Flamethrower - Maggie Estep [3]
“I’m sorry, but I have to use the bathroom,” Ruby said, feeling a slight thrill at this announcement. She’d never had to get up in the middle of a session before. This was new turf. Ruby loved new turf.
“By all means, please,” The Psychiatrist said.
Ruby rose from her chair. As she pulled The Psychiatrist’s office door closed behind her, her tailbone began to throb. She stood looking around at the small waiting room. The couch was in its place. The fish tank rested, as ever, on its low table. Ruby took a few steps toward the fish tank, suddenly feeling guilty over never having cared about the fish. Hailing from a family of borderline personalities who were indifferent at best to fellow humans but obsessively empathetic to creatures great and small, Ruby was supposed to care about fish. But she rarely looked at these or any fish. She made up for this now by staring into the tank. The fish were glorified goldfish. One was white with black spots, like a paint horse. The rest were orange. For some reason, they were all congregating at the bottom left corner of their tank, steering clear of a big thing that was taking up a good portion of real estate. Ruby wondered what the thing was. It was bluish white and, at its end, where it nubbed up against the bright green fish-tank pebbles, there was something that looked like toes.
Ruby’s spine was on fire.
At the other end of the thing, the end sticking out of the tank, there was gore. Blood. Ruby blinked and took two steps closer. The fish were in very tight formation, squeezing next to one another as they tried to avoid contact with what appeared to be the lower half of a human leg. It occurred to Ruby that, in spite of the realness of the gore at the end of the leg, maybe this was a plastic leg. A prank by a disgruntled patient—maybe the chatty woman with flowing white hair who often emerged from her appointment with one of the other psychiatrists right when Ruby emerged from hers. Ruby mistrusted chatty people. Their chattiness was either a side effect of psychiatric medication that gave them verbal diarrhea or, alternatively, a sign of profound stupidity. To Ruby, excessive talking was one of the biggest offenses in the book. Right up there with pedophilia and bestiality. Maybe the chatty white-haired woman had snapped at having no one to chatter at and had put a plastic leg in the fish tank to make the world pay for its collective sin of not listening to her.
Ruby took one more step toward the leg. This is no plastic leg, Ruby thought. But it still didn’t seem real.
Ruby reviewed her mental pictures of the previous half hour. She remembered glancing at the fish tank on the way into The Psychiatrist’s office. There had not been a leg in the tank at that time.
Ruby noticed that the big toe of the foot was caught on some decorative coral. She started backing away and bumped up against a wall. She turned around and opened The Psychiatrist’s door. The Psychiatrist smiled at Ruby expectantly.
“Jody,” Ruby said, “something has gone wrong.”
At first The Psychiatrist didn’t move. She knitted her eyebrows and looked concerned. Ruby had to begin gesticulating wildly to get Jody up from her chair and into the waiting room.
Jody Ray’s initial reaction seemed to be the same as Ruby’s. She tilted her head slightly, looking at what she thought was a plastic leg. She started frowning at the bad joke. Ruby thought of things to say. Nothing seemed to fit the occasion.
As The Psychiatrist took a few steps closer to the fish tank, her jaw went slack. She stood gaping ahead for a few very long seconds; then her mouth started opening and closing. Just when Ruby thought Dr. Jody Ray was going to pass out, The Psychiatrist marched over to the fish tank, grabbed the leg, and pulled it out. Pinkness dripped onto the wood floor. The Psychiatrist’s already pale complexion went whiter than a snake’s belly, and she dropped the leg.
“Oh shit,” Jody said.
Another small victory for Ruby. The Psychiatrist had finally used profanity in front of her.
“Is it real?” Ruby