too powerful for such a thin, frail body.
Ready, whispered the voices. So long....
"How much?" Jackie blurted.
The woman caught her breath, popped the cigarette back into her mouth, gave Jackie an appraising look as she inhaled.
"Well, it is an antique...."
"I'll give you 10 dollars."
The old woman dragged on the cigarette, held the smoke in for a moment, released it. "OK," she nodded. "It's yours."
Jackie's hand was already in her purse fishing out a five and five ones before the woman answered. The money was exchanged, and the woman closed the lid on the kit, handed it to her.
Jackie took the box from the woman, clamped it tightly in the crook of her arm, between body and elbow, as if trying to ensure that the lid stayed closed.
Without another word, Jackie turned and walked out of the dark garage into the clear, bright air of a gorgeous spring day.
Before she got to her car, though, she remembered something.
"Excuse me," she called out, walking quickly back up the gravel driveway. "I'll give you 50 cents for that 'Blue Hawaii' tape, too."
Home was motion and lethargy, though always at the wrong times, always from the wrong sources. Most times, Jackie thought of herself as a perpetual motion machine; her energy unharnessed to any useful purpose.
Then there was Mike, her husband. Inertia ruled his life, which seemed bounded by the four walls of the living room. Couch potato didn't go far enough in describing him. He was more a wisdom tooth in the jaw of the house; basically useless, but with roots that penetrated so deeply that to remove him would require more effort and pain than it was generally worth.
Jackie blew away a wisp of hair that had unfurled from her hair band, went about the preparations for dinner. It was late, as usual, since no one bothered to help her. If she asked, as she sometimes did, they merely looked at her with dumb confusion; a look not unlike the one she might get if she asked the dog to play the piano.
It was hot in the kitchen, in the cloying, oppressive way summers in St. Louis get. The air was a jellied, solid mass of heat, like burning Sterno, clinging to everything, making movement sluggish and tiring. Jackie had all of the windows open, in the hopes that some of the air from outside would leak in. But even the air seemed too sapped to move.
The air conditioner was still broken. Two weeks ago, Mike had told her there was no need to call a repairman; he'd look at. What exasperated Jackie even more than the fact she knew he'd have no more idea of why it wasn't working than if he'd open an atomic bomb, was that he still hadn't even gotten around to looking at it.
She opened a can of creamed corn, and it plooshed into the microwave dish, lay there congealed like sputum. The dish was slid into the open oven, closed.
Donning oven mitts in the shape of cows--which she had acquired for a quarter at the yard sale of a young family in a trailer park--Jackie drew a roasting pan from the oven. She swept the lid off, and a heady cloud of steam lifted from it, redolent of garlic and cloves, onions and carrots and beef grease. Doffing the cow mitts, she slid the roast from the pan onto a cutting board near the sink.
With smooth, unthinking movements, she stirred a pot with instant mashed potatoes in it, revolved the dish of bubbling corn in the microwave.
And she opened the knife drawer.
A hodgepodge of blades lay jumbled within, with no order or grouping. Steak knives, butter knives, bread knives, paring knives, butcher knives all rested amiably atop one another.
As she went about other business, Jackie picked distractedly through the drawer until her hand closed blind around the familiar heft of the bone-handled carving knife.
Turning back to the meat, Jackie was distressed to see that a large pool of watery, red blood had seeped from the cooling roast, dripped from the cutting board, and had begun to congeal on the Formica countertop.
She grabbed a towel, blotted at the mess, hurriedly wiping it away so she could get the meal onto the table quickly.
With this accomplished, she took up the knife from the counter, threw the sticky, heavy towel into the sink. Quickly, she hacked the knife down onto the roast, slicing across its brown skin, expecting the blade to slip easily into the flesh.
The knife, however, cared nothing for her expectations. It thunked onto the meat, barely scoring it.
In rising frustration, she lifted the knife and examined the blade, ran a finger gently down its length.
It was as dull as the edge of a spoon.
Mike! she cursed to herself, turning toward the room where he slumped before the television.
He was supposed to have taken a few of her good knives--this was one of them, acquired at the estate sale of some nameless, deceased heiress--to the cutlery shop to have them sharpened. That was months ago.
Pursing her lips tightly, she considered yelling this out to her husband, over the droning sounds of the game show he was watching. She reconsidered, though, when the argument that would ensue from this played through her head.
Well, now what am I supposed to cut the roast with?
She searched through the knife drawer, took out the long, serrated bread knife, but it ripped through the roast, turning it into unappetizing hairballs of stringy, matted meat.
Disgusted, she threw the bread knife into the sink, searched the other drawers.
Then, her eyes fell on it, and the pressure built in her head again until it made her woozy.
The kit.
It lay on the dining room table, underneath the "Blue Hawaii" cartridge. She saw the line separating the lid from the bottom of the box, and it was like a dark, thin smile leering at her.
With only the dim outline of an idea, she moved into the dining room, set aside the Elvis tape, and opened the box.
The implements gleamed unpleasantly upon their bed of worn, blue velvet.
One of the instruments stood out from the rest, caught her attention.
It was a long, slender knife, almost dainty.
She lifted it hesitantly from the box.
The pressure in her skull intensified, not quite like a headache, but throbbing through the bone as if something were squeezing it.
The sounds of the house around her faded as if she were sinking into a deep pool of water.
She felt strangely calm about this.
The handle of the knife in her hand was some kind of dark, hard wood, stained beyond recognition, with several notches and nicks in it; a smooth, worn place where a hand had grasped it. But the blade itself was unmarked by either its owner or its work, appearing unblemished and almost polished.
Without thinking, her hand grasped it tightly, tested its heft.
It was as light and insubstantial as a feather.
Curious, she drew a finger lightly across the length of the blade, so thin that the metal nearly disappeared near its tip.
It whispered across her flesh, leaving no sensation of its passage.
When she lifted her finger, though, a hair-thin line of blood marked the path of the blade.
Hungryhungryhungryhungry.
Reeling into the kitchen, she was not even sure of what she was going to do until the knife swiveled like a divining rod to point at the roast on the counter.
Hungryhungryhungryhungry, the voices in her head rumbled like a million empty stomachs.
Groaning, she placed the edge of the knife against the roast, and it slid into the cooked meat as gently as a lover. She quickly carved the roast into paper-thin slices, which fell limply into a mound onto the cutting board.
When she stopped, the entire roast had been sliced.
Gathering her wits, she dropped the knife onto the counter, stood stock still for a moment.
"Hey, honey!" came a voice from the other room. "Wheel's over. Is dinner ready yet or what? It smells great!"
"Just a minute!" she nearly screamed, staring at the roast beef in alarm.
Not wanting to touch it or the knife, she used her old, dull carving knife and a fork to transfer the meat from the cutting board to a serving plate that had a picture of Niagara Falls embossed on it, from another garage sale.
Jackie took notice of the fact that no lovely red-pink juices swirled at the bottom of the plate to stain the painted waters of the falls. No juice trickled down the sides of the cutting board, either.
Everything the knife had touched was bone dry.
She ate nothing during dinner. No one noticed.
"Meat's a little dry tonight, honey," Mike mumbled around a mouthful of beef.
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