by Raptor, John
Scared out of my mind, my kneecaps knocking together, somehow I kept myself moving across the blacktop in those pumps—which were killing my ankles, btw.
The air was humid, wet, felt like rain coming. That’s probably why I had mascara running down my cheeks…then realized I was crying.
Like a fucking baby.
Oh God, suck it up. Suck it up, girl, I told myself.
But no. That’s what the ape-men wanted. They wanted us bitches to just suck it up, get over it. Shut up.
But I wouldn’t.
Fuck them.
Fuck them in their hairy ape-men assholes.
An ape-man started hollering obscenities, then threw his head back with loud obnoxious laughter. I glanced over my shoulder, hoping to God it wasn’t the ape-man in the suit with the slick hair. It wasn’t. Just some asshole with his ape-men buddies.
On the street corner was a phone booth (one of the few left) and I quickly shut myself inside.
I refused to buy a cell phone—too much money, and I needed that money for my girls (and my junk fix—the only thing that could calm my anxiety in this cesspit ape-man world). Of course, now I was probably out of a job. My boss wouldn’t be too happy that I walked out on a client. Maybe I could be a waitress.
I put two quarters in, dialed a number with shaky fingers. The other line rang, but there was no answer.
“Come on, come on, come on, Sis. Pick up. I need a ride.”
I hated the anxiousness in my voice—it made me even more anxious.
KNOCK KNOCK—on the glass of the phone booth.
I nearly screamed into the receiver and jumped out of my pale skin.
I feared it was the ape-man in the suit…but worse: a bunny-man, waving at me behind the glass.
“Fuck off, weirdo!”
The phone booth slid open and I screamed, dropping the receiver. The Bunny stabbed me in the neck with a syringe and pushed down on the plunger: a stinging filled my veins. Goddammit, it hurt.
I had heard about sick fucks injecting people with HIV and felt my heart stopping and then the sound of a river rushing in my head and I—
…NOW
…woke up in a cold torture chamber with an ape-man who is going crazy.
“Let us out of here, you sick fuck,” he’s screaming.
“Shut the fuck up!” I yell back.
He looks at me, starts toward me. I quiver; afraid he’s going to hit me, rape me, kill me.
“This isn’t my fault,” he says (of course, it’s not; that’s what all the ape-men say: “I can’t help it; you’re giving me blue balls; you tempted me; waaa, waaa, waaa!”)
“This is obviously the work of a psychopath,” the ape-man continues. “Trying to get a point of morality across through sick immoral acts. Richard Harris was the same goddam thing.”
“Who the fuck is that?”
“A serial killer—cut prostitute’s eyes out, replaced them with big black buttons. Said he did it because they were sinners.”
I like how the ape-man mansplains it to me like it’s something new or intriguing, but it’s just the same old ape-man bullshit. Shut the fuck up.
“Let me guess,” I say. “He sexually violated the women before he killed them.”
“Yeah,” the ape-man says. “Have you heard of the case?”
No, it’s called not being a fucking idiot. Dickhead.
I say, “No.”
“He blamed the hookers; said they led him into temptation. So he killed them.”
No shit, ape-man. Sing me a tune I haven’t heard.
“There’s no escape,” I whisper. “We’re going to die.”
“No!” The ape-man screams, startled by reality. “We’re getting the fuck out of here! One way or another!”
“What’s your sin?” I ask him.
The ape-man glares at me. “None of your goddam business.”
“Yeah, actually, it is. It’s the reason we’re down here.”
“No, it’s not! We’re both down here because we both did something stupid! We’re stupid! You’re stupid, and I’m stupid!”
“Why are you stupid then?”
“Why are you stupid?” the ape-man shoots back.
I wipe mascara off my face and look down at the floor.
“You’re a whore, that’s obvious,” the ape-man says.
I don’t want to (I want to fire back, tell him he’s a dirty filthy good-for-nothing ape-man), but I start crying.
He doesn’t care and ignores me, like ape-men are wont to do.
Robert
A fucking whore just like fucking Angela.
I should’ve never got involved with that fucking slut. It had to have been her. She’s the only one I’ve ever told. I don’t know why I told her more than I told my own fucking wife. Because she asked, I guess. She wanted to hear the fucked up shit.
Angela’s fucking crazy, obsessed with sex and murder. This is probably her idea of foreplay. She probably wants me all for herself. Probably had my wife murdered. Now I’m stuck in a death chamber with this slut.
This isn’t my fault, goddammit!
I try to pray but I can’t. I don’t even remember the last time I prayed. I stopped caring about god a long time ago.
A steel door on the opposite end of the room slides back—I never even noticed it. Am I blind? Or did it just materialize out of nowhere? Am I losing my fucking mind?
Jennifer starts weeping again and I want to bash her fucking face in.
The Bunny enters the room, giggling. (What else is fucking new?)
“Tick-tock, tick-tock. At dawn, the sinners die,” the Bunny says.
“I need to take a piss,” is what I say.
“Okey dokey, artichokey.” The Bunny steps aside, gesturing outside the chamber. Must be a trick. That thing can’t actually be letting me out. “There’s a bathroom down the hall to your left.”
I move toward the Bunny, shaking, sweating, sick with anxiety…and slowly inch past…it. The Bunny stares at me (wide dead eyes). I squint, trying to peer into the mesh…but see only darkness: no face, no human of either sex. It giggles and I nearly scream my fucking head off…but somehow, hold it in.
Outside the chamber, I move into a long corridor: dark, except for a sick green light that tints the walls from an unknown source. Though judging from the way the green light shimmers (like the reflection of a swimming pool on a low ceiling), it’s from a body of water.
“Don’t run away,” the Bunny calls after me, “or your torture will be ten times worse.” This, of course, sends the Bunny into a fit of mad giggles, which echo off the dripping stone walls.
I shudder; continue down the corridor, splashing through puddles, cursing as the wetness soaks through my socks and shit-water squishes between my toes. My footsteps echo all around me as I step back onto solid concrete. I can’t quite judge how long the corridor is by the echoes, but I assume there are connecting corridors, maybe even mazes of them—like some sort of horrible labyrinth holding Minotaurs…except, we are the Minotaurs.
I spot a rusty steel door (embedded into the stone wall) with the words BAFROOM scrawled on it (in blood?) and slowly reach for the copper handle, which has turned a pale green—probably from exposure to moisture.
Not surprisingly, the door squeals open.
It’s dark in here. Again, the only light is the ghostly green glow that haunts the rest of this labyrinth. I search the ceiling for green bulbs, a window, anything to let in that ethereal light…but find nothing but more and more concrete.
The bafroom itself is a shithole (pun not intended): the tile floor cracked into chunks. Two out of the three porcelain sinks smashed and dripping shit-water and all three with rusted spouts and handles. The soap dispensers full of black grime and…maggots? Jesus Christ. Blood-spotted paper towels and blood-filled syringes litter the floor. I feel like I’ve contracted a disease just by walking in here.
No urinals, only a stall with BATTERY ACID scratched into the peeling grey paint. (W
hen I was young, I always pissed in the stall anyway. I valued my privacy).
The stall door is broken off (so much for privacy), hanging out in a dark corner against one of the smashed sinks. And I’m thinking there must be a way out there must be a way out for god’s sake I’m out of the fucking chamber!
Your torture will be ten times worse. Hehehehehe.
I pull my limp dick from my pants—so hard and throbbing hours, days, months? ago, when I was with Angela. (That fucking whore!)
I look down into the steel mouth of the toilet…
…a severed penis.
Floating there in the brown water.
I suck in a cry of terror and I can’t piss. No matter how hard I try I can’t get my bladder to loosen. It’s full, so full it hurts, but I can’t. I bite my lip, crying, trying not to look at the dick floating in the dirty toilet water like a long white turd.
I claw at the stall, which has drawings of cut-off penises carved into the paint (blood gushing out the aft ends), and slowly start to urinate, but it goes all over the floor, the seat, anywhere but the bowl…
…I bite down harder and my lip bleeds and I piss straight into the steel mouth and I can hear it hitting the murky water, and then the sound muffles, like rain on the roof, and when I open my eyes, I’m pissing on the cut-off dick and it’s bobbing up and down in the shit-water.
Erica
Lying on a bed, my shattered wrists and ankles bound to the bedposts, a dirty handkerchief tied tightly around my head, the filthy cotton violating my mouth…I try uselessly to bite through it. It tastes like gasoline and oil.
I’m crying, twisting in the restraints (which only reignites the screaming pain in my broken bones), my brain spinning, my soul plummeting…into the darkest of voids. I’ve never known such fear. Even when my ex used to tie me up and I didn’t know what he’d do to me, I never felt such fear. Sometimes he’d be gentle…other times he’d burn me with cigarettes, call me a cunt, slap and hit me. He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He made Christian Grey look like a Mormon missionary. You never knew who you were going to be sleeping with that night. Part of it was thrilling, but mostly, it was scary and I was afraid to leave him. Afraid he’d rape and kill me. But for fuck’s sake, he’d already been doing the former for years, hadn’t he? But maybe I deserved it because I didn’t say no. My daddy always said that a boyfriend couldn’t rape you, because a boyfriend had the right to fuck you whenever he wanted. Told me that if you got a man started, you had to finish him. Told me that you couldn’t kiss a boy without him fucking you. That’s why I never kissed a boy until I was 19. But I guess daddy was right. When I kissed Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde fucked me…and I let him, because it was my fault for starting it.
My daddy told me that if I didn’t want it, I was a prude.
Told me to widen my horizons and spread my legs.
I never fought back; there was no point.
People were going to use you, no matter what.
Your body was not yours, only others to hit, slap, and rape.
Might as well accept it.
A montage of abuse spins before my eyes, as if viewed through a zoetrope. So many faces…all with that awful, lustful glean in their vacant eyes. Eyes like windows—which did not offer a glimpse into the soul, but only unfathomable depths of darkness.
And despite all I’ve been through, all the shit I’ve waded through, all the hurt I’ve been subjected to, all the bruises, the limping, the make-up covering cuts and scratches and burns, the hospital visits, the lying to doctors, the cowering in corners as he/she/it screamed and yelled and threw things and treated me like I was inferior, stupid, dumb, unworthy, and all the praying to god to protect me and save me, only to realize that god is also an abuser and does not give a shit…none of that compares to the fear I feel now as I hear footsteps clunking down the hall, and see shadows pooling beneath the door.
I scream into the handkerchief, heart pounding in my eyes, as the rusty doorknob squeals, followed by clicking sounds…and the rabbit enters the room.
The handkerchief muffles my cries: I’m unheard, as always.
“Sex is evil,” the rabbit says. “Probably the foulest act I’ve ever witnessed. Sweaty bodies creating sickly fluids, spewing and spreading their disease. It makes me want to puke. Puke until there’s nothing left.”
Flashbacks: …all the guys I’ve ever fucked, some for less than ten dollars, and how empty I felt some nights, and how I’d cuddle up under the covers and cry into a pillow for hours and sometimes cut my wrists and snort cocaine off the bathroom sink. Once, I jumped off the balcony of my apartment but I only broke my ankle…
…My father fucking me in the ass and how I puked as he violated me and it was tuna and it reeked and I could feel his slimy semen dripping out of my bleeding asshole (blood and semen dripping down the back of my child thighs) and smell his horrible whiskey breath hours after it was over and I did what I do now (minus the cocaine): go in my room and cry and pray for a way out. But god never listened…
…Kids at school could tell I was not like them. I didn’t talk. I never laughed. I had no light in my eyes. I was a whore. My father raped me and I was dirty. I would never be clean for my future husband like the other girls in my class. I was always told how important it was to stay pure, but I had already been damaged…
…So I stopped caring and I’d let guys use me. If I chose to let them use me, at least I still had some control in my life. In middle school, guys would touch me for a dollar. High school, I’d blow a guy for five bucks…
…all the girls gossiped, called me a ho, a skank, a bitch. And I guess I was. But I was goddam proud of it. Part of me thought they were jealous: I was fucking all the cute boys (and ugly ones) and they couldn’t get none. Also, I had more money than them and the work was easy: touch and suck and done (most guys only took about a minute or two). Those stuck-up bitches could have had it all too if their stupid “self-worth” didn’t get in the way…
…Now, men (and some women) pay up to $700 to fuck me. Candy Cane—that’s my name at PUSSY CATS. I am one of their hottest and most requested (the club labeled me “exotic”). I reduce those fucking horndogs to slobbering Neanderthals.
But no matter how much the price tag goes up on my pussy, I feel empty.
In reality, I have no power.
Those school bitches were right: I’m a skanky, dirty ho.
Those men and women (those customers), those boyfriends and girlfriends…they were my father, raping me, over and over, again and again and again. Nothing had changed: I was still that powerless little girl—doomed to relive my father’s abuse, his betrayal of my innocence, the rest of my fucking life.
“You’re a fucking whore,” the rabbit says (as if reading my thoughts) and rips the handkerchief from my mouth.
Crying, sobbing: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. It’s not my fault. Please…don’t fucking do this. Just let me go.” My teeth and jaws, my shattered wrists singing with pain; I let out a raspy cry: “Oh god…please…don’t kill me.”
“You don’t know god,” the rabbit says. It does not giggle.
The rabbit isn’t fucking around anymore. It’s not having fun or finding amusement in the torture. It’s dead serious. Which somehow disturbs me even more.
“Oh please…please…” The swelling in my face is so great I can barely breathe. “Please don’t kill me. Oh god…I’m sorry. My dad raped me. He fucking raped me you fucking bastard!”
“That’s no excuse,” the rabbit says. “Honor thy father.”
The rabbit goes to a counter with a microwave oven sitting on it. He opens a drawer beneath the counter and I can see that it’s full of surgical tools (the reflection in the microwave’s blank mesh face) and I start screaming, my limbs turning to jelly, my heart swelling in the back of my throat. I scream at the top of my lungs: “NOOOO!” Shredding my vocal chords. I start choking, eyes bloodshot and red, dripping tears. “No you sick fuck! Let me go let me go!” Th
e restraints bruise my ankles, and the broken bones in my wrists grind against each other, flowering fresh pain. I holler, snot and tears mingling on my lips, and I know the pain will only get worse but I can’t stop crying. “Please god! Please god help me! I’m so sorry! So sorry!”
“God doesn’t give a shit about niggers, especially nigger whores,” the rabbit says. “You people don’t feel pain anyway. You’re fucking animals.”
The rabbit crawls between my legs with a scalpel and I start twisting and shrieking in the restraints as it rips off my panties (just like my father…and Luke and Neil and Brady and Alex and Robert and John and Samantha and Alice) and presses its cold instrument to my inner lips…I feel a thunderbolt of pain as it slices into my clit…blood gushes onto the mattress, onto the rabbit’s furry white chest and paws and vacant eyes (like so many of my abusers)…and I know I’m going to die and the fear swallows me up and…
…AT ANY MOMENT
There was a girl just like me…
…who removed bloody bandages from her head as he/she/it watched.
Neither said anything.
Her mascara trickled down her cheeks in tendrils, as he sat down on the bed, the springs inside squeaking like feral mice.
A block of lead resided quietly in his throat.
She washed the wound, the sink filling with crimson like chum on a salty sea.
He exhaled a slow breath and she jumped. His eyes looked sad and innocent in the glow of the sliver moon.
But her scalp throbbed…and tiny crumbs of green glass fell from her long hair, tinkling in the porcelain basin. Somewhere downstairs, a shattered beer bottle lay in the trash. She glanced at him. He stared through her, at the picture on the wall. In the picture, he held her from behind: he in a pressed charcoal tux, she in a flowing pink Cinderella gown. Prom 2007.
He exhaled again. She did not jump this time, only quivered. She could smell rotten barley permeated on his tongue. Heat rose in her chest. Her gut twitched. The tap on the sink was silenced. Crickets whispered to each other in the night. Tires squealed in the street, destroying the cricket’s serenity. Loud laughter and screaming soon followed. She jumped again.
