And the Earl of Slander says, “Roll her over, if that makes it easier. So you can't see her face.”

So we roll her over, and Chef Assassin kneels on the carpet and digs the layers of skirts and petticoats, muslin and crinoline, up around her waist to show yellow cotton panties sagged across her flat, pale ass. He says, “You sure she's dead?”

Miss America leans down and slips two fingers against the side of Comrade Snarky's webbed neck, inside the high lace collar, pressing the blue-white skin. Chef Assassin watches this, kneeling there, holding his boning knife, one finger-long blade of steel. His free hand holds back the drift of white and gray lace, yellow muslin, the pile of petticoats and skirts. He looks at the blade and says, “Think we should sterilize this?”

“You're not taking out her appendix,” Miss America says, her two fingers still tight against the side of the blue-white neck. “If you're worried,” she says, “we can just cook the meat longer . . .”

In a way, the Donner Party was lucky, says the Earl of Slander, still scribbling in his notepad. So was the plane full of South American rugby players who crash-landed in the Andes in 1972. They were luckier than us. They had the cold weather on their side. Refrigeration. When somebody died, they had time to debate the finer points of acceptable human behavior. You just buried anybody dead in the snow until everyone was so hungry it didn't matter.

Here, even in the basement, even in the subbasement with Lady Baglady's and Mr. Whittier's and the Duke of Vandals' velvet-wrapped bodies, it's not freezing cold. If we don't eat now, before the bacteria inside Comrade Snarky begin their own chow-down, she'll be wasted. Swollen and putrefied. Poisoned so much no amount of turning around and around in the microwave oven will ever make her into food again.

No, unless we do this—butcher her, here and now, on these gold-and-flower carpets beside the tapestry sofas and crystal light-sconces of the second-balcony lobby, it will be one of us here, dead, tomorrow. Or the next day. Chef Assassin with his boning knife will be cutting our underwear up the back to show our withered-flat, blue-white butt and little-stick thighs. The back of each knee turned gray.

One of us, just meat about to go bad.

On one flat ass cheek, the panty fabric peels back to show a tattoo, a rose in full bloom. Just like she said.

Those rugby players lost in the Andes, it's from reading their book that Chef Assassin knows to carve up the buttocks first.

Miss America pulls her two fingers back from the cold neck, and she stands up. She blows on the fingers, warm breath, then rubs her hands together fast and stuffs them in the folds of her skirt. “Snarky's dead,” she says.

Behind her, Baroness Frostbite turns toward the stairs that lead down to the lobby. Her skirts rustling and dragging, her voice trailing away, she says, “I'll get a plate or a dish you can use.” She says, “How you present food is so important,” and she's gone.

“Here,” Chef Assassin says, “somebody hold this shit back off me.” And he elbows the pile of skirts and stiff fabric that wants to fall where he has to work.

The Earl of Slander steps over the body, straddling it at the waist, looking at its feet. The legs disappear inside white socks rolled to halfway up each stringy calf bone wiggling with veins, the feet in red high heels. The Earl of Slander gathers the skirts in both arms and crouches down, holding them back. With a sigh, he sits down, his butt settling on Comrade Snarky's dead shoulder blades, his knees pointed up at the ceiling, his arms lost in the drift of her skirts and lace. The little-mesh microphone sticking out of his shirt pocket. The little RECORD light, glowing red.

And with one hand, the fingers spread, Chef Assassin holds the skin on one buttock tight. And with his other hand, he drags the knife down. As if he's drawing a straight line down Comrade Snarky's blue-white ass, a line that gets thicker and bolder the longer he draws it. Pulling the knife parallel with the crack of her ass. The line looks black against the blue-white skin, red-black until it drips, red, onto the skirts under her. Red on the blade of the boning knife. The red, steaming. Chef Assassin's hands red and steaming, he says, “Is a dead person supposed to bleed this much?”

Nobody says anything.

One, two, three, four, somewhere else, Saint Gut-Free whispers, “Help us!”

Chef Assassin's elbow is bobbing up and down as he saws, sawing the little blade in and out of the red mess. His original straight line lost in the red stew. The steam rising with the blood smell of Tampax, that women's-bathroom smell in the cold air. His sawing stops, and one hand lifts a scrap of something red. His eyes don't follow it. His eyes stay on the mess, red in the center of this snowdrift of petticoats. This big steaming flower, here on the carpet of the second-balcony foyer. Chef Assassin shakes the red scrap in his raised hand. What he can't look at, dripping and running with dark red. And he says, “Take it. Somebody . . .”

Nobody's hand reaches out.

Her rose tattoo, there, in the center of the scrap.

And, still not looking at it, Chef Assassin shouts, “Take it!”

A rustle of fairy-tale satin and brocade skirts, and Baroness Frostbite is back among us. She says, “Oh my God . . .”

A paper plate hovers under the dripping red scrap, and Chef Assassin drops it. On the plate, it's meat. A thin steak. The way a cutlet looks. Or those long scraps of meat labeled “strip steaks” in the butcher's case.

Chef Assassin's elbow is bobbing again, sawing. His other hand lifts scrap after dripping scrap out of the steaming red center of that huge white flower. The paper plate is piled high and starting to fold in half from the weight. Red juice spilling off one edge. The Baroness goes to get another plate. Chef Assassin fills that, too.

The Earl of Slander, still sitting on the back of the body, he shifts his weight, pulling his face away from the steaming mess. Not the nothing smell of cold, clean meat from the supermarket. This is the smell of animals half run-over and smearing a path of shit and blood as they drag their shattered back legs off a hot summer highway. Here's the messy smell of a baby the moment after it's born.

Then the body, Comrade Snarky, lets out a little moan.

It's the soft groan of someone dreaming in her sleep.

And Chef Assassin falls backward, both hands dripping. The knife left behind, jutting straight up from the flower's red center—until the dropped skirts flutter, lower, sift down to hide the mess. The Baroness drops the first paper plate, burdened with meat. The flower closing. The Earl of Slander springs to his feet, and he's off her. We, we're all standing back. Staring. Listening.

Something needs to happen.

Something needs to happen.

Then, one, two, three, four, somewhere else, Saint Gut-Free whispers, “Help us!”

The soft, regular foghorn of his voice.

From somewhere else, you hear Director Denial calling, “Here . . . kitty, kitty, kitty . . .” Her words stretched long and then broken by sobs, she says, “Come . . . to Mama . . . my baby . . .”

His hands webbed with gummy red, Chef Assassin flexes his fingers, not touching anything, just staring at the body, he says, “You told me . . .”

And Miss America crouching forward, her leather boots creak. She slides two fingers into the lace collar and presses the side of the blue-white neck. She says, “Snarky's dead.” She nods at the Earl of Slander and says, “You must've forced some air out of her lungs.” She nods at the meat spilled off the plate, now breaded with dust and lint on the foyer carpet, and Miss America says, “Pick that up . . .”

The Earl of Slander rewinds his tape, and Comrade Snarky's voice moans and moans the same moan. Our parrot. Comrade Snarky's death taped over the Duke of Vandals' taped over Mr. Whittier's taped over Lady Baglady's death.