To the Bone by Neil McMahon

had loved Martine immediately. Now Monks was the one who felt their cold stares, particularly after he had been gone working for a night. He remembered that the first emotion he had felt about her was an urge to protect. Maybe it was the same with the cats.
    Three or four drinks would be okay, he decided. But not five or six.
    By the time the steaks were done, the knots in his brain were dissolving. He went into the kitchen to fill his glass one last time. Martine was putting together linguine with Parmesan and garlic.
    â€œTell me the truth,” Monks said. “Are you getting bored with me?”
    She looked surprised. “Don’t be silly.” Then she glanced at his glass. “How many of those have you had?”
    This irritated Monks. “I’m doing fine,” he said, careful to enunciate the words precisely.
    â€œOn an empty stomach, with no sleep?”
    â€œIf you want to play nurse, why don’t you put on a uniform?”
    She turned away stiffly. He had meant it as a joke, or at least he thought he had. He had been told that sometimes there was an edge to his voice that he himself did not hear. The edge tended to sharpen, and his hearing to dim, with alcohol.
    â€œWhat makes you think I’m getting bored?” she said.
    â€œThe way you’ve been talking about getting back into practice.”
    â€œWhat’s the matter with that? I spend half my life becoming a doctor, and I’m not supposed to practice?”
    â€œOf course you are,” he said. “I’m just wondering, you know, where. When. All that.”
    She turned to face him full on, holding a long wooden spoon like a fencing sword. “Why’s this coming up now?”
    â€œWell, it has to sooner or later. Don’t you think I deserve to know?”
    â€œKnow what ? I haven’t decided anything yet.”
    â€œKnow what you haven’t decided, then.”
    â€œYou’re a little drunk, Carroll. This isn’t funny.”
    â€œâ€˜Drunk’ is a relative term, Martine. Strictly speaking, you have never seen me drunk. Drunk is a fifth or two of liquor in a day, and that’s really only the beginning of drunk, because it can be sustained indefinitely.”
    â€œDo you turn into a different person?”
    In his brain flared a dizzy, fragmented memory of a night when he had looped a black silk scarf around the slender neck of Alison Chapley—a sexual game, one that she had initiated—and barely caught himself before she had stopped breathing for good.
    â€œIn vino, veritas,” he said.
    â€œMy lowbrow education didn’t include Latin.”
    â€œâ€˜There is truth in wine.’ Are you moving out?”
    There was a longish hesitation before she answered. “I never really moved in.”
    Monks nodded. “It’s been seeming more and more like that.”
    He walked back outside and leaned his forearms on the deck railing. The creek at the bottom of his sloping property was silent now, the last sluggish rivulets from the winter rains dried into a few scattered pools. They would be gone, too, soon. Evening came early up here in the woods, and jays flitted through the thick madrone foliage on their last errands, big birds that crashed around like vandals, flashes of iridescent blue that appeared with jarring swiftness at the corners of your vision and left again by the time you turned your head. They usually woke him at first light, seeming to take malicious pleasure in perching outside his window and screeching until he hauled himself to his feet.
    Martine Rostanov had been with him for more than a year—since the two of them had nearly been killed together. She had uncovered the fact that a giant software corporation, getting into the business of genetic manipulation, was using fetuses that were deliberately aborted for the purpose. Monks had gotten caught up with her in exposing this. When it was over, on a foggy March dawn, they