Her breath tickled his ear as she whispered, though he couldn't feel it, seeing as how the simple flap of cartilage and flesh had been ripped off his head in the fight moments before.

“We should probably get you to the hospital,” the woman muttered as she inspected the ear like a collector with a rare coin.

Still dazed, he half-consciously responded, “Yeah.”

It hadn't been much of a fight, but the ear-grabbing tactic had caught the man by surprise, certainly from a guy as strong as his fallen opponent. He kicked the corpse at his feet, and it slid a few inches on its side. Oh, well. The ear could be reattached easily. He'd had his arm cut off once by a chainsaw, and even with the extensive tissue and bone damage the docs had done a fine job of putting him back together. He mumbled his usual post-fight sentiment. It was a quote from his father, who had been a fighter of nearly equal prowess a generation before. “Jesus never won a fight, so I got that on the Son of God.”

She never liked the sacrilegious statement, being in her own way a God-fearing mortal, but after dozens of fights, she discovered that it was some sort of release from his regrets and guilt. Let him say what he would, if it got him out of bed in the morning.

One of the neighborhood kids popped out from behind a bench, where he had obviously been watching the fight. The man paid no heed to the kid. Usually, a couple of the little bastards would show up to loot the loser, dead or unconscious, of anything valuable on their person. While he would never support the practice, most of the kids who did it had no chance for a life on the straight and narrow, and after just killing the man that the street children would loot, he felt uniquely unqualified to offer a sermon on respect for the dead. The hypothetical homily nonetheless took shape in his mind.

The kid didn't walk to the body, but instead walked towards the woman clutching the ear. In the same reverent manner as she had inspected it, the boy twisted his head awkwardly, as if by doing so the organ would suddenly make sense outside the context of a head. All three observing the ear shared a similar thought in that moment: alone in a stranger's palm, an ear is a very sad thing.

The woman thought of a can opener in the cereal aisle of a grocery store. Sure, canned goods are only two aisles over, but for a can opener alone that's an insurmountable distance. And what the hell is the point of a can opener if the only things around are boxes? The can opener is left wondering if the poor box cutter is equally as stranded in the dairy section, and so on around the store miserable little implements go on leading miserable little existences, disjointed from normality by what, from a human perspective, is an inconsequential distance.

The two adults were lost in similarly meandering streams of thought, and when they finally retrieved themselves from places deep within the wrinkles of their brains, the boy had snatched up the ear and disappeared with it.

“Damn, that little beggar's pretty screwed up,” she said.

“You got that right. I guess we should try to find him,” he consented. He really wanted his ear back.

-----

They walked casually down the sidewalk, its surface gray like the clouds above. A fine mist hung a few inches above the ground. The afternoon shower was going through a karmic cycle only to return again as rain the next day, never able to attain a greater existence, victim of a cruel joke played by the gods. The mist obscured the porous texture of the concrete, which seemed to billow up like the overcast sky hung down. It gave the impression of being upside down, walking on the sky, which would be surprisingly firm if indeed the sidewalk were the sky and made of air.

Looking at the strangely empty side of his head, the woman was pleased to see that the bleeding had stopped. She had been worried, for it was the worst wound he'd received since they'd been together, but from what she had gathered about his past, a missing ear was far from concerning to him.

At the intersection, he took the lead and sauntered up to Pablo's Adult Newsstand on the corner of Rembrandt St. (named for the toothpaste, not the painter) and Flotsam Blvd. (named for debris of indeterminate origin).

“Somebody took my ear,” he said to the clerk.

“One of the local kids?” inquired the elderly porn peddler.

“Yeah, a pretty freaky little bastard,” the woman replied.

The old man set down his smut, glanced back and forth down Flotsam, and muttered something to himself in a language that could have been Japanese or senile babbling. Scratching his head a few times, the old man again picked up the magazine and resumed reading it, like the two visitors had never been there. The woman decided the language was definitely that of senility, a gibberish understood only by its speaker. In truth, it was the only perfect language, with cognition, even on the speaker's part, taking a back seat to the act of talking itself. Pure, uninhibited expression made the insane the finest of poets, and if it weren't for the serious business at hand she would have been content to sit and listen to a few more stanzas.

Instead, she said, “Hey, old man. About the ear.”

He didn't look up from his magazine, and giving him the benefit of the doubt, the couple assumed he was reading the articles. The old man wasn't wearing his glasses, and so, unknown to the observers, he was neither reading nor ogling, but instead found pleasure in the blurry shapes that danced across the page before him. A cigarette ad is as good as a naked woman, when both are rendered so indistinct.

Finally, the old guy inclined his head and cleared his throat. “Yeah, the kid with the ear. I guess it was an ear. He took off by here in quite a rush, like he was running from something. That was a few minutes ago. When nobody followed, I figured he was just running like kids are wont to do, so I didn't call the police or nothin'. So he had an ear? I carried around an ear for a while, kept it as a good luck charm. A rabbit's ear.”

“Don't you mean a rabbit's foot?” asked the man.

“Oh, yeah. I guess that's right. But really, what's the difference once you cut it off the goddamn rabbit? If we define the ear by its function, then it isn't an ear any more by the time it's in my pocket, and certainly that rabbit's foot wasn't going to run anywhere, so we can lump the two of them, plus whatever other rabbit parts you might happen to be carrying around, into the bulk category of rabbit stuff. Like that, an ear is a foot is a pancreas.”

The younger man said, “I once lost my arm, too.”

The old man smiled broadly, and the wrinkles by his eyes deepened dramatically. “Then you just lost the same thing again. Just another hunk of person stuff. I wouldn't get too riled up about it if I were you. The kid is long gone with your ear, and they can make you a new one at the hospital in just a couple days. I see you got your arm back, just be glad that you've got a fifty percent retrieval rate for lost body parts. Probably most people have never lost anything, or don't ever get back what they lose. You're unique. Get to the hospital so they can patch you up until a new ear is ready.”

The man smiled at the elderly man, and resigned himself to a fate with a replacement ear. He walked unhurriedly down the cloudy sidewalk to the emergency room. She followed right behind him, wondering why he looked so happy, such a demeanor seldom displayed.

-----

In a testament to bureaucratic bullshit, the first thing the nurse asked, “What brings you to the Emergency Room today?”

Stifling the rage, though he felt justified in the emotion considering his problem should have been obvious to even the most casual observer, he answered calmly, “Lost my ear. Can't get it back, so I guess I need a new one.”

Looking up from her clipboard, the nurse seemed for the first time to actually look at him, and he suddenly wondered if perhaps she had truly been so unobservant as not to notice the obvious deformity of his head or the blood that had dried in lines on the side of his neck.

The woman also looked at the nurse. At least she looked in the direction of the nurse. In fact, she was thinking about the clipboard and clipboards in general, and how close they must have come to rendering obsolete the desk. Not that desks would have disappeared. Certainly, as a storage device and a wide flat shelf for items like computers the desk retained utilitarian appeal, but if clipboards had become more prevalent, wouldn't it have diminished the desk's role as a writing surface? In her head, lines of clipboards marched rank and file across a muddy and battered plain to the ultimate battle with that most ancient foe: desk. In the rear of the opposing lines, antique roll-tops barked out orders to the particleboard, home-assembled grunts of the desk infantry. Smaller and less experienced, the little clipboards strode brazenly forward, corner in front of corner, as such is the way that a flat thing would walk. Paperclips and pens whistled through the air, breaking the brief silence of a pause before battle. The desks fought valiantly, with greater size and supplies, but the small clipboards wouldn't stop coming, and they made up for their lack of weaponry by firing the desks' own projectiles back at them, but more quickly and deadly with the added force of the spring-loaded clips that doubled as the boards' heads. Splintered wood covered the battlefield, and the triumphant clipboards looked sadly around, only in victory realizing that the desks were long lost forefathers, now lost forever. As the camera of her mind panned across the scene, she noted with a chill how the ink from burst black pens looked strikingly like blood. She snapped back to reality when the nurse spoke.

“I'll be right back.”

“Have you ever though about clipboards?” asked the woman after the nurse had left.

“Not really, right now I'm thinking about how I'll miss my ear.” He really wanted his original ear back, despite the old porn peddler's encouragement. Even though it wasn't attached, and in the grand scheme he had no claim to the matter that made up any part of his body except insomuch as it allowed him to live, but common courtesy dictated that a man's ear was his own.

The nurse reopened the door, and held it open, gesturing for a person in the hallway to walk inside.

It was the boy who had taken the ear, but his hands were now empty. He looked down at the floor, like he had just been reprimanded. Perhaps the nurse or a doctor had chewed him out, set him straight. Son, it just isn't right to take a man's ear, even if it ain't on his head anymore. A man needs his ear.

Smiling broadly, the nurse pulled the reluctant child into the room, and whispered for him to look up. As he did, the boy didn't look dejected at all, just a little nervous. He was almost smiling.

“The boy brought in your ear fifteen minutes ago, and not a moment too soon. He saw a fly land on it, he said, and sure enough, we found bacteria spreading rapidly in the flesh of the ear. As you know, any bacteria in too great a quantity makes reattachment of a severed body part impossible. Even five minutes later and we would've been unable to salvage the organ.”

The man looked at the kid and smiled, who blushed and looked back down at the floor.

The nurse continued, “We told him, of course, that he shouldn't have just taken your ear. He should have explained and brought you along, but because of him we were able to contain and eradicate the bacteria, so we'll be able to reaffix your ear in just a few minutes. Here's some paperwork for you to fill out. There's not too much, though, since you've been here before.”

The man said, “Thanks.”

Moving to exit the room, the nurse took the boy by the hand to lead him out, but the man asked if the kid could stay.

“Sure,” said the nurse.

As the door shut, sealing off the three of them from the aura of illness and injury that permeates so thoroughly the halls of every hospital, the woman said, “Thanks, kid.”

The man snapped his fingers, one beat for every second that ticked off the wall clock before him, using the fingers on the hand of the arm that had long ago been cut off by a chainsaw.

“I'd always liked my old ear,” said the man to the boy, “thanks for helping out.”

The boy nodded, looked up and smiled, trying not to stare at where the ear should have been, would again be in a few minutes. Being a child, he couldn't put out of his head the idea of a man made of building blocks, taken apart and put back together again. Only slowly did the boy remember the person the man had killed. He'd seen death before, but that didn't make the scene any less vivid.

“What do you do?” asked the boy; the first and only time the couple would hear him speak.

“I'm a cop,” replied the man.

-----

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