Ophelia Immune: A Novel

by Mattson, Beth

  “How do I look?”

  “Like a poor wisp of a girl who is going to get sold at an Auction.”

  She threw her hands to her face, “Oh stop, I am blushing!”

  I walked to her and crouched near her hem, feeling along with my fingertips. Beyond the threads and the slight fold of the fabric, I could make out the narrow outlines of two scalpels, stitched into the seams. I looked past her, out the window, my own set of scalpels in my palms. I didn’t smile.

  “Why are you always so grouchy?” she stuck out her skimpy bottom lip, “You're even more stern now that you don't look zombie.”

  “Or Brown, you bean pole,” I snapped.

  The lack of food had made her into a genuine waif. Her jaw chattered in the cool Spring breeze. Goose pimples decorated her pale flesh, completely exposed to the nighttime elements, Summery and mild as they were.

  She more than looked the part. The rag dress accentuated the collar bones that I had heard clattering every time we had launched a practice Molotov cocktail at a the charcoal outline of a Dirtbag on the roof of our building. Her bony knees jutted out from behind tendons that I had worried would splice every time she had climbed into a rusty, jagged dumpster to find more bottles to make cocktails.

  I worried that her starved arms were no longer strong enough to swing her fire poker that we had already hidden with our other ambush supplies in the alleyway that was advertised as the site of the next Auction. We were prepared. There was very little left to do.

  I blinked, focused my eyes and used one of my remaining scalpels to slice open the skin of my forearm in a neat, straight line. I tucked the scalpel inside the slit and pinched the skin back over it, feeling the welcome tingle of the cut and the hum of regenerating skin. When the gash held itself shut, I took the other scalpel and lashed it into my other forearm using the same method.

  “Can I touch them?” she asked, “your arms?”

  I draped a thin piece of rag over my new wounds and held them out to her. She ran her fingertips lightly over my covered skin and then pressed harder as she followed the razor handles backwards to my elbow, her eyes wide and mouth silent. She brushed a fingerprint across my bare skin.

  “No! Never bare skin!” I snapped at her and then was immediately sorry. The abandoned girl’s diet had been hard on her, too. I straightened her rag dress across her shoulders, “Help me use this bleach to lighten the new cuts one last time.”

  She bent over my arms with a cotton swab and a pair of gloves and when she was finished, she stepped back and nodded her approval that I looked White and Human. Not Healthy, but not Dead.

  I moaned. I twisted my arms around in a couple of wide circles, checking my razor blade placement. Satisfied that they would hold to rotate and lift with use, I disappeared out of her door.

  “I'll be right back. I have one last thing to do.”

  The deadbolts to my apartment creaked. Skin and bone, lipless, sightless Juliet – too thin even for a waif – clattered over to me in the only flowery, cotton Summer outfit that I could find to make her look less like a centipede. I pet her on the scalp as she drooled on my ankle.

  “There you are. Come over here my Sweet, My Little Bean.”

  I clipped Immogen’s favorite plastic alligator barrette into her braids instead of my own orange abominations and I made sure that it was firmly in place. She followed me into our kitchen and lapped at the bowl of fresh water that I placed on the floor. I wrapped the tether ribbon snugly around her belly three times, tying the bow into a double knot. I tickled my fingers under her chin in and tilted her face up to mine. Her grey eyeballs roamed restlessly across nothing.

  “Listen, My Little Cricket,” I said, “I have to go take care of something, and I might not make it back.”

  I kissed her forehead. She leapt at my face.

  “I mean, I think I will make it back. Little Sister, I will probably be right back, really soon. Ok? Even if I don’t come back, at Least Uncle Donnie wouldn’t come looking for you. I Love You.”

  I straightened the bow on her cardigan. She grappled with her tether.

  “It’s just like that story I have been reading to you. The one with the little green engine. It’s a big, big hill, and I am rather small, but I think I can. You see? I’ll probably make it. I Love You.”

  She snapped at my wrist.

  “Woah there. You don’t want to get a hold of my arms today, Little One. Sharper than usual.”

  I felt my arms to make sure the razors were still in place. I filled a second bowl with fresh water and set it down next to the first. She stuck her hand in it, then licked her paw frantically. I gave her a third pot full, just in case.

  “There you go. You have extra water, you are safely tied up, and I will be back soon. I Love You. Good night. See you soon. I Love You.”

  I crept back into the hallway, the peeling rosebud wallpaper waving goodbye in the breeze. Swan set one bare foot onto the stairwell expectantly. I followed, forcing my toes to accept the smut of the never swept hallways and gritty rubble without dancing back and forth out of disgust or running for my shoes. We had to be barefoot. We had to look abandoned.

  The alleyway was worse, with puddles of scum and tacky blotches of tar. We avoided all of the largest piles of poisoned rat bodies and sewage that was tossed out of windows, but I was still worried for Swan’s feet. What if she got a cut and then stepped on something squishy and Infected? What if I got her killed even before we tried out our Plan? What if Uncle Donnie found us and killed us and we never made it to the Auction to ambush the whole thing?

  “Slow down,” I urged her, “We don’t know who is coming around the corner.”

  “Nothing is certain, Ophelia. I'm Ready.”

  She carried on at her own speed. When I grabbed her arm to hush her as we approached the Propane Factory, she turned calmly and whispered to me, looking straight into my pupils.

  “It’s okay, Ophelia. We’re supposed to get caught this time. I'm Ready.”

  She placed her hand gently on mine. I winced. Her skin folded over my own, but it was probably ok, because we had just checked that it was all perfectly intact and horribly Lighter. She lead me to the dirty corner of a dirty street. Men’s voices grew near. We hunkered and dug our elbows into our bellies, feigning innocence but trembling with genuine fear.

  Two men saw us and walked directly for us, Sellers already. Too easy, too easy. They were both wiry and lean. One had a hideous mustache that gaped over a scar on his lip; his companion was missing a tooth and was wearing a mildewed necktie. They were both wearing musty hats. They whistled, and a third man followed behind them, leisurely swinging a cane as he went. Swan and I scooted closer together. I wedged my raggedy shirt between our bare arms.

  The third man’s suit was a nice shirt tucked into his un-torn pants, the brain to their brawn. He didn’t smell like mold and piss. He didn’t look like such a bad man to sell one’s daughter to, if one had to sell their baby, like maybe he could afford to keep them.

  He looked all around the corner that we were huddled in. He examined the rooftops, slowly scanning the nearby street ends for any of our potentially protective kin. Seeing none, he pointed at us with a clean, trimmed fingertip.

  “Alright. We’ll take these two. Silly girls, you should have found someplace else to squat. But that’s alright, we’ll give you a roof.”

  Swan released her grip on me as one of the men stretched out his meat slabs to grab her. She whimpered lightly as she looked up into the faces of our captors. She studied them intently for a moment and then let her eyes drop to the ground as the hulking figure with the mustache picked her up and carried her away by the elbows.

  “Why do I always get the bigger one?” whined the carrier with no front tooth.

  I stood and looked at my feet, very small relative to the bulky buildings and towering Dirtbags. I stopped breathing so that I wouldn’t accidentally gurgle. He took me by a fistful of my rags and led me by the makeshift leash, grat
eful that at last summer had begun so I didn't feel so cool to the touch. I followed him slowly away. The man in the suit smiled as we passed him.

  “Any home sounds good after a corner like that, I bet. Smart Birds. You might make it yet. Jeff, put those Sisters in separate cells. Peyar, don’t keep them together.”

  Jeff, with his missing tooth, and Peyar, with his horrible facial hair, lugged us to a mostly burned-out building and pushed us inside the charred doorway. Questionable support beams bulked over our heads. Half of the floor was missing. There was a gaping hole down to the basement and this was where they forced us. There was a ladder down to the cellar. It was missing several rungs and after we stumbled down, we could see four cells hunkered against the four corners of the stone foundation. Peyar tossed Swan into one cell and me into the next. They were already full of girls.

  There were eight in my cell. They huddled in a pile in the corner, nearest its barred window to the outside world. Three of them tried to stand, two of them succeeded, and the other fell backward to the ground, landing against the bare legs of an unflinching smaller girl. Four of the girls didn’t even have rags. They were naked on the dirt floor of the burned-out basement. I gasped and stepped backwards, away from the stench of urine puddles that I could see gathering in the low places of the floor.

  “Hey, we didn’t promise you a mansion, did we Bird?” the Boss in his fancy clothes clicked his heals away from the lip of the first floor, “Go cut the bread,” he ordered Jeff and Peyar. With us all locked safely away, they shuffled off to a closet behind one of the other cells.

  The two girls who were still standing collapsed onto the ground. They sighed and lay down still, not speaking or blinking, cheeks against the packed earth. I knelt next to them, careful to check for open wounds as I grazed their cheeks with rags draped over my fingers.

  “Everybody ok?” I asked, meaning relative to dead, not knowing what else to ask.

  “You should stand up,” the girl who had fallen first told me, “Whenever they look at you. Show them that you are strong enough to be sold to the fancier Buyers who come in at any old time, not just for the Auctions. If you can’t stand when they lift you, you don’t even get to go to the Auction. You just die here, because nobody would want to buy you.”

  I shuffled around to the front of the cage, to see where Jeff and Peyar might be. They were still missing and I couldn’t hear any footsteps.

  “Psssst” came a voice from the next cell over. It was Swan.

  “Swan,” I whispered urgently, “Don’t let them see you standing. If they see you standing you might get sold before the Auction! You have to look weak enough to get sold last, but strong enough to go to the Auction.”

  “I know” she whisper shouted back, “And did you hear that? They are going to get us bread!”

  “Help the other girls eat,” I advised, ducking out of sight and joining the pile of girls as Jeff and Peyar came around the corner, carrying trays. They banged on the bars with an empty cup.

  “Soup’s on!” they hollered.

  Some girls in each cell crawled to the bars at the front. Many others remained inert, not even glancing at the pans of mush that were set inside of the gates. Jeff and Peyar’s keys jangled on their belts as they ascended the ladder and disappeared again, leaving us alone.

  I peered inside of the pans. They were full of bread, soaked in water. A few of the girls dipped their hands into the bottom of the pan, lapped at the water and then scooted away crying softly and holding their stomachs.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, horrified, “You should eat.”

  “It’s moldy! All blue!” one girl shrieked, gripping her ribs and rocking herself over and over again into a stone that jutted out of the wall.

  “Shh,” another whispered to me, “The Auction is tomorrow. If you are strong enough to stand, it’s not worth the risk of food poisoning.”

  “Oh,” I sighed and looked more closely.

  The girls who could move retreated back against the walls, puzzled that I still pawed at the foul bread. Their atrophied legs were crooked under them, like they had all grown up in Cars, despite their city living. I gingerly touched their bread for them. I found as many non-moldy sections as I could and walked them over to the motionless girls first. Gently, I rested the soggy bread against their lips until they opened their mouths and swallowed with their eyes closed. I didn’t stop until the bread in the tray was gone and there was a small mound of blue pulp on the ground near the gate. When all that was left was the crumby water, I carried it around to all of the girls pouring it into their mouths, saving the last few drops for myself.

  A girl who hadn’t taken any bread at all, even when I held the soft, wet fluff against her lips for five minutes, began retching the water that I had poured into her mouth. It came back out through her nose. Poor thing. I set the empty pan back down by the front gate, and crouched near her head. I use my ragged sleeve to dry her face. She coughed and spluttered then just wheezed, spending all of her energy making her chest rise and fall. I held her hand, waiting for one of our guards to return. I couldn’t yell for help without gurgling.

  She breathed steadily for another few hours while I waited, but when I looked down at her in the first rays of a slow dawn that filtered through the barred window, her chest wasn’t moving.

  “Oh Gods,” I leapt to the balls of my feet, leaning over her on my haunches. I tapped her cheeks and looked into her eyes. I grasped her head firmly and turned it lightly from side to side. All with no results. I stroked her hair fringes frantically out of her face. I blew a gentle breeze cross her cheeks. I tapped on her chest. I moaned with my own jagged breath. It sounded natural in this setting. Several of the other girls moaned with me and moved as far away from us as they could. I choked on nothing and spluttered as I beat lightly on her fixed breastbone.

  “Oh Gods,” I arranged her hands in an orderly fashion, and smoothed her ragged smock down over her belly button. There was nothing I could do for her legs, they remained cold and limp like the rest of her. I glanced about for a blanket, thinking I should Warm her. But there was nothing further in the cell that I could use.

  “We should line our bodies up next to her! Get her Warm!” I urged the other girls, rattling a little bit in my throat.

  One of them looked up at me from her spot on the floor.

  “She’s dead. Just let her be.”

  “What?” I stood in the middle of them, trying to catch their eyes, “What?” my lungs thundered. I ran to the bars. I grabbed the cold iron and pressed my face against it.

  “Help!” I screamed, gurgling and rattling, “Somebody help! This girl is dying! We need to Warm her!” I ripped the inside of my throat with my volume, and felt black sludge slipping within my neck.

  “Are you ok?” Swan whispered as loud as she could.

  “No!” I yelled, slumping my shoulders and letting my hands go limp, “I am not okay. This is not okay. Nothing is ok.”

  “Geeze, Haven’t you ever seen a dead girl before?” croaked a girl in my cage, “Would you just shut up, please?”

  “They’ll come and remove her in the morning,” another one piped up, as helpful as she could be with what looked like a broken arm cradled against her bare collar bones.

  I sighed and then stopped breathing to avoid a long rattle.

  I stared at the body for many minutes. Nobody else moved, so I picked her up by the armpits and dragged her over to the front of the cell. The girls shuffled themselves to retake the prime real estate that had been occupied by her body. I settled her carefully by the gate, not letting her touch any of the cold bars or the pile of moldy bread. I folded her hands neatly across her stomach. And made her legs roughly parallel. I sat down by myself with my eyes closed. I opened them when I heard someone stirring. A girl who had no shirt was heaving at the dead girl’s rags, flopping the stiffening limbs awkwardly about. She finally ripped it from the body, toppled over backwards and crawled away to put it on, torn as
it was.

  I turned away from the girls and kept my eyes shut tight until mid-morning when I heard the gate click open and keys jangling. The cell was getting hot with the sun that filtered in between the bars. I cracked my eyes open and remained sitting. As many of the girls got to their feet as could. It was more than last night. Four. The bread was working. They were getting stronger already. Peyar frowned down at the body left by the gate.

  “Who’s strong enough to eat all of the bread without a tummy ache and drag a body all the way over here?”

  He stared at me suspiciously, sitting sullenly alert, all by myself.

  “Too bad for you,” he sneered, “We don’t expect any high-brow Buyers before the Auction.” His tongue waggled between his remaining teeth. “Don’t worry though, you’ll go fast and get us a nice high price.”

  He dragged the dead girl’s body over to the ladder by one creaking and cracking arm. He left us another pan of moldy bread and water. Some of the girls lapped at it, while Peyar collected three more dead bodies from the other cells, two from Swan’s. One by one, he hoisted them over his shoulder by their hair or toes and lifted them up to Jeff who grabbed their slack stick doll forms and dragged them out of sight.

  I was sick to my stomach, but as soon as the heels of the last body were gone, and Peyar with them, I hurried to the pan of bread. I stooped over the pond of stagnant food until I had picked away all of the fuzzy sections. I left another blue slop pile for the Dirtbags to retrieve like the dead.

  The girls took the bread much faster this time. Many held out their hands to receive their portion instead of waiting for me to put it in their mouths. And they all drank the water that I tipped up in the end of the pan.

  “Swan, Swan,” I hissed, casting the empty tin away from me.

  She mumbled groggily in return, muttering something to someone in her cell.

  “Swan, stay weak. We were right. As the strongest I’ll get sold fast to be in front of the caravan of vans. You have to get sold last. Stay in the back. Not too weak to get sold, but just the weakest to be included.”