Grief Street

that!”
    “Shall I call you fiend as well? And shall I call out your own fiendish sins? True sins, Grandfa’r. Aye, cardinal sins we likewise call them in hell—sins that go beyond who gets fooked and who gets birthed.”
    “Damn you!” Monaghan once again rose, meaning to throw something at the wicked accuser. He fell back to the chair again, but this time his haunches landed hard on the arm, not the seat. Monaghan lost balance and went over the side of the chair, crashing to the floor, where he whimpered now, “Shut up, damn you!”
    “There's the sin of a man so shamed of his own he’ll even change his name—and run away to bloody America, to prosper as a doctor whilst his own has hardly enough to eat. Ain’t that a fiend’s sin, Grandfa’r?” The man in the cape turned to the window and looked out to the dark, empty street again. Seeing nothing, he swept from the window to where Monaghan lay sprawled on the floor. He hissed and spit on him, and continued the rant. “And then when the poor ones find him—as children will always find their fleeing pap, if only in their hearts—the fiend doctor takes them in. And they depend on him. Like you’re depending on me, see. A lovely irony. The doctor, he even changes their name—his own name he’s changing yet again! Oh, but watch him cover his tracks! The doctor puts them up in rooms under their false new name, and cuts them off to all but himself. And they grow. And grow terrible lonesome, these two, don’t they?”
    “I beg of you, please—”
    “Lonesome in all ways a man and woman know how to be lonesome, including in the desperation of long nights. Now, Monaghan, you heard how the sins of the father are visited upon the son...?”
    Monaghan lay quiet, save for his sobbing.
    “And so naturally, they sin. Ain’t that true, Grandfa’r?” The man reached beneath his cape, pulling out a long knife still wet with blood. He planted his foot on the small of Monaghan’s back. “Answer me, Monaghan, else I’ll slit your lungs open like they was toy balloons.”
    “It’s true, it was sin—all of it, sin. ”
    “But now, that ain’t the greatest sin inspired by a shameful man. There’s much greater crime than fooking the one you shouldn't be fooking. Such as being a drunkard doctor, beholden to despicable patients. A doctor so blind drunk he don’t see it when a tiny girl’s coughing blood and needing care.”
    “Oh, God,” Monaghan moaned.
    “Fook God, I tell you...!”
    The man in the cape snapped his neck, hearing something at the back of the house. Had he come? No matter, he decided. Let him listen.
    “Such as the arrogance of a man who’d conceive of justifying sins he committed when he run away to New York, a man become so bloody American he could no longer distinguish between prejudice and principle. Such a man, what else does he do but become a bloody writer? Here now, the writer justifies his sins—by tricking his audience into believing he’s nothing but a mass of noble sentiment!”
    “Please... Mercy...!”
    “First tell me, Grandfa’r,” said the man in the cape, wheezing now, “what name would you give to such a man as I've described?”
    A sprawled drunkard issued his life’s last word: “Fiend.” The man in the cape brought down his huge knife. It slashed through the back of Monaghan’s elegant satin robe, hacking open one lung and then the other. Then he used the big knife to cut and clip away Monaghan’s clothes. He accomplished this job quickly and deftly, like a fisherman putting a fillet knife to a sea bass.
    The killer pulled off his gray-black cape. He draped it over the bare skin of the deflated corpse. The remembering woolen fibers of the cape soaked in blood and mucus and liquor and the putrid gases and offal of sudden death. The killer picked up the soiled cape. Before setting it back on his shoulders, he smeared his tongue over the filth, again and again.

Forty

    F rom outside the door at the junk-strewn backyard, I had heard the two men arguing loudly; mostly the one not drunk, the one with the wicked voice, the somehow familiar voice. As I listened, I had another cold, sinking-heart moment.
    That voice, was it the one...?
    I had crept inside the unlocked house and stood in darkness in a back room, absorbing the argument and thereby understanding the truth of rumors whispered by nuns of my youth; realizing the crimes of incest and poverty and isolation that had punished the innocent of this