Black Markets
August Roulaux
In New York, in a very large hospital that shall remain nameless, there was a doctor who practiced. He practiced abortions. Or so he claimed. But this is all part of the story and therefore not to be given away so quickly. His name--Dr. Abe Skond. He was a tall man, very thin, with brown hair, and a Verdi goatee, sharp at the bottom like a missile. Sometimes, when irritated, he would twitch, though with just the left side of his pock-marked face. Nothing else would twitch.
Abortions, he had them going since before the big Roe, as he called it. When asked, usually by some sidewalk counselor who had worked up the nerve to confront him after a hard day’s work at the office, why it was that he chose this profession--and they very well could have asked him (if they were privy to his entire medical history qua Doctor) why he had begun in this line of work even before it was legal, and for a good long time too, when you could have gotten thrown in jail for a such a thing--he would usually say that he respected the belief that fetuses were human beings and he did not entirely disagree. He knew that position usually sprang from religious belief, not--he said--because you have to believe in God to believe that abortion is murder, but---he would say--because you would have to believe in God to care that if abortion is murder something should be done about it. As to his own beliefs in God, he would scarcely say one way or the other.
He liked to wear polka-dot bow ties, and this upset many of the patients. But it was not to be feared; his training had more than equipped him for such situations. For, although they probably did not know it going in, the clients of Dr. Abe Skond’s Child Relief Service Association were in the deft hands of one of the Northeast’s most elite puppeteers. The younger girls, who weren’t as stable--obviously--as the older ones (who often had their boyfriends with them; the boyfriends, it should be said, loved the puppeteering, especially Robert the Red Rhinoceros, even more than most of the little girls who came in), were often eased by the velvet stylings of our hero--who was, perhaps, really more within the high traditional mode of an anti-hero.
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August Roulaux is a writer living in northern Virginia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot and Essays & Fictions.
