Wet Work: The Definitive Edition by Philip Nutman

Woody Allen movie. It didn’t happen in real life—not in the lives of the people he knew anyway.
    But it had happened to him, and he didn’t know what to do. What was he going to tell them at the office—the truth? They’d laugh at him behind his back, make jokes. Marriages broke up all the time—but not because your wife decided she preferred pussy to penis.
    Alex was concentrating so deeply on his confusion that he failed to notice that the two bums had returned and were now following him.
    He didn’t even know they were behind him until the older bum hit him with a heavy branch, while the other one gouged his eyes out.
    Hundreds of yards away people heard his screams and dismissed them as teenagers just fooling around.
    The derelicts tore Wilson’s body apart with their bare hands and began to eat.
     
    In the Baltimore suburbs little Tessy Leone was bored. Daddy was working at the hospital, and Mommy was asleep in front of the TV. If there’d been anything interesting to watch, she would have stayed indoors, but the day was so nice and hot that even if she wasn’t sure she wanted to play with her Barbie dolls, she decided to take them outside anyway.
    She had just set Barbie’s Dream Boat afloat in her little plastic pool when she noticed old Mister Rizzo, their neighbor, wandering around his yard like he’d lost something. She hadn’t seen him for two days, and Mister Rizzo looked sick. He was very pale and had a big purple mark around his neck.
    He smelled bad.
    But Tessy was bored. Daddy wasn’t going to be home until late and Mommy was no fun anyway, so when Mister Rizzo asked if she would like to come over and feed the goldfish, she went with him.
    She pinched her nose. The bad smell was even worse in the house. There were lots of flies buzzing around, and Mister Rizzo had a brown stain on his heinie like he’d gone big potty without taking his pants down. He did smell like poo-poo now that she thought about it, and she decided she didn’t want to feed the fishes after all.
    Mister Rizzo smiled at her when she said should go home and see Mommy and he said wouldn’t you like to feed the fishes and she said no and—
     
    In Hoboken, New Jersey, Marc Hellier was working on his second six-pack of the day, trying to think how he could get rid of the body of the dead girl who’d choked to death on her own vomit during the night after they had been doing eight balls of Coke and Smack, when she opened her eyes and leered at him.
    He dropped his Bud, spitting beer all over the dirty Indian rug.
    The girl raised her half-naked body off the worn couch.
    “ Hold me. I’m so cold… please …hungry.”
    Hellier screamed.
     
    Des Moines, Iowa.
    After months of deep depression, Sylvia Harkin decided to end it once and for all with a razor blade.
    It wasn’t her first suicide attempt, but, by God it was going to be her last. She was sick of the world and all the people in it. They were vile, selfish fools. The ozone layer was eroding, there were no jobs, and she couldn’t lose weight no matter how hard she tried. Sometimes when she looked in the mirror she thought she saw a beautiful woman staring back at her. Not beautiful in the physical sense, but beautiful on the inside. Other people didn’t see that, however. All they saw was a fat, lonely woman in her thirties with a bad complexion, no job and no one to love her.
    Well, screw them. They wouldn’t have to look at her anymore. She was going to take a permanent vacation with Death. Death would be her lover, and he would understand. He wouldn’t play cruel jokes on her like the kids in the neighborhood who left dog turds on the doormat and scrawled obscene things about her on the sidewalk outside her house. Death would be gentle and kind, she thought, as she wallowed in the warm bath.
    As she cut her left wrist she bit her lip at the pain. Oh, how it hurt. Ow, ow, ow. And as she slashed her right wrist, she wished she owned a handgun. That would have