I’m folding the laundry like Darren taught me to. I pluck my sweater Darren bought me last week on from the clothesline, fold it into quadrants, and plop it into the laundry basket alongside the rest of my clothes.

One fold, two fold, three fold, four! Darren had exclaimed excitedly when he trusted me to go outside and do laundry by myself. I parrot his singsong voice as I reach up to fold a shirt.

A bunny prances a few feet away from me in the tall grass, its dead eyes staring ahead into the creamsicle horizon. A grin spreads across my face as if I’m seeing an old friend. My hands furl like I could feel its fur between my fingers, rubbing the hairs between my pointer and thumb finger in a gesture familiar only to me. I almost run toward it before I remember I can’t go past the clothesline or else Darren pulls a mean face and gives me more vegetables than meat at dinner, and I don’t want to test what else he’s capable of. I wouldn’t dare to, anyway. Before, my landscape consisted of skyscrapers, towering beings that never left my sight. Now, in the golden countryside where the horizon stretches uninterrupted, I’ve never felt more alone.

So, I finish my folding and walk back inside the warehouse that Darren makes me call home. I find myself calling it home, too, sometimes, but I don’t like when I hear myself say that.

I set down the laundry basket near my bed that creaks too much whenever I move. It scares me at night, even though Darren plugged in a nightlight for me so that I don’t have to walk to the bucket in the dark when I have to pee. The creaking reminds me of the crows that populate the tin roof and squawk at me when I go out to collect my rocks, and even though I like birds, I don’t like those birds.

Just as I begin to load my folded clothes into the battered dresser with one drawer that squeaks when opened, Darren opens the warehouse door as if on cue.

“Connor, I’m home!” he announces proudly, setting down a couple grocery bags on the floor and opening his arms. “How are you doing, son?”

I’m not Connor, and I’m not your son, I want to say every time he says that, but I had given up a long time ago.

“Hi, Dad,” I reply, the word splintering inside me like the wood chips I played with where Darren goes to chop wood for the back boiler.

His footsteps are heavy, his work boots probably weighing more than I do. One thing I hate more than my creaky bed is the cracked concrete ground that sucks up my coins when I roll them on the floor and allows bugs to crawl inside. Darren tries to kill the bugs for me, but when he is doing whatever he does on the outside, I’m alone with the spiders and roaches that also want to call this warehouse home. I want to scream at the bugs, Fine! Take it! It’s yours! I don’t even want to be here! But all they do is stare back at me with beady eyes or tickle my neck when I sleep. That’s when I really don’t need the bucket to pee. I have to sit in my mess all night until Darren comes and silently cleans it up and kills the bugs surrounding me.

He hugs me and does that thing where he buries his nose in my hair so deeply, I can feel the hairs in his nostrils tickling my scalp. All I do is pat him on the back and wait for it to be over. The first few times he did it, the humid moisture of his breath in my hair caused me to lash out and hit him. That reflex has since worn off, and my body is limp like a ragdoll in his arms.

His hand is as big as me, his thumb resting on one shoulder blade and his pinky stretching to the other. I notice then that I’m getting taller—I used to measure up to his hips, but now I can rest my face against his chest, hear the steady beat underneath the warmth of his muscles. I find myself flattening my hand against his back, pressing myself closer.

“Good job folding the laundry.” Before I can process that the hug is over, Darren is already over by the dresser, taking a look at my handiwork. “Just like I taught you. I’m proud of you, kiddo.”

I don’t deny the warmth I feel in my chest, the radiating feeling similar to when I’d wet myself in bed. I walk over to the grocery bags and take a peek, seeing my favorite snack, Pirate’s Booty, in one of them. I breathe in eagerly and jump, shaking my hands as Darren walks over to see what the fuss is.

“You got the big bag this time!” I yell, grabbing it out of the bag and sitting down with it on the floor. “Thanks, Dad!”

“Hey—Connor, you can’t have that before dinner,” Darren says as he begins to reach down to take the bag from me. But something—perhaps the combination of me thanking him and calling him Dad in the same breath—must have changed his mind. “Okay, you can have one.”

He sighs and opens the box, tossing me a bag before taking the rest to the cupboard we call a pantry near the makeshift kitchen toward the middle of the warehouse. I eat my snack gratefully until he calls my name, and I run to the dinner table. I eat my dinner with even more gratitude. It’s steak and potatoes night, my favorite.

“It’s only fair for my growing boy,” Darren says in a fond voice. He never eats with me. He sits at the table and watches me eat. Sometimes I wish he’d eat with me.

But that hope is dashed when he reaches over, and I flinch out of habit, and I remember why I keep my distance. A look of pain crosses Darren’s face, and he haltingly retracts his hand like a machine out of oil, resting it on the table and keeping his eyes on the swirls in the wood.

Then comes nighttime where he sets out my pajamas and turns around while I change. When he hears the shuffling of clothes stop, he sits on my bed and pats the spot next to him. I crawl up next to him, his arm settling on the curve of my waist as he digs in the bedside table through the stack and pulls out a book I don’t recognize.

“The Mysterious Benditch Society?” I ask, raising a brow as I look up at Darren.

He chuckles and leafs through the pages as he corrects me, “The Mysterious Benedict Society. It’s a more challenging book, but I think you can do it. It’s about time you move up a reading level.”

I smile at the thought that Darren thinks I’m smart enough to get through this giant book and understand what’s going on. But the length of a book never intimidates me after we read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone together a few months ago. I lean my head against his shoulder, my eyes dancing across the dedication page.

“I saw a rabbit today,” I say as he tries to find the first page. “A really cute one.”

Darren tucks his chin to look down at me, that same nice smile on his lips. “Oh? What color was it?”

“White and pretty, like the one from Alice in Wonderland,” I reply. I purse my lips. “Sometimes I want to go to where Alice went.”

Darren’s face hardens, his eyes going dead like the rabbit in the field. I don’t like when they do that, and they almost never do. But whenever I do something wrong, he gives me that look where I can see my reflection in the dullness of his eyes, see the panic in my own face, and all I want to do is hug him until the look is gone. But I don’t have to do that since Darren clears his throat before I get the chance to and turns back to the book, finally reaching the first page.

“Sometimes where we are is the best place to stay,” he says. “It’s where you’re safest.”

He starts to read, but I don’t listen very much at all. I pretend to doze off, and Darren slowly lays me back onto the mattress and tucks me in. He leans over to kiss me on the forehead. The vulnerable squish of my temples makes the perfect landing spot for his lips. After he leaves, I pull the covers up to my neck, my fingers lingering on my temple as my sleeping aid.

I dream that night of when I was Evan in my previous life, in my Before. I dream of the regular snapshots: a flash of my mother’s pink bathrobe, a cigarette dying a painful death in an ashtray, my father’s veiny hands as he reached out to me. Their faces are blurred—I tried to remember them after four years, but my drawing skills from eight to now haven’t improved all too much. I stare at the stick figures, and they stare back at me, unrecognizable except for the beauty mark underneath my mom’s nose in Eggplant from my Crayola set.

I turn in my sleep and hear a screeching in my nightmare that I chalk up to my bed springs. A red car pulls up as I walk home from school. The tires screech as it comes to a sudden stop, catching my attention. A man sits inside, a nervous smile on his face as he stares at me, lowering the window. “Hey, kiddo,” he says, his voice wavering as his eyes bounce around outside. “I have something caught in my tailpipe. Mind helping me getting it out?” I don’t know anything about cars, but I look around the car and see black smoke coming from the tailpipe. I shrug and walk over, and before I know it, I’m blinded by black smoke and restrained, the backpack on my back replaced with the leather cushion of a car’s backseat.

I don’t have the nightmare often, but when I do, it’s usually when I almost forget the beating I received on my arrival…or was it before? I was beat until the memory became a haze, until the man’s face looming over me blurred. Sometimes, when Darren wasn’t looking, I’d cut out the faces of the ugly villains in my picture books and hold them up to him when he’d be making me breakfast or reading the newspaper at the dining table. I stopped when he questioned why I was cutting up the pages.

I awake when the creaking of the door, which has been a neutral sound these past few years, strikes me with fear. My chest tightens to the point that I grip the front of my shirt, the firetrucks printed on the fabric sucked into my fist. However, the movement indicates that I’m awake, and I scrunch up when I hear the slow intake of air and metered exhale get closer until the heavy breathing is above me. I wonder: if Darren sees that I’m faking, will he attack me again? He hasn’t once beaten me since our first encounter, but that one time is enough to make me tiptoe whenever he is near. The breathing continues for a few beats: I’ve discovered that he likes to watch me sleep for a few minutes before waking me up. Sometimes he touches me, traces my eyebrows and my nose bridge, caresses my cheeks and strokes my hair, and I’d feign waking up so he’d stop. But I let it happen until he says, “Connor, time to wake up,” and I raise my head in response to the name as if he had said Evan.

He makes me breakfast, and either he doesn’t notice my solemnness, or he pretends everything is normal. After he feeds me and does the dishes, he bids farewell and leaves. I could make a run for it. He’d long since stopped locking the door. But I attempted that once before, and after wandering around hopelessly for an hour, I broke down sobbing on the dirt road until Darren came to find me and swaddled me in a quilt he made for me—for Connor.

I leave the house and go on my usual rock collecting journey, finding a particularly smooth black stone when a rustling pricks my ear and causes me to whip around. I spot a rabbit’s figure hopping into the clearing, but this one isn’t the one I saw yesterday. This one has brown spots, a heart-shaped one on the ear.

Bunny! I cry, my pet rabbit’s corpse laying limply in my hands, which are coated in its sticky blood. The blood stains the brown mark on its ear, leaving it an ugly mahogany. I scream until somebody tells me to shut up.

I blink, blink again to rid myself of the horrible image. My chin dimples from how hard I’m holding back my tears, and I get up and run off to seek refuge at home. I curl next to my bed, rocking with my head held in my hands until Darren comes home and sinks to his knees to comfort me. These flashbacks are not new. They’re rare, but when they happen, they are raw. They started about a year after I was taken, but time here is a sludge that is hard to measure. There’s a clock on the wall, but Darren didn’t teach me how to read it until a few days after my—Connor’s—ninth birthday. My only sense of time is how often the flashbacks come.

The simple sound of Darren’s jacket zipper was enough to set me off once, equating the zipper to the feeling of heaviness on my body, so much so that I couldn’t breathe and clawed at my shirt for relief. Darren bought a new brand of dish soap, and I reflexively covered my eyes and bowed my head to the floor. Darren taught me how to cook when Connor turned eleven, but when I turned toward him with the knife and began to walk, he cried “Stop!” and I froze, my grip slackening and causing the knife to hit the edge of the counter and tumble to the floor, narrowly missing my feet. A large purple bruise on my leg appeared after I grazed the side of the dining table, and I wore long pants until it healed even though it was the middle of summer and a hundred degrees at home because the sight of it would send me into a crisis.

I’m eating lunch when Darren’s gaze on me is more searing than usual, and he reaches out to slip a hand over my wrist. “I love you,” he says. “More than anybody else in the world. My love is pure and unconditional. Do you know what unconditional means?”

“Yes,” I reply, even though I don’t. His grip on my wrist is constricting, confining me, and that’s the last straw. A burst of images, an accumulation of all the flashbacks that had taunted my being all these years, dot my vision in fragments. Still frames and videos flood my vision like when I had a fever and could only see stars when I stood up.

My father’s face materializes over Darren’s, his wiry eyebrows, gnarled scowl, and veiny hand reaching out to me. I feel the pressure on my neck while my father’s other hand grasps my wrist, my eyes looking over my father’s shoulder to see my mother watching the scene in her pink bathrobe, her arms crossed with a cigarette hanging loosely from her lips. Her beauty mark is tucked underneath her thick smile lines, the same shade as Crayola’s Eggplant. You’re gonna kill him, my mom says with as much nonchalance as somebody talking about the weather.

I’m just gonna teach him a lesson for eating my fucking chips, my dad replies, grabbing me by the hair and taking me into his room. The scene fades to black until I stand up after my bruised legs stop trembling and see Darren’s face through the window. He was making the same face he’s making now—one of aghast and torment—his grip on my wrist long gone and replaced with a worried shaking of my shoulders.

“Connor! Connor!” he shouts, but I cannot hear him. All I hear is the blood pounding in my ears, my father’s grunts, the squawking of the crows as my mother dug a shallow grave for my pet rabbit.

I accept the name, wholeheartedly enjoy the sound of it rolling off my dad’s tongue, and renounce my old name. Yes, I am Connor. I am Connor Ackers! I fling myself at my father, bury my face in his chest and cling onto his shirt as if being removed would kill me. He collects me in his arms, his hug full of the same love he’d been giving me these past four years. Only now do I accept it, let myself fall into it, allow myself to press my heart to his. Only then do I understand the meaning of unconditional. I sink under the weight of knowledge.

I live life as Connor Ackers for two blissful months. Dad begins to teach me how to ride a bike outside. Settling into our newfound roles must have lowered our defenses because I’m wearing nothing but a T-shirt and shorts as a jogger comes toward us. She slows in her steps, takes out her earphones, a curious expression on her face. The crunch of gravel elongates as her footsteps get more hesitant. I feel Dad stiffen behind me, his fingers digging into my shoulder.

“Connor,” he says, and I look up at the sound of my name. He’s staring ahead at the jogger, whose eyes never leave me as her expression morphs into shock. “Turn around. Now.”

When we get home, Dad grabs a folder with his passport and other papers. He calls his friend Mike, asks for a favor. Dad packs a few bags, his foot tapping by the fax machine as he waits for documents to come in. It’s sundown by the time that eerie sound of crunching gravel under tires echoes throughout our home. He pauses, and that’s the first time I see my father cry. His tears are silent as the police ram the door down, but mine are wailing, roaring, scalding the ears of anybody near me. I wrap myself around Dad’s leg like a koala as the silver cuffs seal my father’s fate. I scream his name, refuse to move, but when I look up, I see Dad’s face gazing down at me through the tears that blur my vision. His face is oddly calm, a bittersweet smile on his lips. His eyebrows are pulled tightly as if somebody had sewn them too close together, his eyes wet and soft. I know that if his hands were free, he’d reach down and pet my head. I already long for his touch.

“It’s going to be okay, Connor,” he says. “I’ll see you soon, okay?” Then he’s gone, leaving me splayed out on the floor with burning lungs and bloodied lips. My wails die in my throat, and I’m only capable of a pathetic weeping.

“Poor kid,” one of the cops says in the car, his eyes staring me down from the rearview mirror. They allowed me to take one thing from home: my quilt, that is currently wrapped around me. I look out the window and see the countryside grow into skyscrapers and concrete replace any sort of nature I had grown used to. These powerful steel beings used to be my friends, but now they are my enemies. I’m dropped off at the police station, where two people from Before come forth and hug me. But they’re nothing like Dad’s hugs. These are loose, performative. I see Helen look around at all the reporters before she hugs me, flipping her hair over her shoulder to make sure they get her good side. Bill glares down at me disdainfully. My body, which had been clean of bruises for the past four years, except for the ones I got from playing, is littered with them by the end of the month. They had given me a grace period after my kidnapping, but things resumed as normal soon enough. By the end of the next month, I’m in a foster home because a woman in a suit came to our door and took me by the shoulder and told me I’d be staying with an older lady named Barbara who had crow’s feet and a saccharine smile.

The cycle continues for two arduous years until I amass enough money to take a bus to San Quentin State Prison. I had made an appointment earlier that week when nobody was home, my voice still low in case they had cameras installed in the living room. I’m wearing a jacket made from the quilt he gave me, and I hope he can recognize it after all these years. It’s tattered from so much usage; from all the nights I fell asleep with it. But it still smells like him.

The officer leads me to a line of people talking to men clad in orange jumpsuits behind thick glass, their hands curled around telephones like in the movies. I sit down, buzzing with excitement, until a muscular arm reaches around the partition and grips the counter, orange flooding my vision as I look up and see him. He looks worn out, older—a two-year trial and prison will do that. But his essence is the same: the same salt-and-pepper hair, the kind wrinkles that line his face, albeit deeper, and that smile that still hasn’t deteriorated in four years. I pick up the phone, my hand trembling as the tears crawling down my cheek match his.

“Hey, Dad,” I whisper. “It’s Connor.”

If she hadn’t joined that art history class back then, she doesn’t think she’d be sitting in a jail cell now, awaiting sentencing. But, as she looks down at the dry, cracked skin on the back of her hands, her bruised knuckles, and her scuffed-up boots, she doesn’t think she’d do anything differently. She knew what she did was legally wrong, but morally? She doesn’t feel an ounce of guilt in her body.

Her lawyer told her to act apologetic tomorrow, to cry as she read out her written-up statement to her victim, but she doesn’t think she’d have it in her to even say the words “I’m sorry” without laughing. Because she isn’t. She would do it a million times over.

--

Ruby joined an art history class about ancient Greece and homosexuality. It seemed like the most fun class compared to learning about Egyptian dirt and obscure Japanese murals. She sat next to a boy with enough B.O. to singe her nose hairs, and when the professor began to speak in a monotone voice that made every sentence stretch out a minute longer than necessary, she opened her laptop to begin the process of switching to another class.

“We have an Attic cup pictured here on the screen. Does anybody have any first impressions of the image?”

Ruby had her cursor hovering over the ‘drop’ option for the class when a hand raised.

“This is black-figure pottery, most likely made between the 7th and 5th centuries. It shows two figures engaged in—” She cocked her head, her coiled hair falling to the sides like bundles of lavender, “—intercrural sex?”

The class laughed uncomfortably. Ruby’s eyes, however, were set not on the figures engaging in indecent acts on the projector, but on the woman a few rows ahead of her in the lecture hall, earthen skin glistening under the warm morning light floating in from the Palladian window each time she moved her hand back and forth as she wrote in her notebook. Ruby’s eyes drifted to each person in their class, but none shone as brightly as she did. Every voice other than hers fell away as if she held the only microphone in the room and sang with every sentence that left her lips. She made most of the class laugh, which was a feat in and of itself at nine o’clock in the morning on a Monday for a gaggle of college students.

“Now can anybody answer what style of pottery this is?” the professor asked. She smiled when nobody’s hands went up—she had expected so and began segue into the lesson. However, the woman in the third row, three seats to the left foiled her plans.

“I believe it is red-figure pottery, which replaced black-figure pottery and developed in Athens. It’s personally my favorite form of Greek pottery,” she answered.

Usually, such smartassery was annoying to Ruby. But coming from somebody who spoke with such softness in her voice, with a voice that made her lean in from intrigue, hearing her speak was nothing short of a privilege. Ruby never would have held a minute straight of concentration in class. But, thanks to this woman with lavender coiled hair and skin the color of freshly ground coffee, her notes numbered three full pages when she left class that day.

As she walked out of the classroom, she pretended to fiddle with something on her phone until those heeled boots crossed the threshold between classroom and hallway, her head snapping up just in time to catch the woman’s eye.

“Hey,” she said quietly, and the woman raised a brow and looked over her shoulders before pointing to herself. Ruby chuckled and nodded. So she was dorky, too. “Yeah, you. I was wondering how you knew those two guys were having sex on the vase.”

The woman laughed, hiding a snort behind her hand. She reddened at that, but that only made Ruby take a step closer. “Oh, well, I study a lot of ancient Greek art.”

She turned to walk away, but Ruby saddled up next to her, her eyes falling to the woman’s open notebook that revealed sketches that seemed straight out of a museum exhibit. One particular freehand sketch of the statue of David with highlighter yellow lines coming out of his head in radiating columns made her hand drift forward and press her fingers into the ruled paper, her mouth agape in shock.

“Did you draw this?” Ruby asked, breathless. She traced the sketch, the strokes so heavy the lines seemed carved into the page.

The woman was as speechless as she, her eyes finding anywhere else to look other than Ruby’s face in some sort of misplaced embarrassment. “Oh…yes, I did. It’s just a silly little sketch, though, it doesn’t mean—”

“This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” Ruby said, but when she looked up at the woman’s bashful face, her blush red enough to be seen on her dark skin and her heart-shaped lips pulled into a pursed smile, she realized she had lied. “It’s museum material.”

“Thank you,” the woman whispered, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. She spared a glance at Ruby, her voice wavering as she asked, “I’m Samantha. What’s your name?”

That fateful question led to Ruby and Samantha sitting together in class from then on, the boy with horrendous B.O. long forgotten. The only information Ruby gleaned from class was whatever analysis or factoid came out of Samantha’s mouth, and the rest of her attention was set on what Samantha’s hand decided to create that day. She saw Samantha as some sort of god, a kind and creative god that drew only beautiful things, even if they weren’t pretty.

She learned that Samantha liked to sculpt, oftentimes rushing away after class to hole herself up in the art studio and play god with a different medium. Sometimes Ruby would sit on a stool and watch Samantha sculpt for hours, her PDFs unread and her essays unwritten. She’d watch Samantha transform a mound of clay into an aquiline nose, almond eyes that looked back at her in gratitude as she scraped away. Ruby liked to think of Samantha as some sort of Frankenstein, except she never abandoned her creations. She’d stick to a project until she was done, often at the cost of being locked in the studio by security after eleven at night. Ruby would tell off the security guard, and she would stare at her feet until she was dragged off by the arm and nodded along to whatever rant Ruby spouted. She oftentimes found herself smiling to herself, mirroring Ruby’s anger in her next art project in the form of those thick furrowed brows and dimpled chin on a new face.

“That one kind of looks like me,” Ruby remarked one day.

Samantha halted in her movements, her hand stuttering as she searched for the words that were wreaking havoc in her mind. “Oh. Must be a coincidence.”

A silence fell between them, taken up only by the scratching of Ruby’s pencil on paper and the awkward squelching of wet clay underneath Samantha’s thumbs.

“You should submit your art to a museum or something,” Ruby said, surprising both herself and her friend. Ruby had been thinking about telling Samantha for a while, but even though the words came out of her mouth, she couldn’t believe that her lips had formed them.

However, Samantha looked back down to her creation, smiling along with the clay. She ran a thumb over the gray lips she had formed a few minutes ago, smoothing the slay and leaving behind her unique thumbprint. “You’ve been thinking about this for a while now, haven’t you?”

Thus began Ruby’s new career as Samantha’s manager. She quit her job at the mailroom since it had been cutting into all her hours at the studio, where Samantha’s creations were becoming more and more elaborate. She was crafting halos that looked like delicate glass from heavy mounds of clay, was forming facial expressions so complex Ruby couldn’t crack them. Ruby spent all her time at the studio on her computer or her phone, looking up art competitions or showcases where she could submit pictures of Samantha’s art and network with well-known artists. Samantha was excited, the growing pile of coffee cups in the trashcan and the tremor in her hand as she sculpted indicative of her joy.

“I got in contact with a local artist who’s putting on a show tomorrow,” Ruby said.

Samantha stilled in her movements.“I have class tomorrow.”

“I already emailed your professors saying you’re feeling sick,” Ruby replied

nonchalantly, staring at her nails before going back to speedily banging her laptop keys.

Only then did Samantha dare to raise her head, her eyebrow quirking. “You have my email?” Her eyes drifted to her laptop on the table next to her.

“Oh, yeah. Your password is your dog’s name followed by 1-2-3. You should change your password. Anybody could hack it.” Ruby gnawed on her thumbnail. “Want me to change it for you?”

Samantha turned back to her project, her head faltering like a broken animatronic. “Oh. No. It’s okay. Good to know.”

Samantha went to art showcases. Ruby bought her a Rolodex for all the business cards she had amassed. She sat and listened as Ruby marketed her to museum curators, who looked upon her like a specimen rather than the picturebooks containing her projects. Ruby would glance over her shoulder at her as if she was some prized cow at an auction; even her cadence matched an auctioneer. Perhaps that was why so many curators took an interest in her. After a couple of rejection letters, the acceptances rolled in like a tide and swept Samantha away. She was caught in a riptide, and the last thing she saw before drowning was a lifeguard with Ruby’s face staring down at her with a big grin and waving proudly as she watched her go under.

It came to a point that she didn’t care if she was locked in the studio or not. She hid a mattress and blanket underneath one of the tables in the back, but it was hardly used since Ruby would bring her enough caffeine and Ritalin to keep her eyelids stapled back until her eyes were burned by the nascent sun. Her professors forgot who she was, even her art history professor. She was an art history major, but it was as if she was never in college in the first place. Ruby used to stay with her at every moment of the night when they worked late together, but she’d leave after midnight under the excuse that “managers need their sleep.”

“I don’t think I can do this,” Samantha cried during a mental breakdown, caused directly by the combination of stimulant drugs that were enough to fry every synapse in her brain. She rocked back and forth in the corner of the studio; once it had been her home, and now it felt like she was Fortunato. Ruby stood stoically above her, her arms crossed and her chin high as she spared a glance down at her crumpled friend.

“You are better than this, Sam. You are meant for greatness. I can see it. I just have to bring it out. But go ahead, pay me back for all I’ve done for you by crying on the floor. I gain nothing from this. I’m doing this because I love you.”

Ruby had told her this before. Back when they first started these late-night sessions, when time passed between them like sweet honey and didn’t leave her stuck like a fly in molasses. When Ruby had said that before, she was smiling. Now, she looked down on her with scorn, a deep wrinkle extending from her nose to the corner of her mouth. Samantha stood up and walked to her desk, grasped a loop tool, and began to sharpen it against a sheet of sandpaper.

“Good girl. Now, I have a curator who’s interested in you. I brought you these pills, so if you could finish this next project by tomorrow that’d be—”

With a roar and bounding leap, Samantha descended upon her friend with the loop tool and pressed it into her skin, covering up her screams with her own laughter. She was intrigued by how the skin came away more easily than clay in her hand, exposing the pulsing meat underneath that rosy cheek. She ignored the claws scratching at her chest and arms and punched the thing into submission. She continued to carve in utter fascination until it dropped to the floor at her feet in a heap of flesh. She let the bloody tool fall, maroon dripping from her fingers as she walked away from the writhing, moaning creature she created like Frankenstein. Except she proud, owned that she let a demon go loose by not carving out the thing’s heart instead.

--

Samantha stands at the defense table in the courtroom, delivering her apology in a monotone voice that reminds her of her art professor. She wonders if Ruby, sitting behind her, unrecognizable in face bandages, is reminded of that time, too. She heard that Ruby sold all of her art now that her name meant nothing with a crime attached to it. But no matter how much money Ruby made, it’ll never compare to the satisfaction Samantha now feels that every day, she will look into the mirror and be reminded that she is her god. She is her mound of clay, sculpted to her liking, her most beautiful and horrid creation. Her magnum opus.

She was a jaunty young thing, constantly zipping from one opportunity to the next. One day, it was the student government association in high school, the next, it was college. It didn’t matter much in the long run, though.

Education was never a priority in her family, specifically referring to her. Her parents denied it to the heavens, but their time was devoted to something much more pertinent, much more masculine. Her brother, Connor, was of much more importance—he held all the promise in the family in his calloused hands. From valedictorian to star baseball player (s’go Bears!), he was the star of the show. Literally. When she begged Connor to assist with tech in the musical she got the lead in, her parents applauded more when the cast motioned to the tech studio than when she took her bow.

She liked to think this obvious favoritism was not a source of insecurity for her. She liked to think she had thick enough skin to handle her brother’s obliviousness to the inequality. When her brother graduated with honors, their parents threw a grand party and invited their friends and family from near and far. When she graduated college with honors, she got a cupcake and a pat on the back. She had had to hide her cheeks, flushed with resentment, and teary eyes, mumbling a clipped thank you lest she seem ungrateful.

Only when she got married did the kudos come rolling in. Her mother’s smile reached the apples of her cheeks for the first time. Her mother cried at the wedding, hugged her daughter, and whispered in her ear before she retired to the hotel room for her wedding night, “Makes lots of babies for me.”

She pretended that this didn’t sour her attitude for the rest of the night. She pretended to enjoy being loved by her husband. Instead, her hand was splayed across her stomach, wondering if her mother would finally love her when her belly was engorged with child—if pride would finally fill her father’s face when she handed him a box with tiny baby shoes filled with pink and blue wrapping.

When she got pregnant, she was less than surprised. It seemed on par for the course that was her destiny for a mediocre life. Her parents were more enthralled to hear about her pregnancy (much more than when she got accepted into college or graduated—but that was expected). She smiled and rubbed her still-flat belly as her parents fussed over all the changes she would have to make to her life. No caffeine, no alcohol, no fish (even though her favorite dish was sushi). She was to give up all things that made her enjoy life. But it was in exchange for something that would make her life better, that would make her life whole.

But, when she looked in the mirror at night, she couldn’t have felt emptier.

She used to be a high-ranking publicist, but her work was put on hold due to her insufferable morning sickness. Her child wanted to make her life as miserable as possible, to the point that the only thing she could do comfortably was splay out onto her bed and stare up at the ceiling fan. But not for too long or else the spinning would make her nauseous again. Her husband lay next to her in bed, his hand on her dome belly and running a finger down the dark line separating her stomach into two halves. He gasped in fascination when he felt a kick, her skin stretching to accommodate her child’s sudden need to display its physical prowess.

Meanwhile, she felt even more nauseous. The kick wasn’t something to celebrate for her. She pushed down on her child’s leg, telling him to knock it off.

“He’s going to be an athlete, I just know it,” he said, his eyes on her belly and only her belly. When was the last time he looked at her like this?

She looked at her husband and frowned. They hadn’t even found out the sex yet.

She kept promising her coworkers that she’d come back. That she was going to take maternity leave and get straight back to work. However, her parents’ pestering for her to quit her job to stay with the kids (plural, because she would gladly put herself through a few more instances of trauma) caught up to her. She found herself nodding one day in response to their pleas and picked up the phone later that night. Her coworkers seemed to have expected the news already. She let out a wet laugh after she hung up. She dreamt of her job, her coworkers, anything that tied her to the person she used to be.

Her brother was a VP at a bigshot start-up, a new woman on his arm each time he came to family dinner. Their father clapped him on the back. Their mother looked at her son with stars in her eyes, Ursa Major in one and Ursa Minor in the other.

She quit her job. Even with all the free time she had now without playing catch-up with her coworkers, she was still keeping up to date with new releases, nearly salivating at the mouth at the need to do something other than listen to her mother ask for updates on the baby (it would be too much of her to ask how her daughter was doing, of course), plan out a baby shower she would rather die than host, and mentally prepare herself to deliver this baby.

“She’s a big one,” her gynecologist said with a proud smile as if she was delivering the baby herself. “We’ll try for a natural birth as much as possible, though.”

She was 5’1. Her child took up her entire abdomen. People inquired with enthrallment on whether she’d survive the birth, as if the gamble on her life was some juicy gossip to be swapped with strangers. She swallowed down the bile in her throat at the thought of that child’s body coming out of her, and when she looked over at her husband, he had a similar expression on his face.

“It’s a girl?” he asked in a small voice.

“Oh, did you two not want to know?” the gynecologist asked.

“No, we did,” she replied with confusion. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing,” her husband mumbled, waving the topic away.

However, the expression on his face did not change, and he stayed silent the entire car ride home. He white-knuckled the steering wheel, and she wondered if the leather would pop. She waddled inside after her husband, and the second she stepped foot in the living room, their bedroom door slammed. She ran a hand through her hair in frustration at her husband’s antics, but when she brought her hand back in front of her, it held a sizeable lock of her dull brown hair that held no gloss no matter how much light shone on it. She clutched it in a tight fist before tossing it in the trash.

The birth was earth-shattering. It was considered so because her husband swore the ground was rumbling with her throaty grunts. It turned out to be a C-section at the end after many attempts at torturous pushing. She was losing enough blood and was passing out far too many times to justify putting her through that much, even for her gynecologist that made the natural birth work as much as possible. The baby was born and swept away, her husband drifting toward it and leaving his wife comatose and drenched head-to-toe in sweat and blood and snot and vomit, smelling a wonderful combination of piss and shit. It was only natural, unlike her birth, which her mother criticized her for perpetually.

When the nurse came over to hand her child, now free of bits of her intestines and body that were torn away in the miracle of life, she turned her face and shook her head. Both she and the baby had been cleaned up to meet each other. She was wearing a new gown that was free of vomit, and she was now somewhat conscious, her husband having roughly shaken her awake.

“Meet your baby,” the nurse cooed with an excited smile. “Here, hold her.”

“Mm,” was all she replied with and shook her head again, letting it loll to her shoulder as she closed her eyes. “Later.”

When she awoke, she felt a molar loose in her mouth. When she pushed on it with her tongue, it fell free and nearly choked her before she spat it out into her hand. She looked around, spotting her husband rocking with their daughter and the nurses preparing to clear out of the room now that they’ve seen she wasn’t close to death’s door. She gripped the tooth and hid it behind her pillow, a sick, twisted gift for a terrible Tooth Fairy. Except she wasn’t getting anything but anxiety in return.

She loved her daughter. Yes, she did. She had no choice but to love her. She liked seeing somebody who was a perfect combination of her and her husband cry, scream, and occasionally laugh at a bird pecking at the window. She enjoyed seeing her child grow from a pink raisin to a chubby, rosy-cheeked angel who teetered when she stood and laughed when she fell on her butt.

Her daughter’s laughter was the only thing that stopped her decay—or rather, delayed it. It was better that she quit her job. Between juggling taking care of a child and husband, buying presents year-round for holidays and birthdays of long-lost relatives, and congratulating her brother on all his successes, she had no time to do much else. She would grit her teeth as she hugged her brother for going public with his startup and buying a penthouse apartment in New York City with his model girlfriend, but she had already lost three teeth since her daughter’s birth, and if she lost anymore, she’d have to ask her husband to buy her veneers.

She lost another lock of hair each time she had to attend some asinine new mommy Facebook get-together, each time she had to buy a baby shower gift for a woman she barely knew simply because they shared the inescapable title of “mother.” Her scalp had been thinning for ages, but at the ripe age of twenty-six, she had a bald patch at the base of her head.

Her husband noticed one night as he spooned her, and he pressed a finger into it, causing her to whip around in shock.

“What’s going on with your hair?” he asked with a deep frown. “You got cancer or something?”

She started with extensions. However, the extensions fell out along with her hair when she had to give up her favorite hobby, reading, in favor of learning to sew the holes in her daughter’s clothes. Reading had been nearly impossible throughout caring for her daughter, but she had always managed to sneak a word or two in at the end of the night before her eyelids sank in fatigue. Now, with her daughter running around in all directions in preschool, falling and scraping and scratching, there was no time to waste. Her daughter was growing and often would complain about being hungry. At least when her daughter was a baby, she could produce her food without having to go out to the grocery store to buy some. Now that her child was past breastfeeding, the snack aisle at the grocery store had become her second home. She left bits and pieces of herself there accidentally; a tooth between the Clif Bars, another lock of hair next to the Welch’s Fruit Snacks.

Next came the wigs. Her husband sneered at the sight at first, but when he realized that her hair was not going to grow back, he accepted the wigs as opposed to the eyesore that her hair—or lack thereof—had grown to be. One day, after a long PTA meeting to decide whether the kindergarten formal theme would be under the sea or Hollywood, she lifted the wig. The last of her hair fell out onto the bathroom tile from underneath, and the wig fell from her hand along with it.

Her husband climbed into bed one night, her back to him as he turned toward her. His finger traced her spine and rustled the covers as it went underneath them, pulling on her pajama top.

“I think Ruby is getting lonely,” he purred. “Want to give her a brother?”

When she went to the bathroom after her husband had fallen asleep, she spat out her two front teeth.

Her next pregnancy ripped her apart at the seams even more than Ruby did. She was bedridden to the point that the gynecologist had to make a home visit, which she thought was no longer a feasible thing for doctors to do. But she was so incapable of harboring a living thing inside her body that she needed a doctor to tell her that after this child, she was done. She pretended not to see the disappointment in her mother’s eyes, and she held her tongue when she so desperately wanted to say, You only had two children yourself, Mother. Leave me alone.

Her husband was distant, more than usual. He fed her, helped her walk, held her hair back when she vomited, but the cuddles were few and far between. He was an adequate father and husband, but it stopped at adequate. There seemed to be an unspoken wall between them in bed, and he pretended not to hear her sobs into the pillow or notice that she put in dentures every day and took them out every night.

“It’s like I’m married to my grandma,” he’d text his friends, which she only found out after using her husband’s phone to take pictures of their daughter.

“You need to stop being so dramatic and pull yourself together for your husband and children,” her mother would say.

If only she could find the right strings that, when she pulled them, would zip her up tightly and grow her hair and teeth back. However, each string she pulled resulted in the loss of a new tooth or her nose feeling all-too wiggly. Each string was wrong and led her further and further to her demise. If only she could sew herself back up as she did with her daughter’s clothing. But her sewing capabilities stopped at sewing a patch over cotton.

She gave birth to a healthy baby boy, and her husband was ecstatic. He held his son up like in The Lion King, his grin illuminating the entire room. Before she lost consciousness, she looked over to her daughter, who was staring at her father, not her new brother. Her eyes fell upon that proud grin of his, and she could tell what her daughter was thinking. It was yet another cycle of inadequacy, of noticing her father’s pride in anybody other than her. She began to weep, and the nurses took her tears as dewdrops of golden joy, and they wiped them away with their gloved fingers as if they were harvesting them, wanting to keep that joy only a mother could feel toward her child. But what they took home that day, what they wiped on their scrubs was not joy but agony, not happiness but melancholy. It was grief.

When she sneezed for the first time after the birth, she tore her stitches and popped out an eyeball, her intestines spilling into her hands just as her eye bumped into her cheek. The 911 call was calm, collected, cold. She had grown numb a long while ago.

Her husband’s vomit stained the carpet when he arrived home to the violent sight before him, and when she returned from the hospital, it was up to her to try and get the stain out. As she was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the fibers with enough bleach to singe her nostril hairs, her eyeball popped out again, this time snapping free from its cord and plopping into the vomit-and-bleach concoction in the carpet. She blinked, blinked again, then looked up. She could still see with her other eye. Sight was not worth putting that stained eyeball (that was probably bleached to oblivion) back in her skull. She ordered an eyepatch online, hiding away from her husband until it arrived. He didn’t question the patch after he saw it for the first time. He simply turned away and continued bottle-feeding their son (since she couldn’t breastfeed without sobbing), subtly shoving his daughter’s pleas for playtime away with his foot.

Driving with one eye took a while to get used to, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. The PTA moms, with their platinum blonde Dolly Parton blowouts, elegantly manicured nails, bodies sculpted by Dr. Wilson, balked at her new appearance. It was too much to take in the tacky wigs that had to be replaced weekly since her scalp was incompatible with the wig glue, the obvious dentures that caused her to speak with a lisp, and now a glaringly large black eyepatch all at once. She was kindly asked to stop attending the meetings; they cited her continued hard work and the fact that she had just given birth as their reasons, but she could see the fear in their eyes as they broke the news, probably afraid that something else would fall from her face.

And they were right: later that day, as she washed her face in the gas station bathroom on the way home, her nose, which had been wiggly for far too long, finally went through on its silent promise. It unscrewed itself from her face and plopped into her palm, staring up at her tauntingly. She would have cried, but her tear ducts had been singed a long time ago. She hurled it into the garbage can, covering it with paper towels before crashing into the bathroom door and back into her car. She looked in the rearview mirror, catching her children’s eyes. They quickly burst into tears, her daughter screaming, asking over and over where Mommy’s nose went.

“Mommy’s going to look like this from now on,” she told her daughter. “You’ll understand when you get older.”

She felt as if she could breathe better without the buildup of snot and boogers in her nostrils and nose bridge, but the appearance was less than appealing. When her husband saw her for the first time, his surprised expression morphed into one of disgust, his own nose wrinkling, as if he had smelled garbage that had been stewing in the sun for hours.

“God, what happened?” he asked. “Can you get it reattached? Or can you call Dr. Wilson to fix it?”

Her other eye popped out that night.

Her husband purchased thick, black sunglasses so that people—and most importantly, him—wouldn’t have to look at her eyelids sewn shut, protecting the even worse sight of her pitch-black eye sockets. She was lucky that she had gotten used to the layout of their house before going blind and that she had advanced abilities to predict where her children left their toys.

“You should get glass eyes,” her mother said, pressing a smooth orb into her daughter’s palm. “It’ll make it more palatable for people to look at you. By the way, have you given your sister-in-law a baby shower gift yet?”

She sneered. “I don’t recall Connor’s wife getting me anything for my last baby shower.”

“Come on, Jane. Don’t be such a prude.”

She bought the usual fare in baby shower gifts: trendy baby shoes, a bodysuit with turtles on it, and a cute toy. The silence was unbearable when she walked into the party with the gift in hand, her skin crawling under all the eyes that were most definitely staring at her, tearing her apart and criticizing what was left. She excused herself early, setting the gift down after being led to the table by Sabrina, Connor’s beautiful, completely put-together wife. She claimed nausea, but the nausea lie became the truth when people began speculating about baby number three for her.

“I nearly died my last pregnancy,” she stated before slamming the door closed behind her. It was only when she got home that her lips peeled off with the makeup wipes when she removed her lipstick. Her fingers, trembling in their movements, crawled up her jaw and peppered themselves where her mouth used to be. It was smooth, barren, with no opening to be found. She reached out to the mirror, her nails screeching against the glass. She let out a wail, which was muffled by the thick skin covering what should have been her mouth. She drew her fist back and let it spring into the mirror, shards embedding themselves into her skin. It wasn’t as if she needed the mirror anyway. She didn’t need much anymore.

IVs were attached to her arm like leeches, except they were forcing enough nourishment into her to keep her on the brink of life. However, she was the opposite of nourished. She was the picture of '60s heroin chic—a walking corpse that looked as if she belonged in an isolation ward in the bowels of a hospital.

“I mean, at least you got a wife that doesn’t talk,” one of her husband’s coworkers said when they came over to watch a soccer game. “God knows I’d like that once in a while.”

“And she isn’t fat, either,” another said. “I’ve been trying to get mine to lose some weight.”

When she went to hug her husband, she felt his hands grip her forearms and gently push her away.

“Your bones hurt,” he claimed, patting her on the shoulder before brushing past her to envelop their son in his arms instead. She stood there, her arms outstretched until her daughter took her husband’s place. She felt something on her chest move, and she quickly pushed her daughter aside and ran to the bathroom.

Her breast, which used to be supple and heavy in her hand, was now saggy and wrinkled like a raisin, and currently sat in her hand. Her other hand came up to rub the spot where it used to be, which was now smooth without even so much as a nipple to delineate where her chest started and where it stopped. No longer did she have the marker of being a mother. As much as her breasts were saggy, they were an indication of her commitment to feeding her children. No longer did she have the marker of being a woman. As much as her breasts were thin and wrinkled, they were a symbol of her femininity, the last thing she could hold onto and claim she was sexy, worthy of being desired. As if she wasn’t already mourning the loss of her left breast, the right came off soon after, smacking onto the bathroom tile.

When she came out of the bathroom, her arms crossed above her chest to hide the sudden flattening of its surface, it was as if her husband knew what had happened. He sighed, balancing their babbling son on his knee.

“So you won’t consider going to Dr. Wilson for some implants?”

She was wheelchair-bound when her leg fell off after she tripped on her IV stand. It was inevitable that her other leg followed quickly after. It was fascinating how quickly she spiraled into disorder, with body part after body part falling off right after the other. Her fate had been decided the second that first lock of hair detached itself from her scalp. Now, all there was to do was wait along for her demise.

Was this how those with terminal illnesses felt? That impending sense of doom with the knowledge that they would die at any moment, that death would sweep them off their feet? At least those with terminal illnesses have the sense of peace that they contributed nothing to their cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. With her, she could have said no. She could have said no to her parents, could have moved far away and pursued her need for validation in more healthy ways. She should have said no. Perhaps she’d still have her limbs. Perhaps she’d still have intestines that weren’t dust. Perhaps she could see her children again.

“We should consider end-of-life care,” their lawyer told her, pushing a document across the desk. Just the phrase “end-of-life” caused her ear to jump ship, as if her body was wholly rejecting hearing any more about the subject. However, she could still hear; it was only a hole in her head now instead of an ear making it nicer to look at.

“Please sign this to allow your husband and children to use your inheritance,” the lawyer continued. When he noticed that there was no possible way for her to sign the document, he handed the pen over to her husband. “If you nod your head, you allow your husband permission to sign this document for you.”

She turned to face her husband, who was presumably on her right side. I want everything to go to the children, she said in her head. But she knew it would take far too long to try and tell that to the lawyer. So, as her final show of submissiveness, of passive acceptance, she nodded. On her final nod, her head separated from her neck and thumped onto the floor.

It only took a few seconds for her to process what had happened and what was going to happen before her consciousness escaped her. She felt a hand on her shoulder (metaphysical or otherwise), spindly fingers gripping her melting flesh. She was finally happy to say ‘yes,’ to give her permission to do something. She agreed wholeheartedly, following Death happily into the abyss and disappearing on her own free will, the first act of independence in her forty-one years of life.

Left behind in her wake of self-liberation was a pile of ashes in the lawyer’s chair, her head having decayed into dust. Her husband brushed her ashes into a dustpan, tipped them into a decorative urn, and placed her on display in the attic, a corner reserved for his late wife. His new wife never would have seen it.

Inscribed on the urn:

Jane Milgram

Dutiful wife, selfless mother, and docile daughter.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

This garden hasn’t always been dirty. But the new people, these youngsters, are moving in and dirtying up my favorite park. I have been coming here since my infancy, when the waters were as clear as the skies, which have also seemed to get dirtied by this noxious gray fog that blocks out the sun. The greenery has faded away, with the sprawling emerald grass fields getting paved over with rusty bricks and gum-littered concrete—the birds, instead of landing in the park to rest before continuing on their migration south, flew right over the disappearing trees, their gnarly branches snagging a bird’s wing one time. I caught it. I nursed it back to health, but it had lost its flock, who were probably already in Mexico enjoying margaritas and guacamole by the pound. How depressing it must be, to get left behind by the rest of the group and be completely alone in an unknown world.

Now, as my bird Stella sits next to me munching on the sunflower seeds I spread on my knee, I scowl as my childhood home becomes less and less populated by flowers and bushes and more and more by Starbucks cups and couples doing the most intimate things in public.

“Where has the time gone, Stella,” I grumble to my companion, shakily reaching into my pocket and pouring out more sunflower seeds onto my knee. My goddamn Parkison’s refuses to allow me to pour them in a straight line, and most of the seeds land on the ground. Good thing Stella isn’t picky, jumping happily onto the concrete and pecking at the seeds.

“Whoa, a bird!” a voice rings out, and I protectively scoop Stella from the ground and cup my hands over her small body. I look up to see one of those hipsters rushing over to me, his giant headphones bouncing on his shoulders that held a head with a sickeningly bright smile on his face. “Gramps, is that your bird?”

Gramps. How asinine. Whatever happened to respect?

“Well, I’d say that’s a white-throated sparrow if I’ve ever seen one,” he says, digging in his pocket and holding out what looks like millet in the palm of his hand. Stella seems to smell the food because she peeks her little head out of the gap in my fingers and flutters her wings, causing me to open my hands in fear of injuring her. She flies out quickly and into this stranger’s hand. Great, now I can’t have my own bird without these people stealing her away from me. At least he has enough respect to recognize her species. It seems as if he has more respect for the bird than me.

“Yes, her name is Stella,” I reply.

“Stella? That’s a great name for such a pretty lady,” he replies. How...odd. He talks in the same way I talk to Stella at home.

“Yes. She’s named after my wife.” I suck in a sharp breath. “My late wife.”

“Oh, damn,” the man says, taking the liberty to walk over and sit down on the bench, Stella still happily munching away. “Sorry about that, dude. But hey, Stella here is a pretty good friend, I’d say.”

Stella looks up as if to acknowledge the compliment before diving back into the millet. He turns his head to face me, and for the first time, I take a good look at him. He can’t be more than twenty years old, and he has a pair of binoculars around his neck. He notices my line of sight and laughs. “I was bird-watching by the way. I didn’t expect to actually get this close to a bird today, though.” He lifts Stella up to his eyes and smiles as if he’s looking at his bride on his wedding day, and I realize he looks at the bird the same way I looked at my wife. He then pours the rest of the millet onto the bench in the space between us and smiles at me, a blinding grin that causes me to frown deeper in response. He slaps his thighs lightly in a way to not startle Stella, beginning to rise from the bench. “Well, I better get going. Thanks for the experience, gramps! Sparrows are one of my favorites other than warblers, but they’re hard to beat. See ya!”

But before I realize what I am doing, my arm shoots out and stops the man from moving another inch forward, surprising the both of us. We look at each other in awkward silence for a moment before I clear my throat. Maybe not all these hipsters that run around the park like it’s a playground aren’t too bad. Some of them are using it for its intended purpose. So I begrudgingly bring my arm back into my lap, my hands shaking again, but this time it wasn’t from the Parkinson’s.

“I’d like to hear more about those warblers, if you have the time,” I say quietly, my gaze dropping to Stella absentmindedly picking away at the plentiful food in front of her. The man stutters for a moment before sitting back down and lifting the binoculars from his neck.

“I guess I could stay a little longer with dear Stella here,” he says happily before launching into an explanation of warblers, a poor interpretation of their bird call, and why they’re his favorite (it was the first bird he had). As I listen to him speak so happily about birds, I look around the park and notice it’s...brighter than before. The couples are no longer making out in broad daylight. They’re holding hands, feeding each other fruit as they sit on the rim of the fountain, chatting happily. There are other birds, pecking at the concrete and the few bushes that are present. The fog parts to allow a ray of light to pass through, struggling to illuminate the park until it reaches Stella, who looks like an angel. The man and I agree to meet up again in the park, and for the first time, I actually look forward to coming back.

The snow fell much slower that day. The cat batted at the snow absentmindedly, his tail flicking lazily as he blinked the ice out of his eyes. He looked over his shoulder at his back, which, in the meantime, had become lightly dusted with the pure white frost. The cat stood up and shook off the evidence of winter, displeased with being wet and cursing himself for staying out in the snow for so long. But it just felt so refreshing, and the snow provided a nice pastime that didn’t involve hissing at other cats for personal space and looking for food.

Occasionally, a human would pass by, and the cat would only be able to see their heavy boots and their hands that stunk of human flesh. Sometimes, they would grab a stick and try to play with the cat, who simply stared back with an expressionless gaze. How demeaning. A stick? The snow was much more exciting, nature’s version of a cat toy. The cat jumped off the green electrical box and onto the slush on the concrete. He let out a low groan at the feeling of dirty, watery snow under his paws, but there was nowhere else to walk. He looked up and saw a high fence, one far away from the wetness below. Even better, it was covered by a tree, the branches blocking most of the snow from falling onto the wooden barrier. The cat nodded to himself and hopped up onto the fence, purring happily as he curled up on the wood and closed his eyes for an impromptu nap.

On the other side of the fence was a dog, left out in the snow and trying not to shiver too much under the thin protection of her doghouse. It was poorly made, outfitted with splintered wood with gaps between the beams. A layer of snow slowly began to pile inside the doghouse, making the point of the doghouse nonexistent. At least she wasn’t receiving the full wrath of Mother Nature—rather, a slow build-up. She curled up into a tight ball in the corner of the doghouse to preserve warmth, but as her breaths became more and more opaque in the frigid air, she was quickly losing hope. This had happened multiple times before, and she thought she was used to it. But over the years, her skin had become thinner and thinner and her tolerance for the cold only decreased. She lapped at the snow, both to drink water since her water bowl had been empty for two days and to clear out the bottom layer of snow before another one floated through the gaps.

She stood up. Perhaps she should try what she tried last winter when her doghouse began to truly diminish in quality, as if it had any in the first place. She stepped onto the dirt, wincing at the slush coating her paws. She walked over to a particularly thickly-packed hill of snow by the fence and began to dig a hole, letting out quiet whimpers each time she threw a portion of cold snow against her exposed underbelly. Once an adequately-sized hole was made, she stepped inside and curled up, her body heat immediately bouncing off the icy walls and back onto her. She reached out and pawed at the snow, bringing it in closer to close off the opening as best as she could. Perhaps this could get her through the night or until her owners took pity on her and gave her a blanket or stored her in the garage. The garage was cold, but at least she didn’t have to deal with snow flooding her doghouse.

The sound of whimpering and the crunching of snow caused the cat’s eyes to flutter open, his pupils thinning at the interruption to his sleep. He was not in the mood to fight a territorial today. Territorials were the worst, acting as if they owned everything. Meanwhile, the cat took what he could get. He slowly turned his head to survey his surroundings, kneading the damp wood and splintering it slightly. It might have been part of his dream. He began to go to sleep again when the whimpering caused his eyes to shoot open. It came from below. He looked down the inside of the fence into the backyard of the house he usually avoided since it had such loud humans inside. They were always screaming and crying, as well as the enemy that stayed in the backyard. The cat hadn’t realized he had wandered so far from his previous sleeping place. But as the cat looked down and saw said enemy, she was much quieter, not barking that evil bark of hers. Thank goodness. The cat was about to stand up and move away before the enemy sighed, a sigh that the cat recognized. It was one of hunger, thirst, one of struggle. How could the enemy be struggling? Once the enemy disappeared underneath a coat of snow, the cat jumped down into the backyard without hesitation and walked over to the mound.

Crunching steps caused the dog’s eyes to open to reveal tiny gray paws, inquisitively swiping at the snow. Usually, the dog would have ordered the animal to leave her area, but with the obscene amount of cold biting at her skin, she didn’t have the energy. Neither did she have the energy to object when the animal made his home next to her stomach and curling up into a fuzzy ball of fur. This was...nice. The animal provided extra heat, so she didn’t complain. Rather, she moved closer to the source of warmth, letting out a satisfied snort. A displeased mew came from the animal, which humored the dog. Maybe the animal she always chased after like a dog toy wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe the same animal she hated with a passion would get her through the winter alive.

And even though that didn’t turn out to be true for her, the moment they shared was enough to leave her warm inside far after she had grown cold forever.

“Champagne or wine?” he asks, that malicious grin playing on his lips.

A similar grin quirks at the corners of my mouth, realizing quickly where I am. I look around the plane, taking in my lavish surroundings. What makes the growing grin fade as quickly as it came on is the sight of three haggardly girls in the back of the plane, staring blankly at the floor as a hostess brings them juice and water. I look back to his expectant expression. He looks older than in the documentary I watched about him just a few minutes ago. His wrinkles cut deep into his tan and uneven skin, and his hair was even whiter than that salt-and-pepper color that women loved.

“I can’t drink yet,” I reply with a shrug, leaning my cheek against my fist, my knuckles blotched yellow with how tight my grip is. “Apologies.”

He chuckles, a low and rumbling chuckle that sat deep in his chest. It made the corners of my mouth deepen even more. “Ah,” he says simply, waving over a hostess and whispering something in her ear. His eyes graze her ass before he turns his gaze back to me. “You see, that isn’t a problem here,” he says, pushing forward a napkin onto the tray attached to the arm of my seat. The hostess comes by a few seconds later, two flutes of champagne in hand, setting them down on the trays. He thanks her and takes a sip, his eyes never leaving mine, even as he tips his head back to drink the sweet alcohol.

“Do you see the police around?” he asks and gives me a nauseating once-over. “I thought you looked young.”

I bite the inside of my cheek to prevent myself from saying anything brash that might cause him to ground the plane and prolong what was waiting for him on that godforsaken island.

“Hm,” I reply, pressing my lips into a thin line. My gaze falls to the flute with the bubbling liquid inside. Has he drugged it? I look at the clock on the wall. There is only an hour until the plane lands. Plenty of time for him to do something. But as I look back up at him, his welcoming expression sours as I take longer and longer to decide. The last thing I want him to be is suspicious. I take the flute into my hand, spinning it around before taking a sip. It tastes normal enough for alcohol. There was nothing especially sweet or bitter about it that would denote a drug, so I take another tentative sip. I place the flute back down, and his expression visibly brightens.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” he asks, his eyes fluttering closed as he took another sip. “Moet & Chandon Imperial Brut. Fruity with a smoky aftertaste.”

I nod along with everything he’s saying, but I’m far away from listening. I’m thinking of things to pick his brain about, and my eyes fall on the girls in the back again. I point to them, causing his eyes to widen slightly. “Who are they?” I ask, and his Adam’s apple bobs. Is he...nervous? Have I made the great Jeffrey Epstein nervous?

“They’re...family friends,” he replies after a moment, and I can see the gears turning in his head.

“Wow, you must be a great friend to be flying them out to your private island,” I reply nonchalantly, looking at my nails. He shifts in his seat, the armrest groaning as he grips it tightly.

“Yes,” he says, his ‘s’ hyper-sibilant, coming out almost like a hiss. “Aren’t you here for the same reason, my dear? To...have fun on the island?”

I only then remembered: I am a girl. Of age, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Epstein since I still look young. As long as I don’t tell him I’m eighteen, maybe this could go smoothly. I bite my lip and take a look at the other people on the plane. It seems to be just people working for him and hostesses, all of whom were looking away at their electronics or at nothing. It seems as if staring into thin air was better than looking Jeffrey Epstein in the eye.

“You’re right,” I say hesitantly, bile rising in my throat. “I was just confirming who they were, Mr. Epstein.”

He seems to accept that response, leaning back into his chair comfortably, polishing off his champagne.

“But, I do wonder what makes you like underage girls,” I say outright, and he nearly chokes as he swallows the alcohol. I look at the time: forty-five minutes until landing. I needed to bide my time better. But I need to pick his brain. I need to know why. I stare at him, but he isn’t able to do the same, his eyes anywhere except on me. “Were you molested? Do you want to do onto others what happened to you?”

He calls the hostess over and gives her the flute, shaking his head emphatically. “W-who are you to ask these questions? Are you a reporter?”

“No, Mr. Epstein,” I reply calmly, trying to regulate the fear in my voice. He can just walk to the cockpit and tell the pilot to ground the plane at any time with the police waiting for him on the island. I lean forward and put my hand on his knee, quite nearly vomiting all over his lap, but it seemed to calm his nerves. “I work for you, sir. I want to get to know you, is all.”

He grunts a response, his knuckles as yellow as mine as he grips the armrest. “Well, I’m not going to answer that. Ask something else.”

I think for a moment. Now he has me nervous. After almost a minute of silence, with him sitting patiently and me tracing circles on the tray, I look up, prepared with a question. “Do you know that what you’re doing is wrong, or do you justify it in any way you can?” Before he can reply, and I can already see him getting defensive, his mouth open to argue, I clarify, “I have no judgment. After all, I’m here for you, sir.” I curl a lock of my hair around my finger and flutter my eyelashes, and he seems to relax slightly. It feels as if I’m trying to disarm a bomb but every few seconds, the bomb beeps loudly until I snip another cord.

He coughs into his hand, looking around the cabin. It seems as if there’s an invisible border between me and him and the rest of the cabin because nobody has looked once toward our way. Not once.

They’re used to it, I guess, I think. They’ve learned to stop paying attention to keep their consciences clear.

He looks back to me and raises his eyebrows. “No judgment, huh? Alright, then.” He drums his fingers on the leather armrest, his eyes keen on me. “Of course I know this is wrong. But what does wrong even mean? By society’s rules?” He scoffs. “Society is ruled by people like me, little miss. Or people involved with people like me. Society is hypocritical if they say what I do is wrong. They have no place to judge. Society has been like me and even worse since the beginning of time. One’s love for individuals younger than them was extremely prevalent in Ancient Greece, Rome, you name it. Hell, the age of consent in Italy is fourteen.” He points to one of the girls, a greasy brown-haired girl whose eye bags were the worst out of all of them. “She’s fifteen. So, by one country’s laws, I’m moral. But by California’s, I’m immoral. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

He shrugs, cleaning his glasses on his shirt. “You tell me what wrong is. What being immoral means. It seems as if more people are like me than aren’t. Yet we’re frowned upon?”

I can’t find the courage to come up with words to combat him. Maybe this is how he got so many girls to work for him and deal with him for so long. Maybe this is how he got so far in business. Maybe this is how he escaped the authorities for so long. Because I’m starting to believe him. I shake my head, both to shake those thoughts worming into my brain and to disagree with what he said.

“I-I...” But I can’t. I stutter out something unintelligible before I forfeit and stare down at my hands in my lap. I was about to say how it was wrong, but he just disproved what the definition of wrong really was. I gather my thoughts and look up at him, a pleased smile on his face. “You’re hurting people, Jeffrey.”

He seemed taken aback, either at what I said or that I used his first name. He ran a hand through his hair, bringing it down to stroke his chin. “I’m helping people,” he said after a pause. “I’m paying for their education. I’m giving them food. I’m giving them a place to live outside of their abusive households.”

“You are an abusive household, Jeffrey,” I interject before he can spew anymore garbage. “This is abuse.”

“They sit there happily, my dear,” he retorted just as quickly as I interrupted him. “It is simply an exchange for goods and services.”

I look at the clock. Twenty more minutes. I have to wait until one minute before landing, right when the island comes into view. I stand up, looking around the cabin. I can feel his eyes scorching me, my body. I am used to these glances, to these stares. Is that what Jeffrey means by saying that more people are like him than not? I have been getting stared at and cat-called since I was ten and still wearing Hello Kitty merchandise. I look down at him, and he is staring at me in confusion.

“Where are you going, my dear?” he asks, and I frown.

“Where is the bathroom?” I ask in return, and he stiffens. I jump to clarify, saying, “The champagne really got to me. It went right through me.”

His stare stays stern, but he obliges, motioning to the back. I brush past him and the girls sipping idly at their drinks. I spare them a glance, but their stare stays put on the seats in front of them. I open the door to the bathroom and take out my phone. It doesn’t have reception, of course, but at least it still tells time. Ten more minutes. It still says August fourth, but the time is the same as in this world. I tuck it back in my pocket, pacing around the bathroom, trying to figure out what to do. What to ask. Eventually, after stalling for five minutes, I unlock the door and walk back to my seat, crossing my legs. Jeffrey was looking at his phone before he put it down to flicker his eyes up to meet mine.

“That took a while,” he remarks.

“I had trouble with the lock, and then I spoke for a while with the hostess,” I reply, thinking that was better than using shitting as an excuse. “I’m excited about the island, Mr. Epstein.”

“I am, too,” he replies, visibly giddier than before at the mention of his island.

“What will we do there?” I ask, feigning innocence. It is worthless at this point since we had already established that I am here as an escort.

He chuckles, as if he pities me. It seems as if he likes innocence. “Oh, massages, play golf, eat delicious food,” he replies, numbering the activities on his fingers. “Feel good.”

“For how long?” I ask, and he cocks his head in confusion.

“Did nobody brief you on this, my dear?” he asks in reply, and now I’m in hot water. What is my cover story? I should’ve thought about this in the bathroom. The pounding of my heart in my ears makes it hard to focus and come up with an excuse.

“Y-yes,” I stutter out. “I just forgot. It’s been an awfully long day.” I tuck a lock of my hair behind my ear, and he seems to buy my story. It must be common for girls to be a little loopy and not know information because he easily accepts that half-assed excuse. We fall into silence for a bit, and when I look at my phone, I see we only have five minutes before we land. My heart begins to beat harder and faster again, and my hands grow cold with both fear and anticipation.

“Are you afraid to die, Mr. Epstein?” I ask out of the blue, surprising both him and myself.

“Am I afraid to die?” he repeats, and I nod. He thinks for a moment, looking out the window to see the island approaching quickly underneath us. It truly is beautiful--too bad it is and will always be tainted by the ghosts of the girls ruined there. He turns back to me, his knee bobbing anxiously. “No. If I die, I die. Don’t I?”

“Are you happy with what you’ve done?” I follow up, tears suddenly appearing in my eyes. “Would you die happy?”

His eyes widen at the sight of my reddening eyes glistening with tears, but he says nothing of it. Instead, he replies simply, “Yes.”

The pilot announces over the intercom that we are landing, and I stand up abruptly, causing nearly everybody in the cabin to flinch. He looks up at me in bewilderment and stands up as well, crossing his arms.

“You’ve been way too suspicious this entire trip,” he says in a low tone, either to not have others hear it or to intimidate me. But the fear in my chest has been completely replaced with excitement and pure joy. “Who are you?”

I point outside the window, stumbling a bit as the plane shakes from decreasing its elevation rapidly. A devilish smile appears on my face as I walk to the door, pushing past the hostesses.

“I’m from August fourth, 2020. The police are waiting for you on that island, and you’re going to be arrested.” I walk up to him slowly, thoroughly enjoying watching pure fear replace the cockiness in his expression with each word that I spit out. “You’re going to be put in prison, and they’re going to say you committed suicide.” I lean into him, our noses mere inches apart. “But we know that’s not true. You were killed by who knows who, alone in your cell, cold and afraid. But you just said you weren’t afraid of dying, right?”

I pause, letting all of it sink in for him. “You will die. You will try to avoid this fate, but they won’t listen. They will get you eventually. Have fun, Jeffrey Epstein. It was nice chatting with you.”

I blink, and when I open my eyes, I’m back in my bedroom, the Jeffrey Epstein documentary logo staring back at me. I didn’t even get to see him get arrested. I didn’t get to see the panic and despair in his eyes as his hands were cuffed behind his back, never to touch another girl again. I didn’t get to laugh in his face and see the other girls be freed from his clutches. I sigh, close the laptop, and stand up on my shaky legs like a newborn deer.

It’s done. It’s over. He’s gone. But what he said sticks in my mind. It isn’t just him. Who will be next?

Today is a landmark day for human rights. The Supreme Court has officially outlawed the use, existence, and further creation of camps whose purpose is to change the sexuality of LGBTQ people—also called conversion camps. This is a day of liberation and celebration for the diversity we have in this nation. If you believe there is a conversion camp close to you, notify the police. We will not let people dirty the name of religion to fulfill their own bigotry any longer. We will—

“Bullshit,” George muttered under his breath, shutting off the T.V. and immediately standing up. “Disgusting. That stupid lawyer has no idea what she’s talking about.”

He looked to his wife, who was shaking her head in disappointment. The strokes of the knife against the onions got more and more erratic until the blade nicked her knuckle, causing her to yelp and draw her hand back in pain and shock. She sucked on the wound and sighed as George came up behind her with a piece of Kleenex and hydrogen peroxide to clean the cut.

“Oh, Barbara,” he said under his breath as his wife continued to shake her head, either at the cut or at the news she heard. “Don’t get yourself too excited. The churches and activists will take this down in an instant, don’t you worry, honey.”

George’s coos and Barbara’s complaints ceased immediately once they heard their daughter’s footsteps from above, trailing from her bedroom to the staircase. Their eyes traced their daughter’s outfit: loose jeans, a loose shirt with a nearly naked woman on it, and the checkered Vans that she begged them to buy for years. Her blonde hair kept getting shorter and shorter every year and the makeup she used to wear in middle school kept getting lighter and lighter until her face was bare and her eyebrows were unruly.

Barbara studied her daughter for a long moment, and, infuriated from the news report, shrieked, “What are you wearing, Violet?”

Violet almost slipped down the stairs at her mother’s outburst, catching herself only by hanging onto the railing for dear life. She stood herself up and looked down at her clothes in severe confusion, pulling down the shirt to reveal more of the woman and smoothing her jeans, trying desperately to find the problem that was offending her mother so much.

“What?” Violet asked softly, swallowing her defensiveness to not anger her mother more.

Her mother huffed and puffed in pure rage, her face turning red as she yelled, “Why do you have a naked woman on your shirt?”

Violet’s eyebrows shot up in surprise and almost let out the laugh rising in her throat. “This? This is Lady Gaga. She’s not naked. She’s literally wearing shorts and a crop top. I got this when I went to her concert. Remember?”

Her mother ruminated on this answer, eyeing her daughter closely. She decided that she could not accuse her of anything outright. After all, her own sister had short hair along with a husband and four kids. Stereotypes were not helping her in this instance. She let out a long breath to stabilize herself and clutched her husband’s hand.

“Change your shirt, Violet. It’s inappropriate,” she demanded. “And burn it while you’re at it.”

Violet’s eyebrows shot up her forehead. “Burn it? Are you serious?”

A glint of fury flashed in her mother’s eyes, causing Violet to step back. “Yes, Violet. Now go change.”

Violet huffed and rolled her eyes, slipping her backpack off and stomping back up the stairs. “I don’t have time for this. I’m gonna be late.”

“Well, it’s your fault for wearing that,” her father said after his long bout of silence. He carefully let go of his wife and grabbed his keys from the counter before opening the front door. “I’ll be waiting in the car.”

As the car approached a red light, George looked over his daughter’s appearance once again, taking in the way she scrolled through her Instagram, her mannerisms as she adjusted her clothes, the way she pursed her lips. He shook the accusatory thoughts in his head away and focused on the road ahead of him.

However, he kept his daughter in his peripheral vision, watching her as she exited the car, greeted her female friends, and walked to school. He cleared his throat after staring at her for what felt like hours and drove home, the accusatory thoughts making their way back into his brain, burrowing inside, and making a home inside his mind.

A Cure to Homosexuality: Homophobic Doctor Pioneers Vaccine that Allegedly Cures Homosexuality

It has been almost a month since conversion camps have been outlawed, and protests by homophobic groups have been skyrocketing. It has gotten to such a point that Dr. Mark Gaitman, a surgeon who had his medical license revoked when he began experimenting on his patients without their consent, has been advertising a vaccine he has discovered that “cures” homosexuality. More and more facilities have sprung up to meet the growing demand of concerned parents desperate to make their children straight despite human rights groups and the police force shutting them down left and right. The police chief has spoken out about these facilities and has said that the force is trying their best, but they are “spreading like a virus, one that will not stop until [parents] discover that their children are still humans despite loving the same sex.”

Violet and her friend giggled as they burst through the front door to Violet’s house and while her friend darted upstairs, Violet lingered back and made sure to lock the door to ensure she could hear her parents when they came home. She ran upstairs and slung her backpack to the corner of her bedroom and flopped on her bed, where her friend was already laying down. They immediately went onto their phones to show each other funny videos and pictures, laughing lazily at each one as the sun went down, casting the room in a creamsicle orange hue. After half an hour of procrastinating homework, Violet’s friend propped herself up on her elbows and looked at the door.

“When do your parents get home?” she asked, looking over to Violet, who was still on her phone watching videos.

“In a few hours, so I gotta keep watch,” Violet replied nervously, looking at the clock, “We can pretend to do our project until then.” They looked at each other. Violet let out a content sigh and laughed at the rare opportunity to be alone with somebody without being under her parents’ observation, and her friend laughed along with her.

A moment passed before Violet showed her friend a video of a girl dancing to a popular song. Her friend bobbed her head along to the song and smiled. “I wish I could dance that well. She’s really pretty, too.”

“She is, isn’t she?” Violet said, her pulse quickening for no apparent reason. “She’s hot.”

Her friend laughed and shrugged. “I’d say so.”

Violet propped herself up on her elbows, matching her friend, and locked eyes with her. She had only been around her friend in Spanish class, but she already felt a connection to her. A light blush crept up her neck and blotched her cheeks as she tried to regulate her voice. “Really?”

“Well, yeah, she’s very attractive,” her friend replied. “I wouldn’t mind if she asked me out. I’d be flattered.”

“Have you...have you ever been on a date with a girl?” Violet asked tentatively, picking at her hangnails so she wouldn’t have to make eye contact with her friend. “Sorry if that’s too forward. You don’t have to answer.”

“No,” her friend replied nonchalantly.

“Have you ever kissed a girl?” Violet asked, picking her nails at such a vigorous speed that she drew blood from the damaged skin.

Her friend pondered this for a moment, and Violet could feel her friend’s eyes boring into her soul. Her face wavered closer to Violet until she was forced to look up and re-establish eye contact with her. “No,” her friend whispered, “but I wouldn’t be opposed to it.”

Violet’s eyes widened, her heart nearly beating out of her chest. She gripped her chest just to make sure she wasn’t having a heart attack. She mumbled, in a voice so small it seemed to come from a mouse, “Me neither.”

Before Violet could take into account what was happening, her friend had leaned in to close the inch-long gap between their lips, brushing her lips against Violet’s for unspoken consent. Violet, in desperation, deepened the kiss and slowly pushed her friend onto the bed, the mattress groaning under the new shift in weight. She had never felt like this before. It felt as though something inside her had been found—completed. The sloppy kiss she shared in middle school with Jack paled in comparison to the loving and warm embrace of her female friend’s mouth on hers, and while she couldn’t wait to stop kissing Jack, she couldn’t wait to kiss her friend again.

Violet’s earlier nerves disappeared somewhere between the two girls’ lips, and she did not care to go searching for it. However, the two girls had been locked in such a heated exchange that they barely noticed Violet’s father coming home, his footsteps thundering on the stairs, and his explosion into his daughter’s bedroom.

“What the hell is going on here?” her father shouted in a voice deep and loud enough to rattle the entire house.

The two girls separated quickly, their lips left cold. They both looked up at Violet’s father, bug-eyed, unsure of what to do. The two girls shared a longing look before her friend gathered her things and squeezed by a red-faced George. He shook his head and slid her friend a twenty-dollar bill subtly, scratching his chin in anger. Her friend thanked him curtly and gave Violet a pitiful look before dashing.

Violet hugged her knees to her chest, the pain in her heart and the shame in her stomach enough to mask the betrayal she felt from her friend.

“It was nothing, Dad,” Violet mumbled, but even she wasn’t convinced by her answer. George stared at his daughter for a long time, watching her squirm under his toxic glare. The conspiracies in his mind were proven true, and now the conspiracies turned into facts. His daughter was a homosexual. A lesbian. A dyke. A queer. Disappointing. Disgusting.

Violet thumbed the cross necklace that seemed a thousand times heavier on her neck as her mother read Leviticus to her, repeating the same verse over and over. She sighed when her father started to yell at her and cried when her mother joined in on the verbal abuse, flinging all the words that seemed to hit Violet in the most vulnerable spots.

“You know what I heard of today?” her mother said, sitting down and taking out her phone. “It’s perfect.”

George leaned over to take a look at the website his wife pulled up, and his eyes lit up.

“Is this legit?” he asked.

“Seems to be.”

They both looked at Violet with judgemental yet soft eyes. They were disgusted by her yet loved her deeply. And with these conflicting feelings, they turned back to the laptop and clicked Book a Session.

Violet protested as best she could, but her father’s grip on her arm tight enough that any movement from her would cause ugly bruises to form. The car bounced against the gravel-turned-dirt road, and a tire almost got caught in a pothole deep enough to be a well. George complained under his breath about where his tax dollars were going, and Barbara hummed in agreement. Violet’s knuckles began to yellow because of her grip on her thigh as her familiar surroundings faded away into old warehouses and desert land. When the car stopped in front of a small dilapidated hospital, and her breath quickened once her parents got out of the car and opened her door.

“I’m not getting out,” Violet said defiantly, but when she saw the grave look on her parents’ faces, she pleaded in a quivering voice, “Please don’t make me go. Please.” If she had to be Fixed, she wanted to be Fixed in her own home, by her own parents, by people she loved. She wanted to make her parents proud of her again.

Her mother unlocked her phone to call somebody and whispered something into the receiver. Violet wanted to make her parents proud. She wanted all of this to blow over. So as two men in scrubs came out of the hospital with encouraging smiles on their faces, she sighed and climbed out of the car. They flanked her sides and took her arms, patting her forearms reassuringly as they went on and on about the wonders the procedure had done for them and how she would be perfect once she had been Fixed.

She looked back to her parents, her father looked up at the sky in prayer and her mother staring back at her. She almost saw a look of sadness in her mother’s eyes, but it quickly disappeared, and before Violet could protest any longer, the doors of the hospital slammed closed on any hope she had left of her life returning to normal.

But was it ever normal?

“It seems as though you are suffering from same-sex attraction. Is that correct? That’s what your parents have told me.” the man behind the desk said, his pale complexion contrasting against the wisps of black hair on the sides of his head. He adjusted his glasses to take a better look at Violet, eyeing her up and down. She covered herself as best she could by crossing her arms, but she still felt exposed.

“Y-yes. But, I promise, it’ll never happen again. It was just a mistake. Please let me go back home. I won’t do it ever again,” Violet begged, hoping to get out of the situation as quickly as possible, but the man waved his hand to make her shut up.

“Oh, but it will,” the man glanced at the paper in his hands, “little Violet. We’ll just Fix you up and send you back on your merry way.”

Violet had a million thoughts running rampant in her mind like scared mice bumping into each other and screaming in fear. I don’t want to change!

Do I? I don’t want to go to Hell. I want my parents to love me. It’s wrong. But people say it’s not. But Mom says it is. She says they’ll kill me if I’m open about it. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

Maybe this will help.

Out of all those thoughts running through her head, the only thought that came out was, “Will it hurt?”

The man smiled, his eyes softening with pity as he gazed at the withering girl before him.

“No,” he said. But the look in his eyes said otherwise.

“You see, this program is very well-researched, and we’ve done many experiments.”

“Experiments?”

“Yes. We’ve had many willing participants in this study, and all of them have been Fixed. We are very successful. Your daughter will do well here.”

“And the cost?”

“$10,000. It will fund our offices and some will go to the Church.”

“I don’t think we can afford that…”

“Do you want your daughter Fixed? Or do you want her to be a fag? Since they’ve banned Fixing camps more than a month ago, this has become the new solution.”

“...”

“I’ll let you think about it.”

“How does it work? Will she be safe? We want her to be perfect, but alive.”

The two men who dragged Violet out of the car escorted her from the man’s office down a spiraling hallway. It was bland, with beige carpet and walls the color of a sickly yellow. As she stumbled down the hallway, urged by the guards, her eyes followed the pictures of happy straight couples and articles from people who swore they’ve been changed. Bile rose in her throat, and she had to put her hand in front of her mouth to prevent herself from vomiting. The hallway seemed to get tighter and tighter until she had to fan herself to get air. It seemed they had been walking for hours, and her knees buckled from under her.

“Researchers have discovered five genetic variants in a person’s genome that influence same-sex attraction.”

“Genetic variants?”

“They’re single-letter differences in a person’s DNA. You went to college, right?”

“No…”

“Well, DNA is made up of nucleotides: A, G, C, and T. There are five places in a person’s genome that we know dictate their sexuality. We can change the code in these regions from homosexual to heterosexual using this knowledge. Gay to straight, essentially.

We’ll take a retrovirus, which is a type of RNA—which is genetic information—that inserts a copy of itself in the host cell, and then we’ll change the sequence of the retrovirus to match a sequence that will alter your daughter’s sexuality. And then we will inject it in her arm, and she will be Fixed.”

“This seems blasphemous…”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. The pope has said we should do anything we can in order to correct God’s mistakes.”

“I thought He didn’t make mistakes.”

“What do you think this is all about, then? He is almighty, but sometimes He can’t keep track of all His creations. Man created these unholy thoughts...it’s up to man to dispel them.”

The men dragged Violet by her arms to the end of the hallway where a metal door stood dauntingly. One of the men unlocked the gargantuan deadbolt and swung it open. The second man tossed her in carelessly, and Violet crumpled to the floor. She looked over her shoulder only to see the door slamming closed. The only sound she heard for a moment was the echoing bolt of the lock and the eerie silence that followed. A woman approached her with a false smile and a white hospital gown, her sharp acrylic nails digging into the thin fabric.

“Undress, please.”

“Your facility is very...dated. It’s not the cleanest. I don’t think we feel comfortable leaving our daughter here in this...cesspool. Excuse my language.”

“I understand your hesitations. Our facility is only this undesirable because the government has begun targeting our facilities, so we’ve had to stay under-the-radar. We haven’t been able to make that many improvements without drawing unwanted attention, so we’re doing the best we can with the best we’ve got, ma’am.”

“...”

“Ma’am?”

“Will it hurt her?”

Violet’s entire body was trembling as she hugged herself to provide any amount of comfort she could get. She just wanted to go home. She just wanted to see her friend again. She just wanted to be normal. The room did not help with her anxiety. It was very obviously old and dilapidated. There was mold in all four corners of the room, making its way down to the sink with its rusty faucet and dead bugs. A tile in the corner was broken, exposing the rotten underlayment infested with a family of cockroaches. Violet began to cry.

A man in a white lab coat shuffled into the room, interrupting Violet’s cry session. He looked nice, but Violet could not help flinching when he reached for the clipboard next to her chair. He looked at her with worry on his face before the expression dissipated as quickly as it appeared. He wrote a few things down on his clipboard, glancing up at Violet occasionally, and finally put it down. Violet’s nails were almost broken from how hard she was digging into the plastic chair.

The doctor looked up from the clipboard and set it down. He reached for the yellowed gloves on top of the zinc sink and tried to put them on, but they ripped from age. He tried on a second pair that held up better than the first and smiled.

“Let’s begin the exam.”

“Does it matter?”

The man took Violet’s blood, swabbed her mouth, and dropped the Q-tip into a small bag. She felt uncomfortable the entire time, and cold. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to curl up into a ball and die. She cried.

“Stop crying,” the man demanded, which made Violet cry harder. “You’ll feel great soon enough.”

When Violet did not stop crying, the man backhanded her hard enough to make her yell out in pain. She stared up at the man in shock, but he went back to his work as quickly as he had slapped her. She slowly wiped away her tears because the salty drops stung the red, raw skin on her cheek. She sat silently and let the man do what he needed to do without saying a word—without even breathing.

Eventually, the tests were over, and the man took Violet roughly by the arm and dragged her across the room and through a door into yet another hallway. Except one of the sides of the hallway was made of glass, and through the glass, she could see her parents sitting in an office listening to a man in a business suit. She caught her mother’s eye and immediately tore away from the man to slam against the glass, tears erupting from her eyes and her scream permeating throughout the entire building.

“Mama!” she shrieked, pounding against the glass. She continued to tear away from the man who tried to stop her and bloodied her knuckles as she punched the glass. “Mama, please help me!”

Her mother stood up slowly and hesitated to walk before running over to the glass with her husband in tow. She said something unintelligible to her husband before turning back to the glass, pointing to Violet’s cheek with a puzzled look. Violet gestured to the man behind her, who was desperately trying to gather her up and take her away. Her mother’s eyes filled with fury as well as her father’s, and they both glared at the man before turning around and arguing with the other man. He held up a contract and motioned to it, but George snatched it and tore it to shreds. The man feigned sadness before holding up a copy of the contract with a sly grin, and before George could snatch it again, he opened a drawer and let the contract flutter into it before slamming it closed and locked it. He tucked the key into his pocket and shrugged.

Her parents made their way over to their weeping daughter again meekly. Snot and tears were mingling on her face, and she screamed, “Would you rather have a gay daughter or a dead one?”

Her mother’s eyes widened before her head and shoulders dropped in defeat. She cupped her mouth and put her hands against the glass. Violet leaned in to hear and heard her mother say, “I don’t know anymore.” After Violet pulled away, she could see tears welling in her mother’s eyes before she sucked it up and turned away. She shared a long, woeful look with her father before she surrendered to the man’s clutch and was led away to the end of the hallway.

The man opened the door to a room that smelled of sterile chemicals with a Gharieni medical chair in the middle that was full of scratch marks deep enough to tear through the leather. She pushed against the man at first but soon realized any struggle was futile. She let the man toss her onto the chair like a ragdoll and strap her in tight enough to cut off blood flow to her hands and feet. He stood with his arms crossed before another man came in with a white lab coat, and he dismissed the other man before setting his eyes on Violet.

“Hi, Violet,” he greeted, pulling back his thin lips to reveal yellowed teeth. “I’m Dr. Davis. I’ll be performing this treatment on you. It’ll be quick. I promise.”

He turned away to grab something and turned back to reveal an instrument with the body of a gun and a barrel that came into the thin point, a short needle at the end. It glinted in the dim light provided solely by an overhead light that flickered now and then, and Violet had to swallow her screams. He put on gloves and grabbed disinfectant, pouring it on her arm and then patting it dry with a towel. He then grabbed a vial of clear liquid and swirled it around before inserting it into the gun. He then cocked it and turned to Violet.

“Ready?” he asked, raising his eyebrows expectantly. Violet shook her head and tried her best to squirm away from him, but he seized her arm and set it back in place, his knuckles yellowing from the force he was applying against her.

“You’re hurting me,” Violet squeaked out, but the doctor only scoffed.

“Quiet,” he muttered, bringing the gun down and lining it up with the blue vein that ran down Violet’s arm. He traced the vein and found a suitable place, scratching the skin with his nail through the glove. “You ready?”

“Please,” Violet pleaded softly, rolling her head over to make eye contact with the doctor. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Oh, but I do,” he said, motioning to the Bible on a desk on the other side of the room, “or else you’ll burn in Hell. Do you want that?”

Violet shrugged her shoulders as best she could with her bound arms. “Does it work?”

The doctor smiled. “We’ve had many successful experiments.”

“Many?”

“Several.”

“Several?”

“Okay, it’s time to Fix you, Violet. No more dilly-dallying.”

Without letting Violet react, he plunged the needle into her skin, and before Violet ripped away, he slowly pulled the trigger and injected the serum into her arm. Violet felt her eyelids droop immediately after the vial emptied, either from the serum itself or from her own anxiety. She let her head drop and her consciousness to go blank.

When Violet awoke, her parents were the first thing she saw. They were blurry, but she was sure the muddled figures in her vision were her parents. She heard garbled language from them, frustrated and reactionary. She felt lulled back into the peaceful sleep she experienced, but her mother began snapping her fingers in front of her face. Violet opened her eyes one more time and began seeing a much clearer picture: her parents crowding her vision with the man who performed the Fixing procedure in the background. He grinned proudly of whatever he had done, and when Violet adjusted herself in her chair, his grin widened.

“Will she be okay?”

“The procedure went perfectly. You will see results within 24 hours. Just let her sleep it off, and she’ll be bringing the boys in soon.”

Violet couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. She drifted back into her blissful sleep, regardless of whatever noises and gestures her parents tried to keep her awake. She just wanted to be gone.

Violet woke up once again in her bedroom. She enjoyed the familiarity, but she felt little else. She did not feel happy. She did not feel sad. She did not feel angry. She felt...numb.

She heard her door creak open, her parents looking in shyly. They slowly crept in, but Violet made no effort to greet them. She made no effort to do anything, really. Lifting the blankets off her was enough to cause her to sleep again.

“How are you feeling, honey?” her father asked. “What are you feeling? Sick? Hungry? We have cake in the kitchen to celebrate your Fixing.”

“I feel...nothing,” she replied, staring down at the carpet. Her parents exchanged worried glances, but her mother shrugged.

“Better than the latter, I suppose,” she said, doing a little dance before taking Violet to the kitchen and asking Violet to blow out the candles on the cake. Violet did so only because she was instructed to.

“We got you chocolate cake—your favorite,” her father said, cutting her a piece. But Violet did not thank him. She did not eat the cake. She walked back up the stairs and crawled under the covers. She had no favorites anymore. She had no taste. She could see no colors. She had no thoughts. The only solution was sleep.

When she went to school the next day, her friend approached her carefully with a meek smile.

“Hi, Violet,” she said in her screechy voice. “I’m sorry I put you in that position. Your dad found out I was your partner for the project. My family needs the money. I’m so sorry. Hopefully we can still be friends.”

When she received no answer, she grew more concerned.

“Hey, are you okay? You’ve been missing for a couple of days. Have your parents been treating you okay?” She glanced down and saw the scar that was left behind from the treatment, and she shakily covered her mouth and shook her head. “Oh, my God, Violet, I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry. You’ve been Fixed? This wasn’t meant to happen. I don’t know what was meant to happen, but it wasn’t this.” Her friend’s hand drifted to Violet’s, giving it a soft nudge, hoping to spark something between them. “I still really like you, Violet. Seriously. That wasn’t an act.”

But Violet felt nothing. She shrugged off her friend’s touch and walked away. She couldn’t handle her friend’s voice anymore. She couldn’t handle being in her friend’s presence anymore.

Later that day, the most popular and handsome boy in her grade approached her with a shit-eating grin. When Violet failed to look up at him, he tapped her desk with his knuckles, and when she continued to do her work, he snatched her paper away from her.

“Heard you’ve been Fixed,” he said with a wink. “You wanna have a go at it with me? Show you what you’d been missing when you were a lesbo.”

Violet felt nothing toward him, either. He was not handsome. He was not ugly. He just was. She looked around at all the boys in her class and found none attractive. She looked at the girls in her class and also found none of them attractive. She finally glanced up at the boy and shook her head. “No.”

She went back to her work, leaving the boy flabbergasted. But she did not care. She did not care anymore.

When she got home, she examined her scar closely. It had scabbed multiple times before Violet picked it away, leaving the angry red pinprick on top of her vein. Had the injection done its job? Was she normal now? Could she live a normal life now?

Violet stared at herself in the mirror, and her upturned nose she once found cute was now okay. The high cheekbones she once admired were now average. Her face that she once found so beautiful was now adequate. Enough. Sufficient. Fair. Unexceptional. Unremarkable.

What was the point now? What could she do now? She was Fixed—but was she?

#sciencefiction #lgbt #lgbtq

The gun feels light as a feather in my hand as I point it at the president, his eyebrows furrowing with fear and my lips curving up in delight. He had hurt me so many times. Too many times. He didn’t even know I existed, but that was the problem. He did things that changed people’s lives without asking for their permission. He didn’t listen to their qualms before destroying their livelihoods. He made his little repo lackeys collect everything they could find, even if the person was only missing one cent from their bill. They were hungry for power.

Now, they’re full, and I want to reclaim the power they stole from me to use for their own selfish desires. I’m reclaiming it after years of subordination and dehumanization. For my family. For my city. For me.

My finger curls around the trigger, putting pressure on it and pulling it back until I hear a little muffled voice. I turn around to face the door, but it’s closed. I look at the closet, but nobody has popped out. I turn back to the president, who is as puzzled as I am, but I ignore the voice and point the gun back at his head.

All of a sudden, the gun feels heavy. It feels as heavy as a thirty-pound bowling ball. I drop it on the ground accidentally, and it fires a bullet in the wall. I pick it back up and unload it, scared of what it will do next. I cradle it in my hands, trying to figure out what had happened. I look at the president and slowly begin to point the gun at him again, but I hesitate. This gun, the president’s gun, has killed so many people. This had been his gun since his military days when he would go into foreign countries and shoot innocent people in a bloodthirsty rage. It was all documented in his file, but of course, it got covered up. This gun has blood in its history; should I add to its list of conquests?

Am I going to be that kind of leader now? A power-hungry, bloodthirsty person who couldn’t care less about human life—only the feeling of money in my blood-stained hands? Will this become my gun now? Will it become an accomplice in my murders, will it become my right-hand man? I lower the gun, and the president lets out a sigh of relief.

However, without thinking, I raise the gun again and fire three rounds point-blank into his forehead. His eyes roll up into his head like golf balls, and he falls back onto the ground splattered in crusted-over blood.

How fitting. His own gun was the one who shot him. He falls onto the blood of others he had spilled, and his own blood mingles in with theirs. I apologize to the victims; to have their blood, the only evidence of them ever living on this earth, mix in with the tyrant that murdered them must be painful. But it must have been done. He was stealing air away from people worthy of life.

I unload the gun and throw it into the fireplace. I no longer need it. I walk over and sit in the president’s chair and pull up to his desk.

I had decided his fate; where shall I go now?

The flight had been delayed two hours, leading her to become more agitated than she already was. Her backpacking trip had been rife with imperfections and hold-ups, and she simply wanted to go home. Her flight to Europe had been canceled two times, she got robbed three times, and she got food poisoning more times than she could count. She wanted an enlightening experience of self-realization; instead, she got an empty wallet and five buckets worth of vomit.

Eventually, the flight boarded, and she was out like a light before the plane had even finished lift off. Once the pilot made an announcement that they were descending, she opened her window and stared out into the black cloak of night, the only thing visible in the sea of darkness being stars.

She ripped her way past the hordes of people being greeted by their families and stopped at the baggage area. She stood at the very beginning of the area, and when she spotted her luggage, she immediately snatched it from the belt and ran to catch a taxi. As she drove away from the illuminated city out into the suburbs, she saw the lights dwindle until only a few streetlights remained. Some were flickering and some were so dull they might as well have been off. The well-paved streets eventually filled with potholes and cracks, and the mansions and glamorous penthouses downgraded into small shacks and musty apartments.

But she couldn’t have been happier to see her apartment. As small and dingy as it was, it was the perfect home after a long and perilous journey. She opened the door, and her heart swelled to see her apartment, the moonlight shining from the kitchen window and illuminating the dust on the floorboards. But she smiled at the dust as if they were old friends, putting down her luggage at the door and sagging her way to her bed, slowly peeling back the blankets and savoring the familiarity of the fabric. She climbed onto her soft mattress, and the second her head floated onto the pillow, she slept, peacefully and soundly, not even waking up when the sun shone through the translucent curtains.

The mother’s sister gifted her a pink blanket in a small purple box wrapped tightly in a golden bow. The mother smiled at the pink blanket, tears welling in her eyes. She smiled back, thanked her sister profusely, and kept the blanket on her lap.

The night before her baby was due, the mother sat in the rocking chair in the nursery, hugging the blanket close to her heart, and wept. Her tears soaked into the blanket, but the saltiness of the tears did not make the blanket any less soft. The mother stood up while grasping the blanket, ran her fingertips over the crib, and kept the blanket close to her baby’s heart.

Once the newborn was placed inside the crib, the blanket was lifted over the newborn and covered its tiny body, hugging the newborn as tight as possible. The newborn fussed before falling back asleep. Before long, the newborn began to cry, its tears sliding down its cherub face and absorbing into the blanket. The blanket was removed from the newborn and was left alone in the crib until the newborn stopped crying and was returned to the loving embrace of the blanket.

The child cried frequently, from spilled milk to a splinter garnered from climbing trees. The blanket went wherever the child went and soaked up all her tears along the way. It traveled outside, to different houses, to different countries. It covered her when it began raining, it substituted as a knee protector on the rough asphalt when she wanted to play outside, and it served as the primary reason why her cries ceased so quickly.

The tween’s grasp on the blanket lessened more and more until the blanket stayed in her room for weeks at a time, sitting atop a bean bag chair that she rarely sat on. But one night, the tween burst through her bedroom door in tears, wailing about her first heartbreak. She threw her phone on the bed and collapsed on the floor. Her parents came in to comfort her, but she promptly sent them out. After a moment, she looked up, saw the blanket on the chair, climbed on top of the chair, and hugged the blanket to her heart.

The teen did not even look at the blanket because she was so busy. Her room was littered with papers and binders. But all that clutter was not enough to mask the sound of her screaming downstairs when she got into college. The days went on as normal until the long summer days tapered down, and on one fateful day, the teen was wading through the moving boxes in her room when her eyes set upon the blanket. She sat in the chair and cradled the blanket in her arms for what seemed like forever while allowing silent tears to slip down her cheeks. Then she laid the blanket on the chair and took her moving boxes with her as she left the room for what seemed like forever. The blanket became faded after years of the sun rising and setting in the window, taking the pinkness out of the blanket and leaving it a sickly beige. Her room collected dust, and dust bunnies frequently had a gathering atop the blanket before her mother came in a vacuumed them off.

The woman, after many years, waddled into her childhood bedroom, her swollen belly appearing in the room before her. She picked up the blanket and pressed it to her heart before she moved it to her belly, smiling and crying as she rubbed the matted fabric between her fingers.

“Thanks for hanging in there, old friend.”