A Chance Encounter

“You need to be put out of your misery.”

Dolores started, felt the heat of embarrassment rise to her cheeks as the meaning of the sentence percolated down through the levels of understanding in her mind. Had he said that? Had this customer just said these words to her? Did she hear him correctly? There wasn’t much of a rowdy crowd in the diner, no, this wasn’t Friday night after the bars had closed and sent their patrons, drunk and hungry, out into the brisk Autumn night.

Dolores, in a true test of the resolve that had kept her going through the thick of it all these years, did not allow her customer-facing smile to fade from her lips. “I’m sorry, sir?”

The man indicated with one, casual finger, refusing to lift the rest of his hand off the mason jar. He had politely requested they serve him his water in something made with glass instead of a plastic cup and the only glass they had was the mason jars. He had appeared to be such a clean-cut, gracious older gentleman, with a thin frame and close-cropped hair, though now he was directing the small gesture toward her.

He was pointing at her face.

“How did this happen?” he asked, through perfect veneered teeth.

Dolores’ hand drifted to her cheek, a behaviour that had become a subconscious tic, feeling the small spot of roughness there. “This? Oh, this is where the doctors had to remove the cancer from my skin.” She kept up her appearance of the happy proprietor, willing to chat to customers about any lark their attentions chased, no big deal. Except, of course, it was a big deal for her. A very big deal.

The customer pulled his face back into a snarl of disgust, twisting his handsome features into a dangerous caricature of itself. Dolores thought she might gag, and told herself it was because of the way he looked and not because of what this expression displayed about what he thought of her appearance. He really didn’t need to say anything more, but he did. “How can you go on like this?” He spoke in a clipped cadence, voice dripping with the accent of someone from Eastern Europe, maybe Russia or Germany, Dolores wasn’t quite sure. She and Jerry had always planned on moving to Germany when they retired, had spoken of learning German together before they left. The thought of him brought a twinge of loneliness to her heart.

Her fingers involuntarily curled in, scratching the hard spot on her cheek. Even after all the healing, the skin grafts, the time spent away from home at the hospital in Bakersville because Grand Oaks didn’t have a cancer unit, she was conscious that it was always there. Her skin hadn’t been flawless before cancer, not even when she was nineteen, and Dolores had always had many more things to be worrying about.

“I’m alive and I suppose that’s good enough,” she sniffed, hoping he wasn’t intentionally being rude, that he just hadn’t gotten out and spoken to many people. Maybe this was how they spoke to each other in Germany-or-Russia, very straight-forward and to-the-point.

“You ‘suppose’ that’s good enough?” He sipped from his mason jar, thunking it back onto the table when he was done. “I assumed one would ‘suppose’ when life was worth living, and when to call it quits.”

Dolores felt a stab of humiliation, and regretted it almost immediately. he was just being rude for the sake of it, and Dolores was, quite frankly, finished with this conversation. What had she come over here to do? Ah yes, write the bill. She retrieved the pen from her breast pocket and scrawled out his total on her receipt pad, refusing to meet his eyes.

“The doctors did what they could to save my life,” she said. “That’s all there is to it.”

“Well, I’m a surgeon, miss, and I wouldn’t have done this to you, left you with this horrific deformity to live out the last of your years in such slavish  circumstances.”

Dolores tore the cheque from the booklet and slapped it on the table, spun on her heels and rushed away. Already the tears were welling and she hadn’t even made it behind the counter. She pushed the door to the kitchen open, let it slam behind her even though Jerry had always given her shit for that. She rushed to the tiny employee bathroom in the back and locked it behind her, sinking to her knees as the great heaving sobs finally claimed her.

* * *

Dr. Ostens waited in his car outside the squat, ugly mid-rise apartment building. The streetlights were dim here, offering him some darkness to find refuge. It was the only positive thing he could think of for this situation he found himself in.

He tried to wipe the memory from his head, the one of the woman at the diner that had served him. The one who had looked normal from afar, when her head was turned, but when she turned and tried to speak to him like a normal human he had become unsettled at the true sight of her. She had transformed before his eyes; the skin on her throat and chin peeling back like a bloody rose, revealing the naked muscle and flesh beneath, the apple of her throat moving up and down with each swallow, wet and slick, the cheeks that had been scraped away to expose the teeth and jaw in a skeletal grin.

He tried to shake the memory from his head, pounded on his skull with his fists and kicked his feet. He had been caught in this cycle before, trying to rid himself of an image, thinking about it day and night, fighting for sleep. There was only one way to end it.

Dr. Ostens pulled his blue rubber gloves over his hands, retrieved the packet of alcohol wipes he kept under the passenger seat, and wiped the dash where he had beat his fists, cleaning it of any residue that might remain from that disgusting diner. When he retrieved the mini-suck vacuum cleaner from his trunk—careful not to slam any doors—plugged it in and cleaned the floor around every seat for the fourth time that day. There were simply no corners that could be cut.

He had to pause in his cleaning when he saw the car he had been waiting for coming down the dark street toward him. One of the headlights was dimmer than the other—the result of faulty wiring, and perhaps something that was hard to notice for anyone aside from himself—and he turned off the lights and crouched behind his own car while it pulled into the parking lot. Sneaking a look over his hood he saw the woman from the diner get out of her car. It was late, and dark, too dark to see her face, but he knew that skeletal grin was waiting for him.

She punched in a code and entered.

Dr. Ostens gripped the black leather case containing all his scalpels and knives, then straightened his tie, tucked in his Henry Collens white short-sleeve dress shirt, and made his way over to the building. This shirt and these pants would be stained when he came out but he always kept extra sets in his car. He would change his clothes and bag them, then properly dispose of the soiled clothing later with acid, dissolving them until nothing was left except a slurry of fibrous liquid. Then it would go down the storm drain on the opposite end of town.

His skin, as well, would need to be scoured clean with soap and loam, with scratch pads that cleaned so well they hurt.

That was a sacrifice he was willing to make.

He needed to make the world make sense.

He needed them to see what he saw.