Squonk

When she had first been thrown in the room, the fire had appeared an ominous and dangerous presence, and she hid from it in the opposite side of the room. Soon though, she could stand the chilling corner no longer and stumbled on weak legs towards the life the fire offered. The furnace grew seamlessly out of one of the otherwise barren walls. The flames it housed were perpetual; not a day went by that the fire did not burn bright and hot, heating the room to sometimes intense temperatures. But even now, when the flames happened to be at their hottest, the concrete floor of the room turned the toes of her feet blue and numb, despite her best efforts to warm them.

But it was a cruel existence. She endured long nights of hunger that quickly turned to starvation and desperate thirst. Her weak body began to eat itself from the inside out; her muscles disappeared and soon she lost even the strength to hold her body upright and keep her naked feet from touching the frigid ground.

It had been long since she had first been imprisoned in the room, she knew, though her sense of passing time had long faded away. None of her thoughts were coherent now, and she felt only the incessant hunger and thirst and all other human needs she had been deprived of. She slept when she wished, but despite the longer periods of time unconscious, it felt to her that she had still been imprisoned for ages. And she did not die, though she had neither food nor drink.

She knew death was inevitable, and gradually the drawn out waiting became more than she could bear. But she could do nothing, for fear kept her lying motionless before the fire, her eyes watching the demonic flames and creating slight hallucinations that danced before her, coming ever closer and increasing in intensity until she had to shut her eyes for fear that they might touch her. Yet she wished that they might, for she lacked the courage and strength to take her own life and end the suffering.

Her body lay outstretched before the great fireplace; eyes tired and shut, lips cracked and cheeks bruised. Folded over the emaciated chest, the arms and hands were limp and the ragged fingernails clawed into the simple fabric that embraced the skeletal figure. After observing her apparent physical state through a hidden window, the man unlocked the solitary door to the room and entered, his footsteps falling heavily on the concrete floor. She had been sleeping, but her body jerked in an unnatural fashion at the sound, shocked and upset. Her head fell back onto the concrete floor as soon as it had risen, for the muscles in her neck had become too feeble to hold up her head. Dots of light that often appeared before her eyes when staring into the fire now appeared behind her closed lids. She did not notice as the man strode across the room to where she lay.

He stood over her, and when she opened her eyes again and looked directly at her captor, he kicked her. The blow fell on her already frail ribs, which immediately snapped. She cringed, and he stuck her again, this time his foot landing right on her hand, effectively crushing it. This time she cried out hoarsely, and the cry was animal-like and screechy, reaching all corners of the room and bouncing off the blank walls to return to her ears many times over.

The man ignored her screams and whimpers, and left the room without glancing back to see the damage he had caused. It was all part of his experiment, this manipulation of the human body. All of the suffering was justified, for it was in the good interest of his patients. The man crossed the threshold from the experimental wing into the hospital main.

posted by Sarah Ruiz  # 10:53 PM 0 comments

Vincent peered between the seat cushions of his couch; he had found his purpose in life. With a victorious screech, he ripped the yellowed recipe card from the clutches of the hungry sitting-apparatus. The delicate handwriting was in pencil, and while not smudged, was spidery enough that certain letters seemed to blend into the paper they were written on.

“How very inconvenient,” Victor said to himself, ignoring the echo of his words in the very empty double-wide. Turning the card sideways and placing it in the left-hand-side pocket of his tattered windbreaker, he walked the ten feet to the kitchen. Sometimes Victor felt frustrated with the size of his trailer, but other times he was content with it, especially on days when he got the cleaning bug. He looked around the trailer with disgust—on this particular day—as he paced the customary three times around the refrigerator, taking care to step on only the brown tiles. He had more trouble than usual, since all the tiles looked brown. Those crazy city officials had pointed out the filthiness of the floor last week and now he couldn’t seem to get the idea out of his head.

“Why am I thinking? I should be cooking!” he yelled to himself, hoping for once he would listen. Victor shook his head. Sometimes there was no telling yourself. He broke an egg over the rim of a cracked glass, and then peered at the yellowy-white liquid--eye-level with the aborted chicken fetus. He glanced down at the card and searched for the word “egg”. It wasn’t there.

“You idiot, Victor! There’s nothing like that written in these directions! Stupid!” and poked himself in the eye with his eggy hand. He proceeded to throw the glass and egg out of the window. Victor grumbled as he got down on the floor and searched through his plywood cabinets for a mixing bowl. The fifteen-minute quest produced a narrow flower pot, a ceramic ashtray, and a miniature Venus plaster statue. Then, after two seconds of rummaging through the cabinets in the kitchen itself, he came across a large mixing bowl. Victor began cooking.

“Okey, so bananas, I know I got bananas some’er in this house, just gotta find them.” He left the kitchen and went into his bedroom.“Yep, sometimes finding things in here is like trying to find--sheoot, that’s a long nail sticking out of them floor-boards, I oughta take it out sometime.” Victor went upstairs to find his trusty hammer that he used to carry on a string around his belt but stopped when he’d taken to wearing draw-string pants. Coming downstairs again, he noticed a bowl of bananas, and remembered the recipe he was trying to make.

“Lemme see, what kinda bananers am I gonna need? Oh well, this card just says bananas, so I guess these green ones will do, but I wonder if yellow ones would be better….” Victor decided it didn’t matter what color bananas he would need, because they would be baked anyway and things were always a different color when exposed to hundreds of degrees in the confines of a small metal box. “Gee, my granny sure is vague, she says to mush the bananas up, but she don’t say nothing ‘bout how to do it. I’ll just put them in the bowl and step on them like they’s do in Italia with the raisin-grapes.”

With the bananas sitting vulnerably in the bowl on the floor, their peels quivering with fear, Victor raised his foot above the bowl. But he had a second thought. “Then my foot will be all messy with banana goo and that’s icky,” he said, frowning. So he sat down on the floor to think.

He got up a half hour later and picked up the bowl. “That’s it, I’ll chew the bananers and spit them out into the bowl. They’ll be all mushed then and then I don’t got to clean nothing ‘cause it’ll just be with my mouth….” He trailed off, lost in the splendor of his incredible idea. Victor wasn’t the least bit worried about bacteria or germs—he knew the temperature of the oven would kill them right away.

With his mouth full of banana, he opened the fridge and groped for the milk. He spit the chewed banana into the sink and poured milk on top. Upon finding the crusted bottle of vanilla in the spice cabinet, he turned back to the sink and yelled in surprise.

“Where’d the bananer go?” he wondered, and stuck his hand down the drain. It came up with a handful of yellowish-brown goop. “Ah, well,” he said. “This’ll do.” And he put the mixture in a drinking glass and turned to the oven.

Or, where the oven would have been if he had one. Victor sank to his knees. He didn’t have an oven. He curled up into a fetal position and rocked back and forth. O O, what had become of the meaning of his life—to fall like an unwanted egg onto his kitchen floor—he would never achieve this dream of being a great banana-muffin maker. He would never stand upon the cliffs of the South Carolina coast, watching for his cargo ships to bring him money in place of muffins.

“Shut up, Victor, you old crazy! You’re a Caroliner, born and bred, and we don’t like to talk like no no-good smart person. The only smarts you’re gonna get is when I hits your behind with a wooden switch for being all down and sad like that! So go find yourself something else!”

The next morning, he had the strength to get up off the filthy kitchen floor. He had been thinking about the next day and the rest of his life. Victor went over to the couch, ready for a new meaning.

posted by Sarah Ruiz  # 10:52 PM 0 comments