The Excision

“There isn’t much to it at all, see? No need to be scared.” Said Greg, the matted, spit-soaked end of a lollipop stick in his mouth. He hoped that when men saw him from a distance, they would think it was a cigarette. In his hand was a gushing spout of fire illuminating a ring of orange, like someone had left a cup stain on the table.

Delilah wore his coat. It was a massive black piece of canvas; if it weren’t for her goggled head peeking out the top, he would’ve thought that the coat was still on its velvet hanger that swayed back and forth quietly on his office door whenever anyone shut it. Shush, shush, shush.

“And now that it’s burning, you listen to the noise.” Greg cranked one of the knobs on the spou,t and the flame swelled yellow and rumbled.

“This is too much.” He shouted. He turned the knob the other way, and the flame withered until it barely trickled from the spout and coughed a pitiful red.

“And this is too little.”

Delilah, her face completely overtaken by a boxy pair of welding goggles, stared into the fire. The flame colored the creases from her nose to her mouth, making her look ugly. Greg thought that only old women were supposed to get those lines.

He nudged her with his shoulder because she wasn’t paying attention to him. She turned to face him slowly. He couldn’t see her eyes. She could be meeting his, or staring at his nose hairs, or watching that lollipop stick waggle in his mouth.

“Isn’t that right?” He said.

“Sure.” Said Delilah. Her head drifted away, latching back onto the cold red flame that burbled slowly from his hand.

“Then you add the oxygen.” The flame narrowed and whitened until it was a translucent blue line extending calmly from the spout, like the beam of a flashlight when pointed at the night sky.

“This is where you bring the feeder line in, blah, blah, I already showed you that.” Greg shut off both knobs, but he did it anxiously, so a loud, violent CRACK ruptured the calm humming of the flames. Delilah flipped up her goggles. She had deep red lines carved around her eyes, and the rim of her nose was sweaty. Greg didn’t remove his goggles. They were a pair of modified sunglasses that he always wore in the welding studio because they made him feel cool.

“That’s one way to do it.” Said Delilah.

Sandra’s office was warm and oaky like a beer. The walls were covered in cork boards and posters, and magnetic strips of tools. Five different desks jutted from the wall, all covered with a hash of papers and scale models. If a child entered her office, he would die instantly, impaled on the hidden exacto knives between the sheets.

Her main desk had a mug full of pencils, pens, a letter opener, and a dull knife. The mug was embossed with red stripes. There was a large chunk of the table in Sandra’s hand. She pressed it into the hole it came from. Wood glue oozed from the cracks, pus from a wound.

A knock on the door.

“Come in.” Said Sandra.

The gnarled hand of the doorman popped through the doorway and escorted a man in. He clutched a folder between his paws. There were dots of sweat stippled across the back of the paper.

“Can I help you?” Said Sandra.

“Are you Sandra Mostef?”

“I am.”

He held the paper out to Sandra. She took it with one hand, the other still fastened to the table. A resume.

“I saw that you put out an ad for a studio assistant.” He said eagerly, lowering himself into the seat facing the desk. “My name is Greg Owens.”

“Your first test,” Said Sandra, halting his ass before it could sit uninvited in her chair, “Is to hold this table for me.”

He jumped to her side and eased his hand over the crack. That was good, that he could be delicate. Sandra circled around the desk and sat in her chair. She kicked her feet up. The desk rattled, but Greg kept the chunk still. Steady hands. Sandra flipped through his resume.

“You’re completely unqualified.” She said.

“I know, but I want to learn the trade. If you teach me, I promise I’ll work harder than anyone else you could find.” He was certainly enthusiastic.

“How old are you?” She said.

“25. 26 in three months.”

“Tell you what. Greg. If you hold onto my desk until the glue dries, the job is yours.”

“Really?”

Sandra left the office and closed the door behind her. She went to get some lunch.

The doorman, that same gray face, pulled the now graying Greg aside before he entered the studio.

“There’s a girl in there wanting to see you.” Said the doorman.

“Really? Who?”

“Some girl. Wouldn’t tell me what she wanted you for.”

“Homeless?”

“Maybe.”

“Call the cops?”

“I figured maybe you asked her to come.”

Greg clapped the doorman on the arm, projecting unflappable masculinity.

“Good man. I’ll go see her.”

Sandra’s studio was cold and white like the foam of a beer. Over the years, the rough cut floorboards and warm exposed beams had deadened with grime. The walls were bare except for a surgical magnetic tool strip stapled to the wall like a taxidermied fish.

The girl stood in the middle of the office. She had moved one of his stools out of the way so she could stand in the exact center. She was staring at one of his scale models on the construction desk. She had turned on the spotlight and pointed it straight at the model. Greg could see the white tangle of her arm hairs, the halo of dust around her head. He cleared his throat.

“Can I help you?” He said.

The girl turned around. He recognized the parentheses of her ears. Her nose, wasn’t it that nose?

“I’m your new assistant.” She said.

“I’m not- I’m sorry, who are you?”

“Delilah. You must be Greg.”

“Mr. Owens.”

It was hard to see her face, backlit like it was. Delilah took a step forward. He didn’t hear the floorboards creak.

“Teach me how to weld.” She said.

She wore a black floppy polyester tank top that glimmered as if scaly. No good for welding. Greg watched as a tide of goosebumps crested her shoulder, puckering her collarbone like freckles. Or a disease.

Delilah presented the newspaper to Greg. He snapped it away from her and sliced it open with a knife.

“There’s a bucket of nails in the corner. Sort them for me. Please.”

The rustling of paper like a dry bird from Greg. The jangling plinks of metal from Delilah. The headline was MISTLETOE KILLER FINALLY CAUGHT.

“Good that they caught him.” Said Delilah.

“Yeah. Good for them.”

“That poor girl.” The plinks stopped. “She could’ve killed him. She could’ve. He caught her off guard.”

Greg flipped down the paper.

“What?”

“He tricked her. Surprised her. She could’ve, if she knew it was coming.”

Greg leaned forward on the desk.

“Are you, by any chance, related to a Mostef?”

“No.”

Greg shook his head.

“You look just like her.”

“Who? Sandra?”

Greg sat up straight as if pinched by a schoolmistress.

“You know her?”

“I know of her.”

Plink.

“Shame.”

Plink.

“What?” Said Greg.

“Shame. About Sandra.”

“What about her?”

“How she died.”

Delilah’s face glowed hollow in the pale fluorescence of the ceiling. She kicked the bucket of nails over. A shrill percussive clanging. The noise cascaded to a stop, like the scream of a woman sputtering into silence.

Delilah had one knee up on a stool. She braced her welding hand against her leg. A honey of melted steel dripped across the beam she was working on. Greg watched in amazement as she guided the red pool gracefully across the gap, sealing the two pieces together. Surely she was holding the flame too close. Surely there was too much oxygen, and the metal would be bubbly when it cooled. That was a habit it had taken Greg ten years to unlearn.

Delilah shut off the oxygen first and then the acetylene. There was no vivacious CRACK. She leaned the welder against a brick so the hot tip wouldn’t adhere to the table. Greg hadn’t taught her that.

The seam in the metal was so pristine and glossy that it looked like God had bent the piece, that He had run his fingernail lovingly over the fold to make sure it was creased.

“Pretty good.” Said Greg. “Are you sure that you’ve never welded before?”

“Why would I lie?” She said.

Greg lived above Sandra’s studio in Sandra’s apartment. It was spacious, and it had big windows. Sandra had told him once that he would never be a true artist until he caved in and bought a pullout couch for his workspace, because a true artist slept three hours a night and only left her studio for strong coffee in the morning. Greg got thirteen hours of sleep every night. He took pills for it. He called them ‘pills’ and not ‘medication’ because they weren’t prescribed.

There was a large, mysterious, freezer-burnt something tucked away in the back of the freezer that he hardly thought about anymore. Greg withdrew some brownie batter ice cream and shut the door on something. He still checked every night to make sure it was still there. He sat on Sandra’s couch and watched Sandra’s TV, and tucked into his ice cream. This house wasn’t haunted. She didn’t have the nerve.

One time, Sandra made Greg hold a table in place for two hours. Once she made him fish rust,y sharp pieces of metal out of a bucket of moldy clay. Always with the lugging. She had a pneumatic wheeled dolly, but she never let him use it. Greg tore his shoulder lifting a pallet of nails. He asked her if she could get him some health insurance.

“Ok.” She said. “I’ll pay you less.”

His first personal project was a swirling, swan necked treble clef of a sculpture. He envisioned it suspended from a glass ceiling in a train station. The kind of sculpture that tourists took photos under. Made of clear green resin, or maybe bronze, so shiny that it looked liquid, that caught so much sunlight it scalded a tourist’s retinas.

“Your first problem,” Said Sandra, “Is that you want to make a sculpture that hurts to look at.”

“That’s the POINT.” Said Greg in a rare moment of insolence.

“If I was the city, I would LOVE to spend thirty thousand dollars on a bronze piece of shit that I can’t even look at. The world isn’t made of artists.”

She let his plans fall from her hand to the floor.

“Only boring people can be themselves in public.”

Greg fell to his knees and collected the fallen plans. A pathetic whine dripped from his lips along with some drool. Sandra’s foot alighted onto Greg’s hunched back. Not kicking, not pressing down. Only resting, like a small bird on the back of a water buffalo.

Delilah handed Greg a crumple of plaster, a fossilized tissue. A nose poked from the junk, expertly rendered with pores dotting the bridge. And here, swirled around a bend, was an eye. A mouth, slightly parted in a surprised gasp, wrapped in its own folds.

“What is this?” He said.

“A scale model.”

The sculpture was tender. A piece broke off in his hand.

“I used silicon as a base mold, and then I only partially filled it. That’s what gives it this wrinkled fabric texture.”

“I haven’t taught you about silicon yet.”

“I want the final product to be twenty feet wide. Made from concrete.”

Cement was hardy and easy to transport. Perfect for an outdoor installation. Greg could see the kids playing on the wrinkles of the mouth, hiding in the nostrils. Interesting process, easy to make, unique result. He could see Delilah signing a contract with the city to sprinkle twenty of these on any green space where there was room.

“I want your feedback. Be honest.” She said.

Greg let the model clatter from his palm onto the table. The nose broke off. There was an ear hidden beneath the nose. Damnit, he thought. Now that’s artistic.

“Pretty weak. The human face is the most overused form in art history. The only thing worse than sculpting the human face is distorting the human face and calling it art. You’re not Picasso. I’d call this uninspired.”

Delilah picked up the broken nose and wound it around between her fingers.

“I said I wanted your honest opinion.” She said.

She pressed the nose back onto the model. Miraculously, it stayed.

Sandra applied a layer of black nail polish to her scale model. The model was undeniably a copy of Greg’s treble clef.

“That’s my sculpture.” He said.

“No, it’s not.”

Sandra set the model down on its belly. It rocked back and forth like a boat, never capsizing. She must have put weights in it.

“See. It’s different.”

“That’s my shape. I made that.”

“It’s a different color. It doesn’t hang, it bounces.”

“You stole it from me.”

“What did I steal? Show me what I stole from you.”

She tilted her head like she was talking to a dog.

“You threw it out already, didn’t you? Because I told you to start over.”

Sandra blew on the model and put it in a suitcase.

“Now I’m going to a pitch meeting with some stock brokers. I’m putting this in their atrium. The black will be pleasant to look at. They’re offering me fifty grand.”

Greg ran out back to the dumpster. He got in there with the trash. He pawed frantically through the chunks of plaster, splinters of wood. He cut his hand open on some scrap metal. Up came the garbage truck. One of the men came around the back of the truck. He barely saw Greg over the lip of the bin, tarred and feathered with blood and plaster.

“What the hell are you doing?” Said the garbage man. “Get down from there.”

Greg slunk down from the dumpster. He covered his head with his hands as the garbage man scolded him, as the truck lifted the dumpster and shoveled the whole thing into its mouth. The truck chewed it all to dust.

In the studio was a massive cement iteration of Delilah’s scale model. She knelt by a yard of eyeball, working the lid with sandpaper. Greg stood in the doorway, closing his eyes, praying that once he opened them, the sculpture would be gone.

“Pass me that chisel.” Said Delilah.

Greg wandered over with the chisel.

“You got a lot of work done last night.” He said.

“You didn’t hear me scrabbling around down here? No? You were fast asleep.”

The sculpture’s single eye festered with loathing. The pupil fastened onto Greg, enveloped him, swallowed him whole. He stumbled backwards. He knew this face.

“Sandra!” He said.

Below the eye was a mouth. It seemed to be opening wider and wider; her teeth were crawling towards him…

Delilah watched as Greg fled from the studio. In came the doorman, his arms piled high with boxes. On top of the boxes was a red striped mug, swaying happily back and forth like a triumphant flag erected over a won battlefield.

“In my office. Thank you.” Said Delilah.

Greg tottered upstairs to Sandra’s apartment. Into the kitchen. Brownie batter ice cream and old tater tots, and a tub of baking soda tumbled from the freezer onto the floor. There was no mysterious freezer-burnt package in the back. It was gone. Or rather, it was now massive and concrete, warping the floorboards of the studio below him. He sniveled and shielded his body with his hands. Why now? Why did she have to keep torturing him like this?

Greg dragged himself down the stairs and around the back of the building. He crawled inside the dumpster and hid himself in a nest of trash bags. He trembled and sobbed, flecks of snot dappling the plastic. He made a horrible whining noise, like a worn-out piece of machinery that had overstayed its welcome. The garbage truck rose over the crest of the hill, snuck slowly towards the dumpster. The truck’s mouth lolled open; a gaping, hungry hole, shuddering with anticipation.