When he got up the next morning, the paper cut wasn’t any better. He was able to get a good look at it in the daylight. It extended across the fleshy bulb of the fingertip.

The edges of the cut were already starting to withdraw and whiten into dead skin instead of pulling together to close up the slice, like it wasn’t even going to try to heal.

At work in the Photo-Electronics department that day, he had trouble making change at the register. The sore fingertip kept catching on the edges of the bills from the cash drawer. He fumbled out the change to customers, straining to separate and count out the money. Each time he raked the edge of a bill, the paper cut flared anew.

His department boss, Grimes, confronted Morris after lunch, before he even got his Freddie smock put back on.

“I saw you having trouble handling the money. Your drawer better not come up short today,” Grimes said. His cottage cheese face below a greasy blonde comb-over was accusing.

Morris looked down at Grimes, who was always riding his ass over something. Grimes resented him because he was taller, younger, and had a full head of brown hair in a rubber band ponytail. Morris knew that Grimes was constantly looking for some cause to can him and replace him with some overeager young female clerk.

Morris shrugged. “I’ve got a sore finger today. I might have miscounted some bills and handed out too much change. You can dock my check for it.”

“You bet I will. I’m not having your drawer overdraw come out of my department totals. I’m tired of your screw-ups, Denny. Coming in late, sloppy customer service, now this. You’re on notice from now on. Plenty of other people would like to have your job. Remember that.”

Morris didn’t argue the point. It was a tedious grind of a job on his feet all day, but it was all he had. At thirty-two, with his spotty work record, where else was he going to go?

He could feel Grimes staring holes in his back while he worked his shift. He was careful to count out the bills using his left hand instead, even though it was slow and clumsy that way. But he didn’t think he made any more mistakes that day.

The lack of contact didn’t help the paper cut any. The edges of the cut had hardened and curled backward into a grimy black color. Inside the edges, a flame of redness had appeared. Morris hoped the damned thing wasn’t getting infected.

He bought an extra-strength antibiotic ointment that was supposed to kill germs in the wound. When he put some on his finger at home that night, the cut immediately started to burn and throb violently, like the ointment was fighting with something way down deep inside the flesh.

Morris didn’t feel well when he woke up the next morning. His stomach was nauseous and he had a dull headache across his eyebrows. In the bathroom mirror, his face was pale and blotchy.

He wanted to call in sick and spend the day in bed, but he couldn’t, not with his job hanging by a fingernail. When he drove shakily to the store in traffic, it was already baking again by eight-thirty. Morris squinted his eyes to see against the hazy white glare on the street. He squeezed his sweaty hands tighter on the steering wheel and the paper cut suddenly split open wider. He winced and jerked his right hand off the wheel to look at the cut. He didn’t see the green Taurus brake in front of him and he ran right into the back of it.

He pulled over and got out with the other driver to survey the damage. The collision hardly fazed the scuffed metal bumper of the old Plymouth Fury Morris drove, but it dented the rear of the Taurus. The old goat that he hit kept staring at his damp, pasty face like he thought Morris was on drugs.

With the cut screaming on his finger, Morris could hardly hold the pen to write out his license info.

Morris started work at nine and struggled all day behind his register in a sick fog. His face felt hot and he had a thin paint of perspiration on his forehead even with the store air conditioning. He thought maybe he had a low grade fever, like when he got the flu, except this time he didn’t think it was a flu bug that he had.

He began to worry that it was the paper cut that was making him sick.

By then, the cut had split farther into an ugly little crescent and the skin around it was a hard black crust on the swollen fingertip. For the first time, the cut had begun to weep a grayish fluid. The slightest contact with anything caused a sharp spike of pain shooting right up his arm. Morris was sure now that the cut was infected and it was putting out poison into his whole system. How far could the infection spread? Gory images swam through his feverish mind of gangrene rot and sawed off black limbs.

If he wasn’t better by tomorrow, he had to get in to see a doctor for sure. That meant another bill he didn’t need and couldn’t pay. But he might not have a choice anyway. Not if that damned paper cut kept rotting on his finger.

Morris had to suffer through an early work shift that day until he got off at six. When he got back to his neighborhood, he managed to find a parking space on the street for his clunker only two blocks from his apartment building for once.

But as he shuffled toward Irving Street, the evening air had a thick, smoky smell and he sensed immediately that something was wrong. When he came around the corner of his block, the street was clogged with fire engines and snaking white hoses in front of his building. Sooty smoke billowed out of the back corner of the brick structure, right where Morris had his studio apartment on the fourth floor.

He joined the milling crowd on the sidewalk across the street from the fire. The paramedics rolled a stretcher with someone on it out of the lobby entrance. The prone figure was a bony old woman in a flowered terrycloth robe. Morris had seen her before tottering around behind her wheeled walker. He didn’t know her name.

The stretcher came closer and he saw the clear plastic oxygen mask fastened over her wrinkled white face. She looked unconscious and Morris couldn’t tell if her frail chest was even breathing any more or not. What he could see all too clearly was the sucked-in prune of her mouth inside the oxygen mask. The soot-caked lips were formed into a dark crescent gap that was an eerie replica of the crusted black paper cut Morris had on his own finger.

After the fire was knocked down, the building was taped off for inspection. Morris already knew that all the stuff he had in his place was probably a total loss. The Red Cross was signing up displaced tenants to stay in a temporary shelter. He got his name on the list.

Somebody in the crowd said the fire started upstairs in the back of the building right where Morris lived. The Fire Marshall was investigating the point of origin. Morris swallowed dryly when he heard that. He tried to recall whether he had turned off his stove burner after making a cup of tea for breakfast. He remembered ironing his wrinkled pants before heading to work, but had he unplugged the iron for sure?

He was so sick and out of it all day that he couldn’t swear a hundred percent about anything that he did. In the crowd, he saw the heavyset woman who was the apartment manager glare accusingly toward him. What if it turned out that Morris was to blame for starting the fire? What if that old woman on the stretcher choked to death on the smoke because of him?

His finger hung at his side, pulsing with vicious pain. For the first time, Morris wasn’t just worried about the infected paper cut not healing. He began to be truly afraid of the thing.

Morris wanted to get away from the fire scene. He drifted unsteadily toward the retail area up on Twenty-Third Street to look for a place where he could buy a new toothbrush and a comb.

The leaves in the black elm trees over his head rustled limply in the dry evening air. His stomach felt queasy as he moved and he hoped he wasn’t going to have to heave in the gutter. Morris tried to put some thoughts together, but it was hard with the buzzing pressure of the constant headache. He needed to get well, but he didn’t think he was going to with the paper cut still on his hand.

In one way or another, the vicious little cut had played a part in every destructive thing that had happened to Morris in the last two days. Whatever normal, shoddy life he lived, it had suddenly begun to come apart on him.

The cut pulsed and flared like a small black sack of poison on the end of his finger as he walked. Every time the cut brushed against his pants leg, it sent out tendrils of fiery pain. In the feverish confusion of his mind, Morris formed a picture of the paper cut spreading an invasion of virulent poison into his body tissue. He could almost feel the putrid junk seeping through him.

A car horn blasted suddenly right next to Morris and tire rubber shrieked on pavement. He flinched backward to find himself in the middle of Twenty-Third Street with the bumper of a Camaro stopped only inches from his leg. The driver continued to lay on the horn. Morris stumbled out of the street to the curb.

“Wake up, Freak!” somebody in the Camaro shouted at him as the car drove off.

His steps were still shaky as he moved onto the sidewalk. Sweat trickled down into his eyes, blurring his vision. Pedestrians shied away from him as he passed. As he shuffled by the shop doors along the street, Morris couldn’t even remember what he had come up there to do. He passed by the front entrance of a Laundromat. Inside the smeary plate glass, he saw something that made him stop abruptly and stare.

A sloppy looking guy in a baggy green T-shirt with a canvas bag on a shoulder strap was dropping off something on the Laundromat’s magazine table. It was a pile of the E-Z Loan junk mail cards exactly like the one Morris got in his mailbox. The one that gave him the festering paper cut.

Morris vaguely recalled seeing those green T-shirt people around before. They belonged to some loony Doomer cult that was always ranting against the human species as a genetic dead-end. Poisoned Planet Now, or some head-case name like that. Morris had never paid any attention to the freaks before. Maybe he should have.

The delivery guy was wearing leather gloves even in the heat, and Morris knew why. A rush of anger made him ball his fists and want to confront the guy to find out why he was distributing the malicious junk cards. He stepped inside the Laundromat, steamy with the heat of running dryer machines.

But something made him stop short when the dumpy nerd turned around and Morris got a good look at his face. Above cheeks pitted with old acne scars, his eye sockets had the sunken, hollow shine of fanatic purpose. His movements were precise and automatic, like he was on a brilliant mission that no one else could see. When he brushed past Morris and headed out the door to continue his route, it was as if Morris wasn’t even standing there.

The pile of flyers was sitting on the corner of the scratched Formica tabletop. Sitting there patiently, just waiting for someone to come along and pick up one curiously and get the same vicious paper cut slice from the card edge that Morris got. He approached the stack of cards warily. He was frightened of them and what they could do. A gray plastic trash can sat next to the table. Morris used a dog-eared People magazine to shove the card pile off the table into the can below.

When he stepped back out on the sidewalk, he felt good about what he had just done. Stopping the razor sharp flyers from inflicting the same virulent paper cuts on other unwary victims. He had a new thought, that the card edges might be painted with some kind of toxic substance to make people sick. But how many more of the hazardous flyers were still being put out there on the streets right now?

Or was the fever in his head only making Morris have lunatic thoughts? He swayed in place on the sidewalk for a moment. He had to know the answer to all this one way or another. He started down the street again, looking for wherever that delivery nerd had gone next. A block north, just in front of the Music Millennium place, Morris thought he saw the green T-shirt again.

He set off to catch the guy, but his steps were shaky and it pissed him off the way the jerk kept getting away from him and disappearing for a while. Morris was running out of juice when he looked across the street and saw the green shirt just leaving a stack of flyers on a bus shelter bench. How did that sloppy geek get over there that fast? Morris ignored the horns honking at him again and lurched across the street.

He finally caught up with the delivery guy at the corner of Lovejoy. But when he grabbed his arm and spun him around face-to-face, he saw how wrong he had been. It was the same kind of green shirt that he had been chasing alright, but not the same person he saw before. No, not at all. This one was a woman.

Her face was broad and homely with a fat, fibrous brown mole on her cheek. She carried a canvas shoulder bag full of flyers and wore leather gloves too. She gave him the same fanatical, hollow-eyed stare like he wasn’t even really there. Morris pawed roughly at the bag.

“Why are you leaving these damned card things everywhere?” he demanded. “What are you doing it for?”

She answered him with mechanical vacancy. “I do my job in The Plan like I’m supposed to. The Plan is necessary.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What plan?” Morris shouted at her. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The woman ignored his raving and instead reached calmly into the bag for one of the flyers. She brought the card up in a swift motion and slashed the edge of it across his neck before Morris even registered that she had done it.

He stumbled backwards, grabbing at his throat, feeling hot, sticky fluid already trickling out between his fingers. It took a moment for him to realize that a blood vessel in his neck had been cut. His legs went wobbly with shock and he suddenly found himself sprawled on his ass on the sidewalk.

His shirtfront was damp with a spreading red stain. He started to get light-headed and the buildings on the street became wavy boxes. He was aware of shoes circled distantly around him and vague, agitated voices. He wanted to warn them about something important, but all he could get out of his mouth was a wet, bubbly sound.

He tried to raise a dead-weight arm with a black, pulpy finger on it to point at a distant figure in a green shirt with a shoulder bag that continued to work its way determinedly on its delivery route along Twenty-Third Street.