Holly

November 22–25, 2018

Em doesn’t like this one.

Not that she liked Cary Dressler, and she loathed Castro, the spic maricon. This girl, though, this Ellen Craslow, is different from either of them. Because she’s female? Em doesn’t believe it.

She descends the stairs to the basement, carrying the tray in front of her. On it is a pound and a half of liver, uncooked and swimming in its own juices. Price at Kroger: $3.22. Meat is so expensive now, and the last piece was wasted. She came down and found it crawling with maggots and flies. How they got into this sealed room, and so quickly, is beyond her. Even the crack at the foot of the door leading to the kitchen has been sealed.

The girl is standing at the bars of the cell. She’s tall, with skin the color of cocoa. Her hair is neat and short and dark. From the foot of the stairs Em could almost believe it’s a bathing cap. When she comes closer, she can see that Ellen’s lips are cracked and sore-looking in places. But she doesn’t cry or beg. She’s done neither. So far, at least.

Em takes the plate of liver from the tray and places it on the concrete. She drops to one knee to do this rather than bending. Her sciatica is bad, but bad she can take. When it screams though, when it makes every step agony… that is a different matter. She takes the broom and pushes the plate toward the cell. The red liquid sloshes. And as she has done before, Ellen Craslow blocks the pass-through with the side of her foot.

“I’ve told you, I’m a vegan. You don’t seem to listen.”

Em feels an urge to poke her with the broom handle and quells it. Not just because the girl might catch hold of it, either. She must not show emotion. Like Castro and Dressler, this is a caged animal. Livestock. Poking livestock is childish. Being angry with it is childish. What you do with an animal is train it.

Ellen refused the protein shake, too. She drank both of the small bottles of water that were in the cage when she woke up, the first all at once. She made the second one last, but both are gone now. From the pocket of her apron, Em takes another. “When you eat your meat, Ellen, you can have this. Your body doesn’t care that you’re a vegan. It needs to eat.” She holds the bottle out, displaying it. “And it needs to drink.”

Ellen says nothing, only stands looking at Em with her hands loosely gripping the bars and her foot blocking the pass-through. That gaze is unnerving. Em doesn’t want to feel unnerved, but tells herself that she’d feel the same way if she were at the zoo and locked eyes with a tiger.

“I’ll leave the food, shall I? When I come back and the plate is clean—juice, too—you can have the water.”

No reply, and animal or no animal, Professor Emily Harris (emerita) realizes she’s angry after all. No, furious. Castro ate; Dressler ate; eventually Ellen will eat, too. She won’t be able to help herself. Em turns away and starts for the stairs.

The girl says, “It’s horrible, isn’t it?”

Em turns back, startled.

“When people won’t do what you want. It’s horrible, isn’t it? For you, I mean.” And the girl actually smiles!

Bitch, Emily thinks, and then what she would never in a billion years allow herself to say except in her diary: Stubborn black bitch!

Em says (gently), “It’s Thanksgiving, Ellen. Give thanks and eat.”

“Bring me a salad,” Ellen says. “No dressing. That I will eat.”

The nerve! Em thinks. As if I were a serving girl! As if I were her ladies’ maid!

She does something then she will later regret, because it gives away too much of herself. She takes the bottle of water from her apron pocket, raises it to her lips, and drinks. Then she pours the rest out over the railing.

The girl says nothing.

A day later.

Professor Rodney Harris (Life Sciences, emeritus) stands in front of the cell, cogitating. Ellen Craslow looks back at him, calm. Or so she seems. There are a couple of blisters on her lips now, there are pimples on her forehead, and the smooth cocoa loveliness of her skin has turned ashy. But her eyes—a startling green—are brilliant in their deepening sockets.

Roddy is a respected biologist and nutritionist. Before his retirement he was a teacher sometimes revered and more often feared by his students. A bibliography of his published work would fill a dozen pages, and he still keeps up a lively correspondence in various journals with his peers. That he considers himself first among those peers doesn’t strike him as conceited. As someone wise once said, It ain’t bragging if it’s true.

He’s not angry at this girl the way Em is (she says she isn’t, but they have been married for over fifty years and he knows her better than she knows herself), but Ellen certainly perplexes him. She must have been disoriented when she woke up, the way the others were, they use a powerful drug to knock their subjects out, but she didn’t seem disoriented. If she was hungover—and she must have been that, too—she didn’t complain of it. She didn’t scream for help, as Cary Dressler did almost at once (must have made his headache that much worse, Roddy thinks) and as Jorge Castro had eventually. And of course she has refused to eat, although it’s been almost three days now, and over two since she finished off the last of the water she’s been allowed.

The liver Em brought down yesterday has darkened and begun to smell. It’s still edible but won’t be for much longer. Another few hours and she’d probably vomit it back up, which would make the whole thing pointless. Meanwhile, time is flicking past.

“If you don’t eat, my dear, you’ll starve,” he says in a mild voice his students of yore wouldn’t recognize; as a lecturer, Roddy had a tendency to be rapid, excitable, sometimes even shrill. When talking about the wonders of the stomach—serosa, pylorus, duodenum—his voice sometimes rose to a near scream.

Ellen says nothing.

“Your body has already begun to digest itself. It’s visible on your face, your arms, the way you stand, slightly slumped…”

Nothing. Her eyes on his. She hasn’t asked what they want, which is also perplexing and (admit the truth) rather disturbing. She knows who they are, she knows that if they let her go they will be arrested for kidnapping (only the first charge of many), ergo they can’t let her go, but there has been no bargaining and no begging. Just this hunger strike. She told Em she would gladly eat a salad, but that is out of the question. Salads, whether dressed or undressed, are not sacrament. Meat is sacrament. Liver is sacrament.

“What are we to do with you, dear?” Sadly.

At this point he would expect a prisoner—a normal prisoner—to say something ridiculous like let me go and I won’t say a word to anybody. This girl, hungry and thirsty or not, knows better.

Roddy pushes the plate with the slab of liver on it a little closer. “Eat that and you’ll feel your strength return at once. The feeling will be extraordinary.” He tries a thin joke: “We’ll turn you into a carnivore in no time.”

There’s still no response, so he starts for the stairs.

Ellen says, “I know what that is.”

He turns back. She is pointing to the big yellow box at the far end of the workshop. “It’s a woodchipper. You’ve got it turned to the wall so I can’t see the intake, but I know what it is. My uncle has worked in the woods up north all his life.”

At his age Rodney Harris would have thought himself beyond surprise, but this young woman is full of them. Most extraordinary, almost like discovering a canine prodigy that can count.

“It’s how you’ll get rid of me, isn’t it? I’ll go through the hose and into a big bag and the bag will go in the lake.”

He stares, mouth agape.

“How do you… why would you think that?”

“Because it’s the safest place. There’s a TV show, Dexter, about a man who kills people and gets rid of them in the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe you’ve seen it.”

They have seen it, of course.

This is terrible. Like she’s reading his mind. Their mind, because when it comes to their captives—and the sacrament—he and Em think alike.

“You have a boat. Don’t you, Professor Harris?”

This girl was a mistake. She’s a sport, an outlier, they might not come across another like her in a hundred years.

He goes upstairs without saying anything else.

Em is in her study. It’s crammed with so many books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves that there’s barely room for her desk. Some of the books have been set aside in a corner to make room for a thick folder with WRITING SAMPLES printed on the cover in neat block letters.

Two framed pictures flank her desktop computer. One is of a very young Roddy and Em, he in a morning suit (rented) and she in the traditional white bridal dress (purchased by her parents). The other shows a much older Roddy and Em, he in a joke admiral’s hat and she with a common sailor’s Dixie cup cocked rakishly on her beauty shop curls. They are standing in front of their newly purchased (but gently used) Mainship 34. Em has a bottle of cheap champagne in one hand, which she will soon use to christen their boat the Marie Cather—Marie as in Stopes, Cather as in Willa. Their marriage has always been a partnership.

On the screen of her computer, Em’s watching Ellen Craslow sitting on the futon in her cage, legs crossed, head in hands, shoulders shaking. Roddy bends over Em’s shoulder for a closer look.

“She stood there until you were gone, then just collapsed,” Em says, not without satisfaction.

The girl raises her head and looks up at the camera. Although she’s been crying, her eyes look dry. Roddy isn’t surprised. It’s dehydration at work.

“You heard everything?” he asks his wife.

“Yes. She’s intuited a lot, hasn’t she?”

“Not intuition, logic. Plus, she recognized the woodchipper. Neither of the others did. What are we going to do, Emmie? Suggestions, please.”

She considers it while they look at the girl in the cage. Neither of them feel pity for Ellen, or even sympathy. She is a problem to be solved. In a way, Roddy thinks the problem is a good thing. They are still relatively new to this. Every solved problem adds to efficiency, as every scientist knows.

At last she says, “Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

“Yes. I think that’s right.”

He straightens up and idly thumbs the thick folder of writing samples. This spring semester’s writer-in-residence at Bell’s greatly respected (almost legendary) fiction workshop will be a woman named Althea Gibson, author of two novels that reviewed well and sold poorly. As with several previous in-residence authors, Gibson has been more than willing to have Emily Harris do the initial applicant winnowing, and although the pay is a pittance, Em enjoys the work. This was an offer Jorge Castro declined, preferring to go through the stacks of writing samples himself. Thought having Emily do the pre-screening was beneath him. Em has noticed how many fags are uppity, and thinks it’s probably compensation. Also… all that solitary running.

“Anything good in here?” Roddy Harris asks.

“So far just the usual junk.” Em sighs and rubs at her aching lower back. “I’m beginning to think that in another twenty years, fiction will be a lost art.”

He bends and kisses her white hair. “Hang in there, baby.”

When Em comes down the stairs at noon on the 24th, the maggots and flies are back on the slab of liver. She looks at them crawling around on a perfectly good cut of meat (well, it was) with disgust and dismay. They simply have no business being there so fast. They have no business being there at all!

She pushes the meat toward the pass-through with the broom. And although Ellen looks exhausted, the cracks in her lips bleeding, her complexion the color of clay, she again blocks the hinged panel with her foot.

Em takes a bottle of water from her apron pocket and is delighted by the way the girl’s eyes fix on it. And when her tongue comes out in a useless effort to moisten those parched lips… that is also delightful.

“Take it, Ellen. Brush off the bugs and eat. Then I’ll give you the water.”

For one moment she thinks the stubborn girl means to give in. Then she says what she always says: “I’m a vegan.”

You’re a bitch, is what you are. Emily can barely restrain herself from saying it. The girl is infuriating, and it doesn’t help that the goddamned sciatica has kept her up half the night. An uppity, smartass bitch! BLACK bitch!

She drops to one knee—back straight, less pain—and picks up the plate. She’s unable to suppress a small cry of disgust when a maggot squirms onto her wrist. She carries the plate upstairs without looking back.

Roddy is at the kitchen table, reading a monograph and nibbling trail mix from a cut glass bowl. He looks up, takes off his reading glasses, and massages the sides of his nose. “No?”

“No.”

“All right. Do you want me to take her the last piece? I can see how much your back hurts.”

“I’m fine. Good to go.” Em tilts the plate. The rotting liver slides into the sink. It makes a squashy sound: plud. There’s another maggot on her forearm. She swats it off and uses a meat fork to stuff the spoiled meat into the garbage disposal, going at it with short hard jabs.

“Calmly,” Roddy says. “Calmly, Em. We are prepared for this.”

“But if she won’t eat, it means going out again for a replacement! And it’s too soon!”

“We’ll be extremely careful, and I can’t bear to see you in such misery. Besides, I might have a possibility.”

Em turns to him. “She exasperates me.”

Nothing so mild as exasperation, my dear one, Roddy thinks. You are angry, and I think the girl knows it. She may also know your anger is the only vengeance she can ever expect to have. He says none of that, only looks at her with those eyes she has always loved. Is helpless not to love, even after all these years. He gets up, puts an arm around her shoulders, and kisses her cheek. “My poor Em. I’m sorry you’re in pain and sorry you have to wait.”

She gives him the smile he has always loved, is helpless not to love. Even now, with the deepening lines around her eyes and from the corners of her mouth. “It will work out.”

She turns on the disposal. It makes a hungry grinding sound, not that much different from the sound the chipper in the basement makes when it’s running. Then she gets a fresh slab of liver from the fridge.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take it down?” Roddy asks.

“Positive.”

In the basement, Em puts the plate of liver on the floor. She sets a bottle of Dasani water down behind it. Ellen Craslow gets up from the futon and blocks the pass-through with the side of her foot before Em can take the broom. Again she says, “I’m a vegan.”

“I think we have established that,” Em says. “Think carefully. This is your last chance.”

Ellen looks at Em with haunted, deep-socketed eyes… then smiles. Her lips crack open and bleed. She speaks quietly, without heat. “Don’t lie to me, woman. I was all out of chances when I woke up in here.”

Roddy is the one who comes down the next day. He’s wearing his favorite sportcoat, the one he always wore at conventions and symposia where he had panels to be on or papers to deliver. He knows from the video feed that the liver is still outside the pass-through, but the plate has been moved. He and Em watched as the girl lay on her side, shoulder pressed against the bars, trying to reach the water. She couldn’t, of course.

Roddy is holding the requested salad. Ordinarily he would never tease a caged animal, but this girl really has been infuriating. It’s not just her unshakable calm. It’s the waste of time.

“No dressing. We wouldn’t want to violate your dietary principles.”

He sets the salad bowl down, noting the naked greed on her face as she looks at it. He pushes it toward her with the broom. He could let her eat it before putting her out of her misery. He has considered it and decided against. She’s made Emily angry.

He pushes it into the cell. She picks it up.

“Thank y—” Her eyes widen as she sees him reach inside the sport coat.

It’s a .38. Not much noise and the basement is soundproofed. He shoots her once in the chest. The bowl falls from her hands and shatters. Cherry tomatoes roll here and there. As she goes down he reaches through the bars and puts another bullet into the top of her head, just to make sure.

“What a waste,” he says.

Not to mention the mess to clean up.