She slowly and carefully twisted her wrist, splitting the tight skin of her lower hand. Now she felt a weird tingling across her palm, as if she had cut into some small but vital sheath of nerves which had been half-dead to begin with. The third and fourth fingers of her right hand swooned forward as if they had been killed. The first two, along with the thumb, began to jitter wildly back and forth. As mercifully numb as her flesh was, Jessie still found something inexpressibly horrible in these signs of the damage she was doing herself. Those two crumpled fingers, so like little corpses, were somehow worse than all the blood she had spilled thus far.
Then both this horror and the growing feeling of heat and pressure in her wounded hand were overwhelmed as a fresh cramp moved into her side like a storm-front. It dug at her mercilessly, trying to tear her out of her twisted position, and Jessie fought back with terrified fury. She couldn't move now. She would almost certainly knock her improvised cutting tool to the floor if she did.
"No you don't," she muttered through her clenched teeth. "No, you bastard-get out of Dodge."
She held herself rigidly in position, trying to keep from bearing down on the fragile glass blade any harder than she already was, not wanting to snap it off and have to try finishing with some less apt tool. But if the cramp spread from her side to her right arm, as it was apparently trying to-
"No," she moaned. "Go away, do you hear? just go the fuck away!"
She waited, knowing she could not afford to wait, also knowing she could do nothing else; she waited and listened to the sound of her life's blood pattering to the floor from the bottom of the headboard. She watched more blood run off the shelf in little streamlets. Tiny sparkles of glass gleamed in some of these. She had begun to feel like a victim in a slasher movie.
You can't wait any longer, Jessie! Ruth rapped at her. You're allout of time!
What I'm really out of is luck, and I never had that goddam muchto start with, she told Ruth.
At that moment she either felt the cramp loosen a little or was able to kid herself that she did. Jessie revolved her hand inside the cuff, screaming with pain as the cramp pounced once more, sinking its hot claws into her midsection, trying to set it on fire again. She kept on moving just the same, however, and now it was the back of her wrist that she impaled. The soft inner part was turned up and Jessie watched, fascinated, as the deep gash across her Bracelets of Fortune opened its black-red mouth wide and appeared to laugh at her. She drove the glass as deeply into the back of her hand as she dared, still fighting the cramp in her midriff and lower chest, then yanked her hand back toward her, spraying a fine mist of backspatter across her forehead, her cheeks, and the bridge of her nose. The broken chunk of glass with which she had performed this rudimentary surgery went spinning to the floor, and there the pixie-blade shattered. Jessie spared it not a single thought; its job was done. Meantime, there was one more step to be taken, one more thing to see: whether the cuff would maintain its jealous hold on her, or if flesh and blood might not at last conspire to make it let go.
The cramp in her side gave a final deep pinch and then began to loosen. Jessie noted its departure no more than she had noted the loss of her primitive glass scalpel. She could feel the force of her concentration-her mind seemed to burn with it, like a torch coated with pine resin-and all of it was fixed on her right hand. She held it up, examining it, in the golden sunlight of late afternoon. The fingers were thickly streaked with gore. Her forearm appeared to have been daubed with slobbers of bright red latex paint. The handcuff was little more than a curved shape rising out of the general flood, and Jessie knew it was as good as it was going to be. She cocked her arm and then pulled downward, as she had twice before. The handcuff slid... slid some more... and then bound up again. It had been stopped once more by the obdurate