The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

my balance and fall on my knees at their golden threshold. I reach out for his pants, but he moves back a little, his wife standing behind him. My sore, swollen hand touches his sock-covered toes, and I start wailing like a walrus with a broken fang.
    “Goodmooh…” I can’t say more. The pain is too great. I have to put him through to my soul and let it finish for me. Its voice is deep and inaudible, like Barry White speaking under water. I hardly understand it myself, but it sounds something like: “…pleashe helph me.”
    This is getting interesting. My soul is counting on good old Llama Face.
    I’m almost lying on the hallway floor now, spreading my dirty sins on their white tiles. Take a good look at them, dear pastor. Take a good look at the filthy mess. Take it all and burn it in hell, or bring it to the cleaners in your beloved heaven.
    There is some tiptoeing around the matter—I think I hear them whispering above my head—but finally I can sense that Mr. Good reaches out over my head and closes the door. He then helps me to my feet and leads me into the nearby bathroom. I can barely walk.
    Sickreader washes my aching head and swollen face. I try not to look in the mirror, but it whispers to me that I look like the Elephant Man. I can hardly see with my left eye. My nose has doubled its size. Must be broken. As is the tooth next to the front teeth, on my left. Upper lip looks African. Still, most of the bleeding has come from the forehead. There is a cut above my left eye, going all the way up to the hairline. As Sickreader rinses the wound, it shines again. My right arm is deaf from the ache in my shoulder, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some broken ribs if they had an X-ray camera in the house. Every breath brings pain. My right ankle feels twisted, like a semi-wet towel that somebody’s trying to wring with no success.
    “Did you land in an accident?” the preacher asks.
    “Uh-huh.”
    It’s like talking to the dentist with your mouth full of fingers.
    “Where?”
    “Ah cah….” I mumble through broken teeth and swollen lips.
    “In car accident? That is terrible. We have to go to the doctor…to the hospital.”
    “But we have to clean him first and stop the bleeding. We cannot go with him like this in the car,” Sickreader says like a trained nurse, while carefully washing my forehead with a small towel.
    “Noh,” I protest. “No ospitah.”
    “No hospital? Why? It is clean. We have a very good health system. It’s the best in the world. Or, is it maybe against the laws of your church?” Goodmoondoor asks while raising his brows.
    “You know he’s not Father Friendly anymore. This man killed Father Friendly. He’s a MURDERER,” his wife says with the face of Margaret Thatcher and the hands of Florence Nightingale.
    Her less-intelligent husband pauses for a moment.
    “Oh, yes. You are a criminal. We have to take you to the police also,” he then says.
    I turn away from Sickreader and her towel to face the judge of my days.
    “Pleahse. Shave me.”
    He looks at me and then looks at his wife and then at me again. His face is one big indecision. Maybe he really thinks I’m asking for a shave. And I might actually need one. I try helping him out by suddenly leaning my ugly head against his breast (I can hear his pink shirt and blue tie scream out loud as my bloody forehead contacts them), folding my arms around him. He steps back a little, but I won’t let go, pressing my arms even harder around him. The most untoxic thing to do.
    “Pleahse,” I wail into his womb, forgetting my pain for a minute. “They will khill me. Pleahse, I bheg you.”
    I can feel that wife and husband exchange meaningful looks, two soldiers of kindness faced with the defeated evil. For a while they speak in Icelandic. I do the LPP, clinging to the preacher’s body like a newborn monkey to his mother. I watch two tears mixed with blood fall from face to floor. Each one forms a tiny pond on the white tiles, a crystal-clear pond full of blood-red streaks that are constantly moving about in it like some micro-whips.
    Without informing me about any further decisions, they wrap me with bandages, turning me into a mummy, and then take me upstairs to my old bed. Sickreader places a cold cloth on my nose. She tells me to relax, and they then leave the room.
    Mom and Dad.
    I try to get some rest. I try to get my soul some rest. The physical pain is there, but coming from so many sources it has now