Do Not Go Quietly

by Jason Sizemore

  Across from Nany, Joyce is warming breakfast in her belly; she’s as hot as an oven, only really happy when she’s feeding people. It takes some getting used to—knowing your meal was cooked inside a body. Joyce hands Nany a cup of tea when it’s clear Nany’s not going to sleep, and Nany thanks her, feeling numb about everyone they left behind. That part’s not new; they always leave more than they should.

  “Ain’t never seen this much sky,” Deka says, and lifts her glass arms and hands to watch the light pour straight through her. She rests her arms on the swell of Lita’s belly, the glass turning Lita’s skin green-blue where the sun filters through.

  “Ever see the wall? You got people there?” Lita asks, and Deka shakes her head, amazed that’s where she’s finally going. “It’s something, all right, it’s something like—”

  Lita breaks off when Ellen’s siren mouth goes off on the roof of the bus. Ellen follows with two thumps on the roof, telling them that it’s a convoy up ahead, headed this way. Lita slows, takes the exit they were not planning on taking, and parks the bus under the overpass. She cuts the engine and puts a hand over Deka’s mouth when she means to ask questions.

  There aren’t many places to hide here, Nany Mars knows, but if the convoy is headed this way, the underpass will be safe enough. Safe enough is what passes for safe these years; they want to find a thing badly enough, they’ll find it no matter where it hides. But a convoy is good; a convoy is occupied with business, has a destination in mind, has a cargo that needs delivering, and a deadline that needs meeting.

  Nany’s throat tightens—is it a throat, she wonders, or just my vagina pulling itself into a fist—and she closes her hands at her side. She tells herself not to think about all those women the convoy will be in possession of; tells herself not to think about the pain those men are escorting. But she can’t help herself; thinking about it is how she started formulating a solution. How she started helping women see there was a way out. That every body still contained its own resistance.

  Ellen skitters down from the van and is off into the weeds choking the side of the road. Nany Mars counts until Ellen comes back; Ellen is safe enough, sure—she’s over sixty. Having gone invisible when she turned thirty-five, she’s an old hand at it. Men cannot see her—will not see her, so have unknowingly made her into the best of all possible ninjas. Nany still worries—it’s her way. Nany can see her coming back; she moves like a ninja even though the women can see her plain as day. Ellen opens the back hatch and climbs inside, crouched there like she means to spring up to the ceiling.

  “Blue marks,” Ellen says, “blue marks.”

  “Fuck,” Joyce says.

  Nany Mars sinks against the side of the van, nauseated. Can a cunt be nauseated—will she vomit blood? Nany wants to know how many trucks, but doesn’t ask because one is more than too many.

  In the front seat, Deka doesn’t know what blue marks mean, so Lita tells her that blue marks mean trucks filled with pregnant wombs. Women, Lita corrects herself. Women who are pregnant with boys. Boys who will become men, men who will be fostered into the brotherhood, who will run the world, men who will control all of them forever. Men who will forever shape women into whatever they want women to be.

  “Not forever,” Nany Mars says around the lump in her throat. She has to believe that. If she stops believing that—

  “Galveston, maybe,” Ellen says.

  Nany doesn’t want to think about Galveston, but the image of the medical campus rises in her mind anyhow. That’s where they keep the women and there’s no good way in or out, though she’s tried to come up with one a dozen and a half times. They could steal a blue mark truck, they could—

  Nany squeezes her eyes shut and nods. “Let’s get back out there,” she says. The convoy won’t be coming back for them; it’s got bigger concerns, women carrying the next generation of chosen in their wombs.

  Ellen’s hand around hers is warm and steady. “We do what we can,” Ellen says, and then she’s gone, back to the roof, where she straps herself in and knocks once to let Lita know she’s ready. In the passenger seat, Deka is shaking. Her teeth sound like drinking glasses shivering together.

  Nany doesn’t want to think about a lot of things, but she thinks about some of them while staring at the back of Deka’s head. Nany can see clear through Deka, the road rippling beyond her glass, beyond the windshield. Like she doesn’t even have a brain, and Nany knows that isn’t the case. Knows that each and every one of them is still a whole woman inside whatever hell men have made of them.

  It’s hard not to resent Deka, to wonder if saving one is worth the sacrifice of all the women packed into that blue mark truck. Surely that was what they should be trying to save—but at what cost? Nany tells herself this: that saving Deka is worth it because attacking the blue mark truck means they could all die, and then where would they be? Ashes floating into the clouded skies because no one would bury them; burning’s all they do, like the ground is too good for anyone, especially women.

  So, Nany Mars tells herself this is the smart way; it’s small and impossible, but no one sees them, and they haven’t been found out, and if they do anything bigger, they’d be dead. Everything is death and this is not, so. So.

  Joyce hands Nany a perfectly baked burrito, and Nany eats it without complaint. It used to be so weird—food coming from the warmth of the oven in Joyce’s belly, but there were all kinds of women like her. Not everything was sex. Women were made for cooking and cleaning and farming and maybe the strangest thing Nany saw was a woman who was also a plow, her body bent to the hard ground, made to break it open over and over, despite the fact the dirt would no longer grow anything.

  Joyce feeds them all, seeming content as she tucks into her own food. Nany doesn’t know if that’s real contentment or just what she’s grown used to; feeding people always made her happy, but now it’s the function of her body, it’s what she’s become, so has she chosen to make her peace with it, or is it truly pleasing? Where’s the line? How did the plowing woman feel about her circumstances? How did anyone?

  The VW bus starts to shake outside of Corpus, not quite the worst place Nany Mars can imagine for it to happen, but close. Like Galveston, all the outer islands have become places you just don’t want to be, and so the towns close are likewise dangerous. Inland is better—get to the Rockies, lose yourself in those rocks—but Mexico is best of all. Mexico and farther south, where they’ll never find you because the men don’t dare cross the border, not when everything they want is inside its limits. Still, there are bands who rove, hunters who keep the border clear of those who would dare think to leave Paradise.

  Corpus is something of a trash fire, the city glowing as the VW’s front right tire finally gives out and they thump down the street. Lita glances over her shoulder at Nany, who’s pulling herself from the bus’s floor, to crouch behind the seats and see where they are. Deka has her hoodie pulled up, her glass face reflecting the city flames.

  “The Ranch,” Nany tells Lita, who nods and guides the VW down a darker street.

  All cities are bad, Nany supposes; men trying to organize, but unable to because other men have other ideas about how it should all go. There are small bands of men who try to resist, and sometimes they make good headway (bless the memory of the Denver Twelve, who destroyed a baby bank in ’23 and convinced a city that women were human, despite what had been made of them, but lost their own lives soon after at the end of ropes, drawn and properly quartered like they did in the good old days because an eye for an eye, a spleen for a spleen).

  The Ranch looks abandoned from all angles and Nany breathes a little easier to see it hasn’t been breached. It’s hard to know—the farther afield you travel, the less you know about where you came from. Anything could have happened in the eight weeks they’ve been out, helping who they can, anything at all.

  Lita douses the VW’s headlights and cuts the engine as she angles for the tarp concealing the main vehicle entry. They would
have been spotted already, so there’s no danger of hitting anyone as they slide past the tarp and its flick covers their passage. Maybe it used to be an alley, stone walls close on either side of the vehicle, but it opens into a secure courtyard, a couple of old live oaks arching up into the sky from their cracked ground, providing some cover for the two cars that are already parked.

  Miss Mona comes to greet them, proving to Nany it’s a quiet night. Miss Mona is all hugs and the scent of jasmine, soft curves and long legs like she was born with. Men liked her right fine, so kept her as she was, though she’d rather have a woman sprawled between her legs; she reckons if men knew that part, they’d like her a whole lot less, but they’d sure stay and watch the spectacle, wouldn’t they?

  “Just a tire, most like,” Nany says as Lita helps Deka into the whorehouse proper. Nany watches Miss Mona’s eyes; they widen.

  “And just a glass girl,” she murmurs, threading her arm with Nany’s. “That’s remarkable. How did you …” But she waves away her own question and presses a kiss to Nany’s temple. “Nope. Don’t tell me. I’ll help you do what you need. There’s some men in the bar, but they’re harmless. Take what they’re given and don’t try to make anyone what they aren’t.”

  Of course, some of the girls are already changed by the world outside. They came here seeking shelter, looking for a way forward despite what had been done to them. Still, it’s shocking for Deka to see the women here; their changes might be more conventional, but along with Cordelia’s swelling bosom and Andi’s generous hips are Marge’s thread-thin waist, and Jayde’s wrist-wide thighs. The women here are shaped as their men wanted them, too many of them made brainless and subservient. Their faces glimpsed in passing reveal the struggle: they are not brainless, they’ve just never had to think for themselves; they’ve never had to walk upright instead of on hands and knees. But here, they do.

  Of course, there’s worse. Nany Mars knows what many of the other women never will; that The Ranch contains horrors they can’t wrap their minds around. Women who have been reduced to their basest desires, women who have been turned inside out; women who are missing parts of themselves, parts removed with surgical precision. Women who are eternally pregnant. Women who have lost their spines. Women who have lost their mouths. Women who are only mouths, toothless and starving. Chains for arms and ropes for legs. Uteri begging for sperm. Nany Mars knows that none of them can quite understand the depth of the back rooms at The Ranch.

  It’s another fine line, Nany Mars thinks; these women trying to break free, yet needing to work and find that way forward, so coming back to the thing they’re trying to avoid. Marge doesn’t want to be here but knows that a man’s hand enclosing the whole of her waist while he fucks her will ensure that she can eat; will ensure that her daughter never knows a moment’s work inside The Ranch.

  “Just a tire” will take the night, Miss Mona’s girls out scavenging, so Miss Mona invites them all in, and they all vanish into the dark corners. Ellen finds her own kind, other older women made invisible outside these walls. Here, they revel in their ways, finding comfort in each other but also in the men who cautiously approach them. Some of these men have never seen an older woman in their lives, their kind erased so wholly from society. Society, Ellen tells them, is the worst because it’s made of people. And they all laugh, and it’s a strange sound, one that Nany Mars is still thinking of when she makes her way to the room that Miss Mona always holds for her.

  It’s not large; it’s close and quiet, and Nany supposes it’s like a womb because it’s warm and dark. Nany sinks into the mattress and every bone in her back seems to pop in relief. The blankets smell like they were dried in sunshine, and Nany cocoons them around herself, nipples rising to hard points there in the darkness.

  It’s startling, that. It used to happen all the time; she’d lay down after a hard day and her body would respond happily, stretching and nearly purring as she allowed herself the comfort of a bed. Bed hasn’t been like that for a long while, so she stretches, feet peeking from the end of the blankets, hands pressed to the wall. She is aware of her spine, of her breasts, of the way her skin prickles with gooseflesh. She has not understood her body in this way in years. Just a cunt. But in the darkness, she has hands and toes; she has a belly, and thighs. She has a neck and a collarbone. She has the soft space between both that Eugenia used to nuzzle into.

  Miss Mona never comes to Nany Mars. She always leaves the decision to Nany Mars. Nany’s halfway to Miss Mona’s room when she realizes that. Long ago, they used to come to each other equally, but Miss Mona gives her space and Nany doesn’t know if it’s because of Nany’s concerns or Miss Mona’s. Nany doesn’t knock, just steps inside and seals the door behind her and lets the wonder of the space wash over her. It smells like summer inside these walls, like a summer night and you’re sixteen and barefoot under the stars forever.

  Nany Mars knows there are rumors about Miss Mona’s room. None of the men are allowed inside of it, so they’ve made their own stories about it—some more kind than others. Some men believe the room contains caged men, men in a thousand flavors, depending on Miss Mona’s desires. They believe she tortures these men by denying them her sweet cunt, offering it only to those gay men among them.

  They say Miss Mona has the ability to craft men the way men craft women because that’s what men fear most, that their lives will no longer be their own, that they will be locked away and denied everything they desire. They say Miss Mona crafts men with horse penises, with elephant cocks, with blue whale dicks, but Nany Mars knows that if Miss Mona could craft such things, she’d craft men without mouths. Men can’t imagine anything worse than a small dick, whereas women know there are countless things worse.

  “Hey there,” Miss Mona says when Nany steps inside.

  Nany walks barefoot to the end of Miss Mona’s bed, and stands like a question for two breaths before she answers herself and climbs in. When Miss Mona touches her, Nany can feel her spine again; can feel her breasts and her belly, and her knees, and her shoulders, like she’s a real woman after all. Miss Mona wraps her arms and legs around Nany tight.

  After they’ve licked, bitten, stroked, fucked, and held their way back to being whole women, Miss Mona whispers, “You going to Eugenia again.” It’s not a question and Nany Mars can feel the ghost of Eugenia stretching between them, heavy like another blanket.

  “I’d say it was just the work, but that’s a lie,” Nany says. She closes her eyes, burrowed beneath Miss Mona’s chin, where she can imagine her sweat smells like the ocean rolling over a sugar beach. “Aren’t we supposed to let go of shit?”

  Miss Mona holds her tighter. “They say so, but fuck them. You’re brave to go because as much as I want to see her …”

  There is a long pause and Nany counts the beats of Miss Mona’s heart in the space, picturing the woman pacing the room, every beat a step closer to the truth.

  “I don’t have the stones to see what they made of her, Nany, and that’s weak on my part, weak bullshit, because she was ours, she was here, and they…” Miss Mona trails off, because she won’t even allow herself to voice the horror of what was done to Eugenia. “What were you going to be before all this? What were you?”

  That was long ago and far away, but Nany remembers. “A jeweler,” she whispers. How frivolous it all seems, crafting wearable art from valuable metal. This world doesn’t have room for her creations.

  She doesn’t say anything else, just rests in the quiet circle of Miss Mona’s arms, where the rest of the world does not exist. When Miss Mona sleeps, Nany extracts herself and dresses. She moves down familiar halls until she’s at the door that used to be Eugenia’s. She also doesn’t knock on this door; she knows the room is empty, and also not.

  Miss Mona hasn’t changed the room at all, convinced that if she leaves it just as Eugenia left it, Eugenia will come back. Will sleep in the narrow bed, will drape fresh, flowered fabric across the narrow slit of a window. Will be caught hu
mming old pop songs as she daubs old nail polish onto her toes. In a thousand years, this will not happen, Nany knows, but still allows herself to stand within the shrine of Eugenia’s room. Everything is as she left it, down to the locket on the nightstand.

  The locket catches Nany off guard; she’d forgotten about it, and when she picks it up, it’s like fire against her skin. She made it and it remembers her. Sinks down into her hand while Nany shrieks, heedless of waking the rest of the house. She tries to drop the locket, but it will not be parted from her. Nany sinks to her knees on the edge of Eugenia’s bed, prying the locket open to look at a curl of her own hair. Before it got silver. Before it got coarse.

  Coarser, Eugenia whispers, because you were never soft, my darling, and for one breath, Nany thinks she’s come back after all. But the room is empty, and Nany backs out of it, snapping the locket shut in her palm. She doesn’t need or want it. (Oh, liar. You need it like air; you want it like your partner finding the exact point where you back itches and reaching it for you.)

  In the hall outside Eugenia’s room, Nany is startled by a figure in the shadows, but not so startled that she doesn’t grab the woman’s arm and pull her into the light. It’s Eugenia, Nany is certain, until the light slants across her face. It is not Eugenia.

  It’s Carrie, who is slight and trembling, but she won’t be budged when Nany tries to push past her. The problem is Raf, Carrie says, and Carrie knows they’re not staying, only passing through, but Raf needs help. Nany pulls the locket from her palm, shoves it into her pocket, and follows where Carrie leads, to a small room where Raf curls in a bed, a protective hand across her belly. She’s sweating and shaking like she’s gonna die, and Nany thinks maybe she will, given the blood that seeps from between her legs.

  “All right, we can fix this,” is what Nany says; there’s no sense in alarming a girl who’s already alarmed. “Get me Ellen, yeah?”

  With Ellen beside her, they tend to Raf, sending her into hard blackness with a drug Mona always keeps on hand. She doesn’t tremble in the blackness, allowing Nany and Ellen to work until they’ve undone the clumsy work of a hanger. This, Nany thinks, is also the doing of men, but she swallows the idea because everyone already knows. Women have been driven to worse than this. What’s shocking is that it happened inside The Ranch.