The knife’s edge was dull and M struggled to cut the cock’s neck. The cock jumped away several times until M finally had him down. This time, he snapped the neck before pressing the dull knife harder. His fingers were still black with the blood when his phone rang.
Someone had told M to make a sacrifice, to spill blood to stop the death. The house was stuffy. The cock’s feathers floated in the air. The room smelled of sweat, cough syrup, and old rags. M’s coughs interrupted his sobbing.
Two days earlier, M and his wife had both come down with a fever. Their doctor hadn’t responded to their calls. When they got to the clinic, they found it closed. We will be closed until further notice, a note on the door read.
They took a cab to the nearest hospital. The line circled around the building, growing longer behind them as they waited. They waited under the hot sun for two hours without moving ahead. When his wife fainted, M screamed for help, but nobody paid any attention to him. M left his wife to buy a juice and a bottle of water from a corner store. When he returned, he splashed his wife’s face with cold water and gave her some juice.
“I can’t wait here any longer,” his wife said. “Let’s go home. I’d rather die there.”
“You’re not going to die,” M said, “it’s just a fever.”
After two hours, the paramedics still hadn’t shown up. His wife’s face looked gaunt. She had closed her eyes, sitting on the sidewalk, stretching her legs and leaning her head on the wall. Once in a while, she opened her eyes and looked around as if she didn’t know where she was. M kept touching her forehead to check her temperature.
After a while, a man in a dark suit stepped out of a yellow van and approached them. He wasn’t from the hospital.
“Do you have a minute to chat? Can we walk around the block?” The man had a protruding forehead, a carrot-colored moustache, and thick glasses.
M said, “I have to stay with her.”
“It’s about her,” the man replied.
“I can take you to a safe house,” the man said. “We’ve got the best doctors there.” He wrote a figure on a paper as the minimum to enter the safe house. His handwriting was ugly. “You don’t want to go into this hospital even if you can,” the man said. “The hallways are crammed with sick people. There are not enough nurses to clean up. It’s a mess.”
M was not sure if the man was trying to scam him. He had heard that some doctors took in patients in places other than hospitals for higher profit.
M had some savings in the bank, but it wasn’t enough to cover what the man was asking for. M called his brother, who said he could help. They got in the man’s van, and the man drove them to the bank and to M’s brother’s on the other side of the city.
M’s wife put her head on his lap. Once in a while, she would murmur her mother’s name, then become silent. Her dress was drenched with sweat. M looked at the cars moving slowly in the heavy traffic. People walking on the sidewalks, going on with their day. He was running his fingers through his wife’s hair when he noticed the stench of ammonia.
“I need to change,” M’s wife said. She’d become aware of her surroundings. “Let’s go home,” she said with a moan.
“Don’t you worry. We’re going to the hospital. They’ll take good care of you. I can bring you another dress.”
“We were just at the hospital.”
“We’ll get the money and go to a better one.”
The man rolled down the window. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I am not going to charge you for it.”
When they got there, M’s brother was waiting at the door with an envelope in his hand. “I came a little short,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it’s pretty close to what I said.”
M counted all the money, then walked back to the van to talk to the man.
“Can we admit her with this?” he asked, handing the man all the cash through the window. “I’ll get the rest ready by tonight or tomorrow.”
“I wish it was my call, but they told me to not accept anything less.”
Back in the van, M’s wife was no longer moving. M put his hand on her chest and felt her heart beating. Her skin was burning. After his wife’s sister didn’t pick up her phone, M called two other friends, but they either made excuses or didn’t have the money. M asked the man to drive to his wife’s sister’s. They hadn’t spoken to her for more than a year.
The safe house was an old dilapidated factory. When they got there, his wife was unconscious. M and the man wrapped her in a sheet like a dead body and carried her inside. There were several spaced-out beds, two doctors, and multiple other patients attached to IVs. A part of the space was cleaned up and renovated, but the rest was still covered with dirt and debris. Scavenged rusted metals. Wires hanging from the ceiling. Exposed brick walls. They had M sign a document that removed any responsibility from them. He had to sign that he wouldn’t ever disclose being there.
They provided a menu of possible medications along with their prices. This, they said, M could pay for by tomorrow. M didn’t know what any of the medications were, or if they would help her, and had to choose based on how much he could get from quickly liquidating their valuables.
After they gave M’s wife a bed and fed her medicine, the man in the van left. M didn’t know where he was or how he could make his way home.
At home, he stared at his fingers when they called him to tell him his wife was dead. After the call, he soaked another rag in water and placed it on his head. His mother used to do this when he got sick as a kid. She used to add salt to the water. She had such delicate hands. Then, he remembered his wife’s hands. They hadn’t known each other for long when they had gone on their honeymoon. When they’d left the city for the lake town, there had been an uprising in the city and the government had opened fire on the demonstrators.
His wife had spent the whole week in the hotel room listening to the news and watching the video of a girl who was shot in the neck on the news channel. He saw the video of the girl once himself. The blood spilled out of her neck, and there was a point at which she wasn’t able to breathe, when blood started coming out of her mouth too. He once pulled his wife’s hand and placed it between his legs, hoping that it would distract her from the protests. But she jerked her hand away and looked at him, her face showing something like disgust.
He walked on the beach feeling lonelier than before, looking at the other young couples, wondering how long their own marriage would last. Swimming alone in the lake, he found himself sobbing.
But on their last day, his wife woke him up early in the morning and asked him to go to the beach with her. They strolled along the beach as the sun rose. There was no sign of the tourist couples he had seen before. Two wild stallions drank water from the lake. His wife took his hand and kissed it.
The cock’s eye stared up at him from the floor. The white curtains let in a pink light. He rubbed his fingers on a dirty rag and closed his eyes. Then, he started coughing. 
Babak Lakghomi is the author of South (2023) and Floating Notes (2018). His writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Electric Literature, Fence, Ninth Letter, and New York Tyrant, among other places.
Illustration: Rachel Merrill.
