The Scab-Begger by Zoltan Komor

The scab-beggar steps to me on the street and asks for some dry wounds. He can see that my arm is full of crusty layers and he's already eyeing a big wound on my elbow, the one I wanted to buy a pack of smoke with. It's such a long time since I’ve smoked—the overhead charges take away all of my wounds and I can't torchure myself forever.

I look the scab-beggar up and down. What a miserable little fellow. Since scabs became the new currency only weak-kneed, spineless people who haven't got the balls to bruise themselves become poor.

"Grow your own!" I growl at him, covering the wound on my elbow with my bruised hand.

"Please, mister, I'm anemic, my blood...my blood doesn't clot correctly..." he snivels, then he adds: "I've got a family to take care of!"

"Then why don't you beat them like every other decent person does?" I yell at him, suddenly remembering my father who beat the crap out of us every night when I was a kid so he could take us to the zoo on the weekend. He was a great man, but finally he took too much weight on his shoulders. He and my mother decided they should save some scabs for a new house. So they had a big fight every night and beat each other hard for the wound-coins. It wasn't easy for dad because he was also torchered in his workplace all day long. So the house... They couldn't save enough for the house because my father dropped dead after a few months. I think that's when I decided that I'd never get married and have children.

"Their blood doesn't clot either, ’cause they haven't eat for quite a long time!" the beggar cries. "You're not gonna leave me alone, are you?"

I sigh and pinch the crusty layer between my two fingers and I tear it up slowly. From behind the brown wound-coin transparent liquid and some blood oozes out. I drop the slimy clot-coin into the beggars palm, who slips it into his pocket thanking me.

I can almost see that he will step into a bar to buy some booze with it. But later I see him in front of a milk automat. He's pushing my wound into its coin slot and suddenly a really good feeling overwhelms me. Though, there's really no reason for me to be happy. After all, I didn't buy any smokes.

I go home. The sounds of infant crying and beating can be heard coming from the neighbour. Maybe a mother is kicking a newborn so she can buy more diapers for it. I'm cutting myself with a kitchen knife when an image pops into my mind from my childhood. I was seven, kneeling in the middle of the room, scratching up a dry wound from my knee that I'd got falling off my bycicle. I was saving my wound-coins in a porcelain piggy bank while a bald, chubby politician talked on the tv about how great an idea it was to make scabs the new currency after the usual money became worthless in the big economic crisis.

"The world will never run out of wounds!" He winked from the screen.

This was long ago. I go to bed. In my dream I see pigs with foaming mouths eating my wounds from a rusty trough. I wake up later with the dark suspicion that the politican in the tv was wrong, even the world can run out of wounds.