Dr Jew

door to make his exit. But I was faster, Sergio, I was faster! I slammed the portal of his deliverance – not to be! – and put myself against it, and we each knew the score. I was a gentleman and he a villain. He had perpetrated, and I would avenge, inflict the final tally, unknown to him, but fully known to me.
    "I jumped and was upon him! He had the advantage of youth and being raised like a rat in a mad swamp. I had the advantage of experience and explicit understanding of the human body, its strengths and weaknesses, afforded me from my devotion to medicine. It came down to professional rogue versus professional medicine man. I must confess, however, that I also have a smattering of rogue in me – just enough to give me the veneer of suavity – for as we grappled and twisted, lunged and punched, each trying to render the other insensible, I was not above any maneuver that might ensure my victory. I had, when departing earlier to find a W.C. on the streets of Mexico, concealed a scalpel in my pocket on the lone chance I was assaulted or enticed into a dubious establishment or otherwise leeched upon in that malignant nest o' Spaniards. Like a boy scout – which I once was so many summers ago – I am always prepared.
    "With this utensil somehow removed in the scuffle and in my hand, I aimed, his heart being my mark, and my hand lunged at him, into him, cracking into skin and liberating blood to the surface. It all happened so quickly and would have appeared as a rift in the Earth's surface following the earthquake of our entanglement, so rabid and primal, so quickly halted. As the blade went in as far as I could immerse it and before that crimson tide so unleashed itself to ruin his otherwise fashionable wifebeater, he loosed a faint Mexican growl to indicate he had been pierced. Despite my loathing for this vermin, I must confess a kind of sorrow filled me when I heard his cry. It defied my surgeonic nature to cause pain when I cut, so normally intoxicated with bilious gases were my subjects, and it went against my doctoral presence to cause pain without the intention to heal. And furthermore it went against my nature as a human being, to take life from another, however damning his sins. Who was I to judge? No, not I, not I – leave him to heaven.
    "Yet it was not to be. Instinct had won out over decency and the higher moral ground, as it so often does. My aim had been true, and in the stroke of a second he knew that the game was up. He clutched at the knife enthroned in his chest, rubbed the red oil spill that would not be capped or caked with scab, no doubt attempted some dismal attempt at the laying on of hands, useless, and began to make his fall. I took a step back to witness a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle: the drunken post-coital tumbling of this inimical – yet oh so common – critter as he grasped and slipped upon those shrinking pieces of life remaining to him. His literal fall took place next, warping him around face down onto the floor. His collision simple. His outcome nearly complete. He grunted and shuddered for nearly five minutes. I did nothing as he writhed. I was in shock and held still by fascination with process. Did I feel remorse for what I'd done? This is a good question, and perhaps I might have given the man my sympathy had the case been more abstracted. But these were personal relations. My dear friend Sergio and his wife Lisa –"
    "Lise," said Sergio.
    "Yes, as you say. The happiness of my friends had been vampired away by the lame throes of desire. For your sake, Sergio, I felt no remorse. Put the abomination down. Kill monsters while small – he was somewhat short, now that I think about it.
    "When I had checked his pulse and was certain that life throbbed no longer, I turned to more pressing matters. Your wife still paralleled the floor with a gaping maw down her front. Sterilizing my claws, I set to work to meld her whole again as best I could without an assistant to support me. I pushed aside the business with the Mexican and found focus again in the warty skin of… Lise? I prayed no infection or other beany microbials had found their way inside her - and yet I also felt that germ 'theory' is overrated and hoped for the best. She was sealed within an hour's quarter. The deed was done. I had only to wait and see if I had done right. I made some adjustments to those machines upon which our lives depend in times like these, gave one last look at her meters and monitors