Thirteen Specimens by Jeffrey Thomas

too, but Dad was in a three piece suit and he had a briefcase. When he was in our hall, he set the case down on the hallway table, opened it up, and took out this big chopper-like knife that he used as a doctor, I figured. He raised it up and I screamed because I thought he was going to hack my Mom.
         Instead, he swung it at this awkward angle and lopped off his own head, like a male Cchinnamasta, which was a blasphemy. He caught his head by the hair, his wire framed glasses still on his nose, and three bright geysers of blood shot up and out of his neat neck stump as if from a water sprinkler. One stream arced into the mouth of his own severed head. Parina caught another stream in her smiling mouth, and her Mom caught the third stream.
         My Mom and I didn’t get any.
    *     *     *
         Last night we all went out and had dinner together, Indian food, surprise. Mom and Mrs. Dad were pleasant to each other, everyone was pleasant, Parina and I talked a lot but it wasn’t like before which makes me sad, and I hated telling her about Alex’s arrival and departure, the whole relationship covered in ten minutes. She’s seeing someone but I don’t know if she’s slept with him or with anybody. She’s a little thinner now, her cheekbones more pronounced; I preferred her with a little more baby fat, she was smoother in the face. She has a little gem in her left nostril but she wasn’t wearing a bindi. She wasn’t in a sari, even, but it felt like she was.
         Dad kept smiling at me, smugly, like he was proud of me, like I was this possession, a flower he had once planted that had bloomed prettily in his absence, he kept calling me beautiful. Maybe you’d like to fuck me, I thought. The perfect fuck. Both Indian and Wasp. I can see it in all three of your eyes, Dad with your hanging Kali tongue you false goddess.
         I was hoping Parina would want to sleep over instead of at the hotel, I hoped she or someone would suggest it but no one did so I didn’t bring it up. In a way, though, I think I was also relieved. Yes, after Alex left I moved back in with my Mom because I couldn’t swing the rent alone.
         Some of the Indian food was great and some of it was gross. I prefer Chinese or Middle Eastern. The names of the various dishes meant nothing to me. I watched Dad slice some curried chicken with his fork and knife and I imagined him carving open one of his patients. I remembered him with that big bladed instrument in my dream. He sensed me watching I think because he lifted his eyes directly up to mine and I had to look away. But when I looked back he was chewing the chunk of flesh, like he was reclaiming one of the personified Shaktis he had manifested, slicing her up and chewing her up and swallowing her so he could produce another one in her place.
    *     *     *
         The third day of their trip, though, which is today, Parina was dropped off to spend with me because I had said I would take the day off from work. Mom went to her job and Parina and I painted each other’s toe nails like teen agers though she just turned twenty one. We decided to rent a video and she picked Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love because she’d never seen it before. She was all giggly about it. I said, oh, come on...it sounded like some late Friday night Cinemax movie but she said it was by the director of Salaam Bombay! which I guess was supposed to be an impressive bit of trivia. So I said yeah, yeah, okay, and we took it home and made popcorn and watched it on the couch with our bares toes shining.
         I had given us both a Corona, with lime in it and salt on the rim even.
         The beer was a mistake, though I only had two. If I haven’t eaten much I can get a good buzz off two beers, though my perfect buzz is two mai tais, no more and no less. But her mistake was renting that stupid movie. Because it was very sexy, and the actress Indira Varma was so beautiful. I had snuggled