He takes the needle, withdraws liquid into it.
Comes behind me. No, no. What is... No. I am beyond. Gritting. Bearing myself. I will my veins to harden into concrete, to never allow the intrusion, the break in. But I'm not supernatural, just a human, a female. One with thin bones, without wings or wisdom or experience.
The needle is so long. We look into the glass mirror. Him and I. I and him. The master watches. He bends my head to the side to expose my neck, which is so white and unreal under the hot lights. Like lab-grown albino flesh. I fight, my neck tensed, hardened with hate. He slides it into my throat slowly, deliberately, as if he wanted me to see. To know it.
He watches with careful, scientist eyes, deciphering cause and effect, how it matches the hypothesis.
And I plunge deeper and deeper into an abyss. A navy-blue sinkhole of water, darkened with slimy shadows and misshaped, slinking, night creatures. I look up and see the light on the surface, how beautiful it is. How the edge glows with silver rings, as if god's iris were watching me. I'm drowning into the alien ever, into the sound of something brushing by my ear, aloft and slight, low-flying shudder. A soft silken sound of growing by the millimeter. And the brim of fading light.
Mother, mother. What yellow.
“Do you love Jamie?” He asks.
I am woozy, floating in gel. Cushioned and insulated, as if a specimen, a growing organism. A fetus. The ends of sounds reach me, not the sharp syllables of starts.
“Yes.” The word comes out quivery, disassociated. I meet myself. I hear myself. But I am not me. I am an elicited version of me. My brain is pulled, something has entered and tugs at it. Implores.
“What do you do for a living?”
“Insides... humans.” Slow, slurping. Drool gathers at the corner. Slides down my chin. Lands on the edge of my nipple, which pokes out from my shirt.
“What is your mother's name?”
“L... a...n...a” He's asking easy ones. Ones he knows answers to.
“Who am I?”
“Doctor...” The words are coming at me quicker. I have impressions of words now, but meandering. As if leisurely collecting small nuggets of seashells. One by one. My ear drums pop.
“How do you feel about me?”
“I thought...” I try my best to stop, resist the tow of truth. I will be loyal.
“How do you know me.”
“No.” I'm coming up to a high. I am still a fetus, but becoming aware. I am forming millimeter by millimeter. Consciousness of my boundaries appears. I hear mother's voice, a hum vibrating within me. What was her word... Inmate. In. Mate. Submarine. Sub. Marine. This is me. Me is this. Me.
“What are Zeus and The Lion's Den?”
“Your... nothing...” Her words. Ruinous. Ruin. Us.
“What are The Honor Group and Venus?” He's twisting the words. Throwing them in the air, hoping they land in a mess I can't decipher.
“Fucking... your...” I try my best to fight against the tug. I must be loyal. They're extracting my brains, tapping my ears. Making them itch inside. I try not to show it. That would be a tell.
“No... fuck... fuck... you...” More drool streams gooey to the table.
“What did you think earlier.” He asks nonsensically.
“Your... mole...” Somehow it is all suddenly so funny. His mole, that black dot. How I followed it. How it landed me here. That small, raised, furry, little dot. Like a crumb you brush off the table. Like that insect you find on the street, the one you step on or step aside from, depending on how much hate you have. And I can't stop laughing madly. It helps relieve my itchy ears.
“My mole?”
I stare at it and burst out again. It is so cute and ugly. So innocent and guilty. I want to smash and pop it. Tears stream down. “I foraged it.” Forage. For. Age.
He is quizzical. At a loss for words.
“Scarlet.” Scar. Let.
A pause.
A breath.
“Let. Scar.” Another stream of drool drops onto my shirt. Mother laughs softly. I feel the rebound billowing through the gel and my new limbs. To my tiny bean of a heart.
“What you think?” I ask, wounded animal-like, glassy eyed, head hung with hunched shoulders, a long line of drool from me to my lap. My leaden tongue suspended as a pendulum.
He pauses. Gives me a strange, naked look. I see more emotion in it than all the time I've spent with him. It's saddled with surprise and fate and future. I know the camera watches his profile. Can they see it? That graphite smudge of ink in his eyes. The master behind the glass watches me, I feel the tunneled gaze. We're all on edge. What will he say. Will he be kind or cruel.
My eyes begin to roll back into that supreme white.
“The world is mad. And you are joining it.”
A pink haze. Gauzy, ephemeral. A diluted, diaphanous dawn you reach out to touch, but can never feel. Can never own it.
The upper reaches of sky congeal at the edges, into milky, opaque white.
Hints and tinges. The insinuation of pink bleeding into milk.
I could say...
I'm falling. Sliding deeper into whirlpools, into ashes and shrouds.
My nude flesh, warm and clammy, on a stone ground. I'm turned over by reptilian claws... the long pointed, yellowed nails. Thickened. A saber is used to carve a shallow crescent on my stomach as I watch in growing horror. Pain sears through me, sharp and mind-numbing. They pull the skin until it splits at the crescent's seams. My insides spill, shiny and plumped, still pumping. I see it, but there is nothing I can do as I cry out. They begin to pull and tug.
This is what they do. Take your gut. The very thing that warns you, guides you. About this. About them.
I walk through a dark forest at the edge of the world. Swimming with fog, it is a nightmare night showing a faint sliver of white, mysterious moon. Up above, black birds circle and dive and swoop. Carry bits back to the air. And I see it. Them. All the decapitated bodies. Some without heads. Others without legs. A head and torso, but cut off at the knees. Hung high in the trees. Dripping blood and being chipped away by the bird's. Peasant clothing soaked blood red. Facial expressions frozen in horror, one in laughter. Eyes wide open and others sealed shut into thin, fragile curves. Blood drips on me when I stand directly under a tree, still warm in this cold night. My ultra-sonic ears hear every aural molecule amplified. And the tiny, faint noises are beautifully terrifying. The brush of feathers, the tap-tap of beak hitting bone, squish of beak poking and pulling fresh flesh. The air stream flowing under wings, the ground engorging, softening drop by drop. Shallow breaths of hibernating animals. The trees ever so still, always witness to everything we do.
An empty, dank room. A basement without windows. My hands tied to the chair I sit in. Something slimy touches me from behind. Cold, wet and squishy. It climbs onto my shoulders, wraps its tentacles around my neck. This could be a kill move or a loving gesture if it were a human. Brown and white tentacles gleam, covered with salt water film and slime. It climbs to the top of my head. Opens its giant mouth on my crown and begins to suck and bite and consume. The rows of teeth puncture my skull, relieving the gassy pressure. It slowly lowers itself the more it eats. I only feel pulling, my brains being sucked into a vacuum silence. My mind going from aware, analytical and sensory to cottony, torpid, vague. Shredded and thinned, into its veins.
My spirit sees myself from afar and the giant octopus is now devouring my face, binging on the chewy bits of cartilage. I can no longer see and speak and think. Just a vessel now, food for it.
A blue sky spilling hanks of rope, hanging and dangling, as if our lives were theater and the behind-the-scenes apparatus fell free. People jump to catch them. They imagine the creator. Full, starry eyes searching for truth. We worship the ropes, just like we did when the pin bursts happened. They hang at different lengths, some short and unreachable and some long, almost touching the ground. Children grab them and tug to see how far they can be pulled. They cannot be stretched. I l
ook for a chair. Pull one up to a rope in a park full of children yelling, playing, singing. I stand on the chair and look up. The rope goes on forever into heaven, an unknown universe and interstellar space. Who originated this? Who or what has the power to thrust such realities and illusions onto us. I can't see the root, the conditions that grew it. And I know we cannot know the origin of much in our life. Why it is the way it is. Why such ropes come suddenly into our lives. I grab the rope and think, I am. I am. Slow-motion, haunting organ chords occupy my mind, louder and louder. Grinding high and low, then a one note nightmare that never ends.
I tie it around my neck, tight and strong. Yank to test it, then step off the chair.
I am.
And now I am not.
It is that simple.
There is a struggle, the body automatically wants to stay alive regardless of what the mind and heart want. I become still shortly after. Parents cannot hide me and the children gawk because they don't know what it means. They will have to be told. They will remember a person who did such a thing. And when they are an adult one day they will understand why even if they do not choose the same fate.
A room of science. A long, metal table covered with round, glass cups. Each cup filled with water, each cup holding a creature of the sea. They are specimens, naked and easily manipulated. No room to move, no freedom, just enough water to live a borderline life. Just enough to satisfy the master and its insatiable curiosities. A master who believes they have dominion over anything that can be captured against their will. A master who believes that anything that can be overpowered is weak and below them in the hierarchy. Not deserving of dignity and respect.
I see a medium sized fish squished into one of the cups. It lives but the cup is too small. Its body is folded in a curve to fit into the glass. It moves up and down, trying to keep its head under water. As if it's uncomfortable and trying to find the best position, as if it were attempting to stretch out. I'm sad. I can't stop the master. But I know I what I can do to help. I will take a knife and stab it. Put it out of its misery. This is no life. And I must hurry before the master comes back.
A diagonal light in a dark room, buzzing as it struggles to stay on. It flicks off and the room is afloat in quiet for a moment. I am calmed, sweaty with a fever that fades. Padded footsteps scurry outside the closed door. A man's deep, baritone laugh. My arms and legs can't move, they're strapped down. What time is it. I hear the man say, you know what they deserve, and a chill goes down my spine.
A second.
Another second.
A deep breath.
A wish.
A slight line of light appears, expanding as the door opens. I can't see him, only the dark shadow of him, his hulking, chubby outline.
He closes the door and turns the faint light on. It buzzes like trapped bees.
He stands at my feet, stares at me. I don't know if I should try to be alert or if I should feign sleep. I am in between worlds. There and here. But arising to now as the serum wears off. This time.
He comes closer. And closer. To my face. I smell his sour, putrid breath, the food decomposing in between his teeth.
We look eye to eye. I see a cold, impenetrable green that is beyond reason or empathy. He looks at the end of the bed where my feet are.
He slings his thumbs into my pants. And I whimper inside. I don't want to know what will happen, what this means. He slowly pulls them down. He slowly pulls them down. He slowly pulls them down. What is he doing. What does this mean. My mind can't comprehend.
To my knees.
He looks me down. My underwear. I keep my eyes trained on his face. I don't want to follow him, his sight, his rapacity. I want to appeal to his humanity, have him see my face. But he avoids it, keeps looking down there.
He trails his fingers over my underwear. Massages me as if I were to receive some pleasure from it. Is this happening. What is happening. Is this...
He puts his other hand over my mouth. As if I would scream. I want to, but I know I'm bound in a place where I don't exist. A prisoner in another dimension.
I try to go into the above, the mystify and secret. But my body knows.
He puts his fingers into me. As if searching. Then in and out, in and out. Methodical.
I close my eyes. The tears begin.
Then rough. Angry as if I needed to be taught a lesson. Tearing into me. Me into. In two.
My eyes close tighter, my face gnarling thick with horror. I tell myself to endure, forget the violence, evaporate into soul. That ultraviolet.
But I struggle between there and here as the inside is turned out.
There are rumors. Yes, he's right. But I don't have specifics. I tell him this once and twice. He doesn't believe me. Or they don't believe me.
I want him to give me a reprieve. He told me to believe. He knows me, must have some compassion for me. But we are in theatrics, a play being acted out before the masters to make them believe in our innocence. Him on his side, and me on my side. Do they believe anyone can be innocent? No one is in their world so they must not believe it exists.
“I want to know who they are. Where they are.”
“I don't know. I told you.”
“Tell me if you want to live.”
“I don't know anything.”
He stares, says nothing. Thinks this will compel me to speak, to populate the silence out of nervousness. But I have nothing. I don't want to play games, buckle under pressure to make something up. Even if I made something up, it'd come back to me. They will kill me anyway. I don't know what else to do. I am innocent.
He leaves.
What seems like hours later, he comes back with a silver tray of long needles and other surgical tools. I've seen them before at work. This is it. The beginning of torture.
I am scared. I've never been very good with pain. I could never hold it separate from me. It always singes, then incinerates.
I am scared, scared, scared. My heart thunders.
“I'll ask you again. Where are the other printers.” Not a question. A demand. He taps the table continuously, putting a burden on me.
I look at the tray. It gleams, promises all sorts of drawn out endings. I think of what he told me once. How we, the underclass, can find a way out with the help of some in the power class. That's how it accelerates. Otherwise, it is a slow, arching motion towards the light.
“I don't know.... I've heard they exist, but I don't know who they are. Where they are.”
Someone knocks on the glass from the other side. He hears it, cocks his head, but continues to watch me. His eyes are darker than usual. They say something I can't hear or bear. They are black and glassy, considerable and determined, from deep within. Volcanic stones formed in immense heat.
He picks up a needle and pokes my finger. Playing, intimating. My fingers are locked onto the table, unmovable. He holds my finger, penetrates the needle under the nail. Slowly. The pain shoots through me, to the tips of my toes. It takes my breath away. Makes me utter a whimper and shed a tear automatically. He pushes it deeper as he watches my reaction.
Yes, he tried to help in his own way. I tried to further that road, but ended up in the desolate. This dead end. One of perhaps many tries that failed to matriculate. The ones never spoken of, never celebrated. Maybe there will be another attempt by others... but not him, not me.
And another needle for another nail. It splits me, sears. He bends the nails up with the pins, the pins digging into my fleshy nail beds. He grabs the pliers and pulls out the nails slowly, millimeter by millimeter with a surgeon's precision. The pain... it's nothing I've felt before... an electric surge of sharpness washing over me, my fear. Acute lightning bolts of current ravishing me. Singular smolder at the source.
I'm bleeding a lot now. The smell of iron intoxicates us.
“Tell us the names,” he says.
Nails clack from the other side of the mirror, as if someone were impatient.
I don't yell. I hang my forehead, bang i
t on the table over and over, harder and harder, hoping it distracts me from the sizzling pain. That daggered trace over my nerves.
A moment.
A breath, a release.
I feel a white foam arise, the froth straining its fingers towards my consciousness. Tickling and caressing back and forth until it slowly inhales me whole, the outgoing tide washing me away into amnesia, the white froth sudsing my thoughts. A tremble into exorcism... then oblivion.
I awake at the table. He's gone, the instruments too.
My fingers throb, hot and swollen. I sit up and look at them, sobered and lowly. They are red, inflamed, caked with dried blood. The table has rivers and shallow lakes of dried, black blood, as if topography of a forsaken land.
He's pulled out four nails, two on each hand.
It breaks me to see it. How I am damaged. By someone I trusted. How it will get worse from here, yet it is unimaginable.
I whimper and cry softly.
You broke me. Can I ever become whole. I am broken. You did it. I am a nobody and you showed me.
You have dominion over me.
I stare at them. Move them gingerly. I want to curl up, cry myself to sleep. My resolve is a faraway memory.
A pain aches in the bowl of my pelvis. My period starts, convulsing and shedding, as if mourning and heaving with despair. The lobs of blood and lining begin to seep out of me, soaking through my pants, creeping out into the world.
I sit in my blood and gore. I cannot grasp...
Flattened puddle of emotions.
Vanquished and tamed.
A male attendant comes in, unlocks the table shackles. Grabs me by the arm to stand me up, but I wobble like a bending reed. He sees the wet, soaked-through period stain and says, shit, you're a piece of work. I'm ashamed, embarrassed he's seen this and look down at my dirty feet. He drags me down the hall to my room, my feet flopping like a fish out of water. I hope he takes me to the bathroom, someone has taken me before, but he throws me like a rag doll onto the bed and straps me down. Bleed in there, he says.
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