Old Man Bennett ran the vacuum repair shop on the corner of Nowhere and Eighth since forever. He’s OLD MAN Bennett after all. He could fix anything, from your basic sixty dollar shit vacuums all the way up to those outrageous twelve hundred dollar jobs that come with their own door-to-door salesmen. Old Man Bennett says that every vacuum is pretty much the same. At its heart is simply a pump. He could say that about you and me, too, and he’d be right.

…………The problem with Old Man Bennett was that he was a Liberal, a bleeding heart Liberal if you will. Ever since those Constitution Revisions and Exceptions a couple years ago, he’s been performing abortions in the back room of his shop for, as he put it, “troubled girls who took a wrong turn in life”. I don’t know jack about politics, but I do know that what he’s up to back there is a big no no. If the USPF got whiff of it, he’d be humanely euthanized in, well, a heartbeat.

…………You could say I had Old Man Bennett by the balls.

…………My job was Customer Service. I checked in broken vacuums and wrote down the symptoms. I gave fixed vacuums back to people and collected the money. That was the best part: collecting the money and running the till. Since Old Man Bennett was, after all, OLD MAN Bennett, he preferred to still deal with cash. People don’t use cash much except when they’re in the State Casinos, but he encouraged it by giving big discounts on repair bills. Lots of people took advantage of it, too, and my till always had a good deal of actual money in it.

…………Since there was nothing he could really do about it, I decided to give myself a little raise. Old Man Bennett paid like shit anyway. Besides, if he ever confronted me about it I’d just click on the USPF and rat him out. I’d get a Responsible Citizen badge and a Safety First debit bonus, and he’d get hauled off to the ovens. Sayonara sucker.

…………I usually only took fifty or sixty out a day. I mean, I didn’t want to ROB him or anything. Despite paying like shit, I kind of liked him. He was friendly enough and knew where to get good tobacco. He hooked me up with his guy and I could stop going to that crook Mikey, who always overcharged me and cut his tobacco down with black tea. You know you’re taking it in the ass on a tobacco deal when the cigarettes taste like jasmine and bergamot. Fucking crook.

…………Old Man Bennett did all his work in the back. A wall separated the retail area from all the tables and tools and benches and dissected vacuums. There was a little counter in the retail area where I stood for most of my shift, taking calls, doing the emails and running the till. Old Man Bennett also sold some vacuum accessories, like hoses and rubber drive bands and bags for those vacuums that still had them. These hung on the walls in the retail area or sat on shelves.

…………Since I’d been working for him, he’d performed, oh, maybe five or six abortions. It was the only time anybody ever went into the back with him and it was always right before closing, which was at 8 pm because Old Man Bennett lived in an apartment on top of the shop and had no life.

…………I had no idea how he got the word out. I mean, he couldn’t very well put an ad up on the net like a regular business. Maybe it was word-of-mouth advertising. I’ve heard people who are into business shit say that word-of-mouth advertising is the most effective. That and radio, whatever radio is.

…………On Thursday I knew he had a customer for his little side business when a woman and her daughter came in without a vacuum. The girl looked about twelve or thirteen. She had very pretty green eyes that darted from side to side. She was obviously scared and unsure, and her mother gently guided her by the shoulders. The mother looked like a typical older woman in her forties, with the shortened hair and sensible shoes. Women that old seem to give up on themselves. They want to look “nice”, not playful or sexy or flirty or fun. Her cheeks and eyes were red and puffy, giving away that she’d been crying only moments before. Her daughter may have been scared, but this woman was clearly terrified.

…………“Is Mr. Bennett available?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

…………I nodded to the door leading back into the shop.

…………“This way, honey,” the woman said gently.

…………The girl, however, had planted herself and would not move, despite her mother‘s soft pushing. Her eyes were wide and fixed on the closed door of the shop. “Daddy’s not gonna be in there, is he?” she asked, her voice wavering.

…………“Oh, no,” cooed the woman. “It’s just Mr. Bennett. He’s a very nice man.”

…………The girl hesitated a second or two longer, then started to move. Just before they disappeared into the shop the woman turned and gave me a limp smile. I thought that was weird of her to do.

…………She came out alone about fifteen minutes later, crying a little and fighting it. “Mr. Bennett said it would be about an hour.” It sounded like she was talking to no one, or like maybe she was talking to herself.

…………She glanced around, perhaps for a chair. “I’m going to step outside.”

…………And she was gone.

…………It had been slow all day and there was still almost an hour before closing. I had been gaming off and on all shift, but now I felt like doing nothing. I just stood there behind the counter. A heavy, gray boredom settled over me and I was aware of how quiet everything was. Even the street noise seemed muted and muffled and distant.

…………Then I heard a scream. It was short, piercing, and ended so suddenly I wondered if I had heard it at all. It was over the second I became aware of it. Like a presence or a memory, however, it lingered around me and I knew it had been real.

…………It had come from the back. Not very often do I go in the back and never very far, but this time I went all the way in, all the way to the far corner where I knew Old Man Bennett did his most important work under his brightest light.

…………The girl lay dead on the table, her skin porcelain white like a really clean toilet. It seemed almost to shine with whiteness. On the floor was a wet/dry vac, one of those shaped like a barrel. It’s top had been removed and I could see the girl’s guts inside. They filled it about halfway. There are nicer words, like offal or innards or tripe, but what I was looking at was GUTS. There was blood everywhere, on the table, on the floor, all over Old Man Bennett’s hands.

…………I leaned forward a little and looked closely into the ghastly barrel. Peaking out from inside a loop of intestine was the flat black fish eye of the fetus. It seemed much too large and was dusted over with death.

…………“Mr. Bennett?” I said, pretending to be polite.

…………He sat there on a little stool next to the table, shaking his head and mumbling. “….Too much….too much….”

…………“Sir?”

…………“My calibrations were off.” His voice was trembling. “It was simply too much suction.” I could see spit in the corner of his lip and knew he was about to start drooling.

…………“Sir,” I said again. “I think I’ll log out a little early, if that’s alright with you.” A tear ran down his cheek and mingled with the spit in the corner of his mouth.

…………I turned and left.

…………Back in the retail area, I flipped over the Open sign and Bennett’s Vacuum Repair & Service was now Closed for business. I emptied out the till, stuffing my pockets full, and went to the door. I grabbed the door knob and hesitated for a second, my head down, the cold brass filling my palm.

…………I took a deep breath, pulled my head up, and went out into the coming night.

The End

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