Brides Of The Impaler

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Authors: Edward Lee
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others came and went but it was mostly just these four: Francy, Sandrine, Scab, and Stutty. Shoplifted candles burned to give them light. It was Stutty who’d just crawled in through the hole that was almost too small for them to squeeze into.
    “I just saw the lady in the house,” she said, “and she was playin’ with herself.”
    “She was not,” Francy scowled.
    “She was too! In a window upstairs, and she saw me-saw me-saw me-saw—”
    “Be quiet!” Francy yelled. Most of Francy’s teeth were missing, and her pink glasses always slid down her nose. Her breasts sagged in an orange halter she stole from a store, and she wore baggy men’s jeans and flip-flops. “We’re working, we’re whittling. You could be helping, Stutty, but we can’t find the fourth knife we stole last night.”
    Stutty’s obsessive-compulsive mind stalled. Knife ? She sat down in a corner on a plastic storage bin that read BANANA REPUBLIC. She put her feet up on the old kerosene heater they found in the garbage last year that still worked, and watched the other three continue whittling. Stutty wished she could whittle too because it looked like fun. Stutty’s breasts itched beneath the stained white T-shirt that said THE DAMNED on it, and it had a blue picture of a woman with a crown of thorns; she’d taken it off of a dead crackhead in the Meatpacking District. The color of her hair was indeterminate due to dirt and head oil, but it didn’t really matter what color it was. She rarely wore shoes, often leaving black footprints.
    The knife ? she thought again, then said, “Oh, I know where it is!” and she pulled it out of her back pocket. It was a simple whittling knife.
    “So you took it,” Sandrine said, smirking in her stained, pink sweatpants, and white T-shirt. Her black-spaghettihair hung over most of her face. “Is that…blood on it?”
    All the girls looked. Stutty turned the knife and touched the smudged blade. “Oh, yeah! I got money—I got five dollars-five dollars-five—”
    “Be quiet!” Francy yelled.
    “Stutty got a trick,” Scab said, as if jealous. She was the most quiet of the bunch, and probably the least mentally defected. Her large, dirty breasts swayed in the kind of sleeveless T-shirt that people called a wifebeater, and she wore cutoff army pants. Very short black hair covered her head, but she had lots of bald spots and scabs from some disease or hair blight. She wanted to grow her hair out long like the other girls but it just never grew. “But that was a shitty trick if all you got was five dollars.”
    “Why ya think the knife’s got blood on it?” Stutty retorted with a wisp of pride in her voice. “Some fat guy in a little car, said he’d pay twenty but only gave five.”
    “Did ya kill him?” Sandrine asked, looking up from her whittling.
    “No, but I stuck him right in the bag. Twice.” Stutty laughed. “He had a wedding ring on!”
    “Good,” Francy approved. “Let the fucker go home to his wife and explain why he’s got two knife holes in his nut-sack.”
    The four girls burst into a round of giggling.
    “Oh, and I got some sardines, too,” Stutty added.
    The other three looked up with expectation in their eyes as Stutty took the narrow cans out of her pocket and gave them one each.
    “King Oscar, I hope,” Scab said, but then she frowned at the can.
    “These are anchovies, not sardines!” Francy complained.
    Sandrine cranked open her can and first drank the oil out of it. “But anchovies are better, they’re easier to steal,and they’re salty, and I don’t even like sardines ’cos they remind me of my fucked-up childhood.”
    “Sardines?” Scab questioned, picking a narrow fillet from the can.
    “Because my name’s Sandrine so when I was a kid the other kids called me Sardine.”
    “Oh,” someone said.
    Stutty’s eyes popped open. “And look at this real expensive eye shadow I stole!” She reached down the front of her pants and withdrew a small jar

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