Leni Zumas

She liked a culprit so much, at first, that she ignored the facts at hand.

He had a starlet’s face. Long toes. A restless leg—or so he claimed. “It’s a syndrome,” he said, as though she might believe it.

His mouth made a sticky milk. In the milk swam hairs. From the hairs bloomed contagions. From the contagions she baked a dark bread so hard it hurt his teeth. (He had pussy teeth.)

Syndrome-fakers live next to hospitals. They like to test their blood for fat and their nails for calcium. Black crusts tassel their eyes. She thought Culprit was too old for mascara but let it slide, at first.

They lay across a mattress he had found on a rich-neighborhood curb. They fell asleep to the sounds of the hospital, she with her forgiveness, he with his pain-free limb upon whose pain, in the mornings, he kept insisting.

“Look at it twitch,” he said.

“It’s not moving at all,” she said.

Did a false ever look so twin to a true? Did a healthy human leg, sturdy of ligament, tranquil of bone, ever give such a frantic performance?

He reddened viciously during a game of cards and yelled, “It’s not my fault I didn’t go to college!”

What did college, she asked—

“You learned deduction skills,” he explained, as though that might explain something.

The cards lay on the floor where they had been thrown. The facts were making themselves known.

Culprit said he was in a burrito mood, but Culprit had no money. It was her first brave act of their acquaintance, to refuse him the four dollars.

While he slept, she gathered and stacked the cards (hers). Culprit, when he moved here from Florida, had brought nothing. He was proud of his scavenging skills, though he was not, aside from the mattress, a good scavenger; maybe the standards in Florida were lower?

She opened a drawer of utensils the previous tenant had left behind. There was a garlic press and a potato masher. There was a prong with two-inch metal spikes. She took the prong, whose function she wasn’t sure of, into the bedroom and drove it, hard, into Culprit’s thigh.

He bleated from sleep.

Again she heaved the spikes into him, feeling for bone. He was a vegetarian and his muscles were flat, like fruit leather. He stared up at her with watering eyes. “That hurts,” he whispered.

“Finally,” she said.