Clown Girl by Monica Drake; Chuck Palahniuk

crop in a bad year.”
    He held my wrist and took my pulse. “You’re exhausted.” He wrote a note on his chart, then took my pulse again from the same wrist but a different place. “Ah! Interesting.” He shifted his fingers back and forth, fretwork on his folk guitar, and counted under his breath. His fingers were warm, finding the beat of my heart.
    He wrote more notes and nodded. “Perfect. You have a perfect example of what we call Heart and Kidney out of Balance Syndrome.”
    “My leg?” I said.
    “A person has six pulses. On you, the heart pulse is the strongest. The kidney pulse is almost nonexistent. The heart is fire, the kidneys water. With too much fire,” he said, and used one long-fingered hand to gesture like a plant unfolding in fast motion, “and not enough water,”—his other hand made a sort of pooling movement below—“your system will become disrupted. Heart and Kidney out of Balance Syndrome.” He held both hands up, as though announcing a beautiful thing. “Your heart and kidneys aren’t communicating.”
    I said, “Well, I do have heart trouble.”
    He took out a stethoscope and pressed the cold metal disk to the skin of my back. “Your heart sounds OK. Let me see your tongue again.”
    I opened my mouth, held my tongue out.
    “Yes. Exactly!” he said, and pointed with one long pinkie at my tongue. “You have a narrow split down the center.” He wrote in his notes, then looked at me. He said, “I do too.” He opened his mouth and showed me his tongue and I saw a line down the middle of it but didn’t know enough to tell if the line was particularly narrow.
    Softly, he said, “People like us, we’re genetically predisposed toward stress on the heart.” He seemed happy to learn we had something in common, our ailing hearts.
    “Well, that’s cold comfort. Least I’ve got genetic relations.”
    He smiled. “It’s not heart disease. Maybe you’re lonely.”
    Lonely? I wasn’t lonely. I had Rex. But here it was—another clown fetishist. In a minute he’d hand me a card. Ask me out. Try the old line about acupuncture for a long-playing, extended dance version of the massive orgasm.
    I’d heard it before.
    “Have you experienced a loss?” He looked into my eyes. “Abandonment issues, perhaps, or childhood trauma?”
    Ah, the sensitive shtick. In through the heart pulse. I wouldn’t fall for it. “No.” But even as I said it, I touched one hand to the photos tucked in my bra.
    His eyes followed my hand, he flushed, wrinkled his nose, and tapped his tiny glasses. “Sometimes, we bury our feelings…” He looked at me like I was a sad clown on worn velvet, then offered his own half smile.
    He offered me pity. Did I need his pity? I said, “I’m so far from lonely, it’s not even funny,” and reached into my pink bag for a pack of exploding gum, the rubber ham sandwich, or any trick to take the focus off me. My hand wrapped around the silver gun. I pulled it out— voilà !
    The acupuncturist jumped back and threw up his arms. He hiccuped, hit his head against the sloped roof, and tripped into a wastebasket. “Take a deep breath, don’t do anything rash, your whole future’s ahead of you, let’s talk, we’re here for you,” he said, as though reciting an office training memo on emergency situations.
    I pulled the trigger. The acupuncturist gave a yipe. A flag shot out. “Bang,” it said on the flag.
    He looked at the flag, frowned, and straightened his glasses with one shaking hand. “That,” he said, as he eased his way back toward me, “was not even funny. That’s the definition of not funny.” His glasses were still crooked. His flyaway hair flew.
    I twirled the gun to roll the flag, then pushed the flag back into the barrel with the heel of my hand. “It’s a muzzle loader.”
    He rubbed a hand on the back of his skull. “Totally toxic.” He put a hand to his heart, reached up to a shelf for a brown bottle, unscrewed the cap, and took a healthy