Woman Scorned Page 33

  Rhonda had only ever touched him there twice. The first time was the day he’d arrived and she’d removed his useless, vile testicles. The second time, however, had been on his one-month anniversary. That second surgery had exchanged the external ring of spikes around the base of him for her own invention- an internal one which would stay with him forever.

  It had been so long since he’d gotten an erection that for a moment he hadn’t understood what was happening. When he did, he dropped his hand fast. He had touched himself too long and paid the price. Was he dirty again now? What if the women knew what he’d done and made him leave the shower? What if they sent him back to his box to start his education all over again. What if… what if they made him change his name again?

  Brother would be so disappointed in me, he thought. But the notion was as brief as it was ridiculous. No, he corrected. Brother would never think that. Brother loved me. Brother showed me the cloud game. I’m only scared of the women, that’s all. My brother would be proud of me today. That’s the truth, even if the women don’t want me to know it.

  For a few scared seconds he waited for a woman to arrive and pull him out and push and kick and drag him back to his box. But nobody came, and he remembered that he was alone and they didn’t know after all. Still, he was very careful from then on to only wash himself there in brief spurts. He even turned down the heat a bit, afraid it would cause another erection.

  It was at least another hour before he’d had his fill of the shower. At first he just washed and re-washed all of these other places again, especially his hair. Then he took to shaving. It was a slow process even with the hot water and soap lather. The hair on his face was too long for the razor. Still, he kept at it, lathering, cutting, and rinsing, until eventually he was able to shave clean to the skin.

  But even after there was nothing left to shave or clean, he didn’t leave the shower. Instead he did just as the woman had told him. He took his time, turned up the heat once more, and enjoyed his reward. He only turned the water off when he began to feel weak and dizzy and the steam made him feel waterlogged.

  When he stepped out of the shower he felt completely refreshed yet so tired he collapsed onto the bench, half on top of the green clothes. He leaned against the wall for several minutes more, a giant smile of purest happiness cemented onto his face. Finally, he was able to lift a leg and pull the clothes out from under his burdensome body.

  The clothes were a stiff fabric, but he didn’t care. It had been ages and ages since he’d worn clothing. It felt good to know he would be able to cover his penis from sight. Maybe the women would see him as a cleaner man now. Maybe that was the whole reason for the… she had called it a jumpsuit.

  Closer inspection revealed why. It was all a single unit with a metal zipper running from neck to belly. He slipped his legs into the pants of it with still-weary arms. Then he stood and put on the rest. He zipped it closed and smiled, proud of himself for a reason he couldn’t quite place.

  The sleeves stopped midway down his forearms and the pant legs fell three inches shy of his ankles. He didn’t mind at all.

  Then he looked down and saw two things he wasn’t expecting. On his left breast was a thick tag made out of the same material. But stitched into it in white lettering was a word. He turned the material to read it. OTTER, it said.

  What is that supposed to mean? Were otters smart or strong or kind? He couldn’t remember. He did know they floated on their backs and ate oysters, but that didn’t tell him if having OTTER on his jumpsuit was good or bad.

  Before he could consider any further, he saw the other thing. Down on one leg, covering a fist-sized area just below the knee, was a dark patch in the fabric. He touched it and it was stiffer than the rest of the material. This bothered him. It looked like dried and faded blood. He tried not to wonder why they would give him a soiled jumpsuit after he’d been so good to clean himself and decided it was time to find out more of what was going on.

  He slid open the outer, cotton curtain and looked around. It was obvious he had been there for a very long time. Other showers that had been open were now closed and steaming mist from the inside. And the one directly across from his, which had been in use when he arrived, was now empty and sopping wet.

  Wondering if he’d get to meet these other men- in all his time he’d only ever been allowed to see Glat from lavatory time- Obe turned and walked to the far end of the hall of showers where the woman had instructed him to go. What he found there was nothing short of amazing.

  7

  It was days later, wasn’t it? Or weeks? He couldn’t tell anymore. He couldn’t think anymore. At the crest of a small hill, his right leg gave out and tumbled him once more to the grass. By the rocks lined up in his box of a home, he knew it had been twelve days since he’d last eaten food. It was past dawn and in the streets behind him the death knell of screeching tires had already woken most men. At least one may already have been run down and killed.

  Lying there, Obe knew dewdrops alone could not keep him alive much longer. He needed sustenance. Something his stomach could digest.

  He looked out across the majestic, overlapping hills before him and saw wave after wave of sweet green grass. All of it so tall compared to his real home, wherever that was, it flowed with the wind in constant downward dips. Even there on the top of his own short hill, the grass was perhaps six inches high. He eyed it all, hungrily.

  Cows eat grass, he thought. Other mammals too. And, strangely, his mind suddenly offered a new memory. There was a poet who’d once talked about leaves of grass, wasn’t there? He had been forced to study it in college. Something about grass being the people of the world because of how common it was.

  Desperately, Obe reached out with an exhausted arm, grabbed a fistful of grass, and pulled. But he was too weak to rip it all from the earth, and he had to release half of the small bundle. Still the grass held tight to its roots. He halved the bunch again and then pulled and ripped a few strands from the strong ground.

  He looked at it a moment before attempting to eat. It could be lettuce or celery. Maybe even spinach or a long-lost cousin of asparagus. He folded it in thirds to give it a palatable thickness and pushed it into his mouth. Before even chewing his nose was accosted by the sweet smell of fresh cut grass. Then his teeth came down carefully and the smell intensified.

  There was no actual taste at first because the stiff fibers wouldn’t be cut in those first bites. He chewed some more, surprised to find his jaw was sore from lack of use yet happy that in the very least he’d be able to give his stomach something to work with. Then the grass began to give way to his gnashing and the taste came. It was so much stronger, more bitter, than the sweet smell had been. It quickly became unpleasant and his stomach threatened to lurch. He chewed on, slowly, trying to imagine dinner-table greens. He wanted to swallow, but the thin strands wouldn’t go down individually. He needed to mush them together with what was left of his saliva and swallow the collected mass as a whole.

  It’s just another kind of vegetable, he thought. It’s got nutrition. It will give me strength.

  I am scum, his other side sneered. This is my final punishment. My name is-

  “Fuck off,” he said aloud, and forced himself to swallow. But the mush still had stray blades not yet mashed with the rest, and the bitterness was too intense. His stomach, despite its urgent need, refused the food and Obe coughed and gagged what was in his throat back to the ground from which it came.

  He longed for a bottle of water to cleanse the taste from his mouth. Already one blade of grass was jammed between two of his teeth, causing an annoyance that bordered on pain. But his discomfort didn’t matter. What did was that he’d come so close to consuming a solid.

  Determined, Obe took another, smaller, stash of fresh, green grass between two fingers and folded it again. This time when he chewed the taste wasn’t as severe. In his mind he pictured spinach.

  Wasn’t there a cartoon character who loved spinach? Pops
ey, right? Yes, Popsey liked spinach because it made him strong.

  He chewed and chewed until the grass in his mouth was completely mashed. Then he swallowed and quickly held his hands up to his closed lips. His stomach didn’t approve but this time allowed it to pass.

  Inside his body, Obe could feel the strange food moving down his esophagus and into his stomach where instantly a great commotion began. He felt slightly nauseated, but infinitely improved. So what if it wasn’t meant for humans? It was a plant. It was food. It was life.

  Tentatively, he took another, slightly larger, bundle of grass and began folding it.

  8

  Obe cupped his hands again and brought the little pool of water to his face. He drank slowly and with shaking hands. The rainwater was the sweetest, most perfect taste he had ever had in his life. It had been fourteen days since his banishment. He had eaten countless fistfuls of grass to stay alive, but this was the first water other than dew he had touched or even seen in that whole time.

  He licked the drops from his palms before remembering there was a whole puddle of water by his damaged knees. Damaged, of course, because he’d fallen upon them so many times in the fortnight before.

  He plunged his face in this time and inhaled the cold liquid through his nose and mouth. He coughed, spraying water all down his emaciated chest, and plunged in again.

  The puddle was large because the pothole was a full three feet across and several inches deep. The rain that night had been enough of a godsend, and he’d passed the hours with his mouth open to the sky, drinking drop after drop that found its way to his throat after all those miles of plummeting through the midnight skies. But despite the impossible volume of water now at hand, the puddle had dropped in depth in the minutes he had been drinking it. Already the steady queasiness in his gut was growing into a true pain. He didn’t care, though. He could barely understand what he was doing. He only knew there was finally water, and he was going to drink it all.

  When he came up for air, however, he saw his reflection in the rippling pool beneath him. The moon was nearly full once again, and coupled with the billion bright stars he could even see himself in some bits of color. The face that looked up at him was one he had seen for years but now saw again for the first time.

  His face was riddled with acne around the nose and forehead. His pathetic facial hair had begun to fill in adding what looked like layers of dirt to his cheeks and jaw. His nose was crooked and swollen, obnoxiously large from when it had been broken all those weeks before. He pulled back his lips in mock smile and the tinge of green along his gum line glared at him.

  Then there were his mysterious eyes of different colors. Looking up at him, the reflection sported a crisp, striking blue on the right while the left was a brown so dark that even in sunlight it often appeared almost black.

  Finally there was the newest addition. The hideous scar reaching from the top of his forehead was in the exact location he knew his brother’s scar had been, and it ran a path down between his eyes and disappeared at the top of his jaw.

  Just look at me, he thought. I’m a monster.

  He drank of the water again, filling his hands and his stomach until he was forced to sit back, engorged and smiling happily at the pain he hadn’t felt in weeks. In front of him was the edge of the black sector’s streets and beyond he could see the start of the rolling hills reaching out to the various cliffs. Farther still, he knew, was mile after mile of ocean and sky.

  He looked up and saw a bundle of wonderful, clean clouds. They were perfect for making pictures and stories. Immediately he saw a cloud with an excellent face. It had sunken cheeks, a pair of hollowed eyes, and a long, howling open mouth. It was an angry face and perhaps even dangerous. It looked familiar, though Obe couldn’t place it.

  Probably another memory trying to find its place in my brain, he thought. But then the cloud morphed in the midnight wind, the eyes spreading apart almost comically and the nose disappearing.

  “It’s a ghost,” he said aloud. And even in his temporary joy he felt the pain of not being able to share it with his brother.

  He looked at other clouds to find the matching heroes and victims to continue his newest story. Soon he had three more and their changes in the wind told the victories and defeats they endured. It did not take long before he began imagining how his own life could be manipulated as easily as the characters in a tale of woe or joy. It did not take long before he allowed himself to fantasize the ruination of the women.

  When the ghost clouds had moved on and Obe’s story had ceased, he sat up feeling perhaps better than he should. The Family doesn’t know what it’s missing, he thought.

  Minutes later he was walking stiffly on stable legs toward the island’s green sector. He kept to the shadows as best he could and listened carefully for a revving engine. His feet didn’t stagger, however, and his legs didn’t weaken. He would search for his brother, and he would search for real food. It was his only course of action. All else would be like living as another lingering ghost.

  This day he finally scored a bit of food. A man named Wog-

  “W. O. G. And oh, gee I must be a dog.”

  -had been too new and too scared to run away. Obe told him that if he didn’t give him his fruit he’d tell the women where he slept. Wog hadn’t been able to see irrationality of the statement and had freely given over a whole apple. Obe managed to save it for almost a whole ten minutes before finding a dark alley where he sat and enjoyed its sweet juices. His stomach had insisted it was too full to finish after only five bites. He had ignored this, of course, and eaten even the core and seeds before he moved an inch further.

  While climbing a paved street in the hour before dawn, he saw the fence surrounding the fortress and pulled back a full city block. But the silence and stillness of the massive building compelled him to creep ever closer. This was not the same place he had been released from all those months ago. Surely it was smaller than he remembered.

  He stopped and hugged the side of the last building before the fence. The entire area was empty and quiet. The fortress loomed like a great stone monolith, but Obe’s fear was muted by perspective and experience. He wanted to see more. There was a tree off to his left by the fence. He glanced, listened carefully, then moved to it.

  He looked at the fortress on the hill above him. It stood there so solid and imposing, but somehow also so frail and pathetic.

  It’s my perception that’s changed, he understood, not the building. Then a stronger thought hit him. My God, I’ve actually grown.

  The perimeter fence was nine feet tall and a hundred yards from the massive structure. The space between fortress and fence was, as always, a hill, and this one was pockmarked with strange, blackened circles in the ground.

  That’s where they burn our bodies, he thought, though he would never learn how close he had come to the truth.

  He stood there by the tree for some time, wondering how many men were inside getting tortured and losing their memories one little piece at a time. Then his eyes wandered back to those strange scorch marks, and he felt a flutter of unease cross his heart.

  Then, right in front of him, a door in the fortress opened. A green door. And six women in pairs of colored shirts like animals from Noah’s ark- two green, two black, two blue- filed out like soldiers on their way to war. Each of them was carrying a shotgun.

  Suddenly Obe recognized the tree he was standing under. He recognized the hill with all its circles of blackened earth leading down from the fortress. He recognized the green door, too. Looking to his left he saw the gate in the fence he knew would be there. This was the place he and all the men of the island were released from their prison and left to start fending for themselves. He wanted to run, but even more he wanted to see. Quickly, he scrambled up the tree and hid high and deep among the leaves.

  His heart pounded in his ears. The danger was real. His litany, which he suddenly realized had been absent for days upon days, came to his lips an
d started its magical soothing effect on his mind. It was then he closed his eyes and was brought backwards several months before to the day he had gotten his own release. The day his life had truly begun.

  9

  When he turned the corner, he was met by an orderly collection of chairs half-filled with other men in green jumpsuits. They were all showered and shaved and looking quite rested and pleased with themselves. Standing before them was Rhonda.

  “Welcome, OTTER,” Rhonda said. “Have a seat but don’t talk. We have a few more men to wait for, and then we’ll begin.”

  Obe didn’t speak and took a seat quickly. The other men smiled at him. One offered the chair next to him and Obe moved to it, observing his nametag. The other man wore the jumpsuit with COW on it, and suddenly Obe didn’t feel so bad about being OTTER.

  As the minutes passed Obe became just like the other men, happy and curious. He didn’t speak, but Rhonda seemed to have no aversion to them turning in their seats and looking at each other. He read everyone’s nametag. There was SQUIRREL and FERRET and HEDGEHOG and MOLE and MACAQUE. What was a macaque? He had no idea. But it didn’t matter. He fairly liked being OTTER soon enough. It was the fun animal of the group. The other men seemed to like it too. He got more smiles than anyone else.

  Another man soon came in much like he had, not expecting the little gathering and quick to find a seat when Rhonda told him to do so. It was fun to watch his eyes open wide when he turned the corner and even more fun to begin the round of showing nametags all over again with each man. He was PLATYPUS, the poor, mixed-up thing.

  Finally the last seat was filled- there were nine of them now- and Rhonda didn’t go back to her little chair in the corner. Obe was disappointed and felt bad for that last man. He didn’t get a chance to read all of the nametags. This man was MARMOT.