11
Jase
Being shackled by the legs turned out to be more traumatizing than being locked to the wall. Fastened against the wall, I knew I could not move. The short chains on my leg shackles gave me the illusion of freedom, only for me to be rudely awakened as they pulled tight. Even worse, in the dark, I couldn’t see the toilet bucket, and more than once, I knocked it over with the results you’d expect. I’m pretty confident that Hulk One and Mammoth Two were putting it in different places just to help me soil myself, too, for shits and giggles.
The other thing about the dark is it is insidious. I found this out when they took my meal dishes away, and they pulled a set of fucking shutters across the bars of my cell. No ambient light from the weak light outside my cell, no dim purple gleaming from the window. It was somehow actually darker than before, when they’d turned the lights out in the corridor. Nothing but the cool, the damp, the dankness of mold and mildew. Sat there in the darkness, my other senses began to sharpen. I could feel every prickle of cold against my skin. Each and every hair on my body quivered with the damp. My nose twitched against the scents the dank brought; the stench from my body waste became even more foul to my nose. Then there was my hearing. I could hear far off laughter, catch the almost sounds of someone screaming, and worst of all, the scratching sounds of vermin as they crawled out from the chinks in the mortar and skittered across the stone floor and across the walls.
I got two more meals before they stopped coming to feed me and to empty my waste. My nose became inflamed from my nose dripping, my eyes sore from watering. I could now no longer smell anything and my eyes saw nothing but colorful spots if I tried to see anything. My throat ached, the area under my jaw and the sides of my ears feeling stretched and uncomfortable from swelling. I could still hear, though. Even worse, I could still feel and when the bugs began to climb over my skin, the chains held me fast so I couldn’t escape them.
I refused to give in, though. If there is one thing a Florida farm boy knows, it’s that cockroaches are everywhere. Unable to afford anything than the odd can of out of date Raid from the Dent and Bent grocery store just a few miles away from us and over the border in Alabama, cockroaches were a fact of life growing up. Roaches, ants, love bugs, you name it, we had ’em, inside and outside of the trailer. Yes, trailer.
My father didn’t pay the insurance premiums on the house one year and a hurricane came and tore the roof off while flooding did the rest. He took the money we did get and drove to Enterprise, buying a fifteen-year-old fourteen by sixty that needed repairs, which it only sort of got. When you drink most of what little money you do earn away, it doesn’t leave much for anything else. So, yeah, I wasn’t going to start screaming and crying.
I slapped at where they crawled and bit, whatever the fuck these bugs were. Probably some type of giant magic cooties. I stamped hard, ignoring the pain that shot up from my barefoot, through my ankle, and up my calf in my determination to try to squash them before they got to me. I raked my hands through my hair, shaking my head wildly to dislodge them. Nothing worked for long. More and more of the damned things came. My skin began to itch and I began to alternately feel hot and then cold. Damned things likely carried some kind of plague, transmitted by bite.
I slept fitfully, startling awake to keep them from crawling in my mouth, as I had to keep it open to breathe now that my nose was stuffed closed. I pinched my nostrils a lot, too, making sure none had gotten up in there as I slept. The day I discovered the itching in my ears and ass and was doing my best to dig them out before they did me even more harm, I was blinded by the shutters opening and the loudness of a familiar voice.
“I said to leave him in the dark, not stop feeding and cleaning him!” the figure snapped at someone.
“We do apologize for the inconvenience. We will, of course, not be charging for the services not rendered,” someone replied.
“And?” the first figure asked.
“And comp you twenty-five percent off of the total bill payable,” came the grudging sounding reply.
“That should about cover how much it’s going to cost me to get him presentable,” the figure muttered. “Ghost! Stop that! Someone grab his hands, he’s going to hurt himself in ways I don’t want.”
Ghost, yeah, that was me. I was a ghost, alright. My past was dead. This male, he was my ticket out of here, even though he was also the one who dumped me here.
“The bugs,” I explained, my voice sounding harsh. I needed to be away from them. There were bugs and then there were bugs. These bugs were nothing like Florida bugs. These wanted to eat me, I just knew it..
“Shh, now. The bugs are all gone,” he told me. Lord Willow, my brain said, stuttering as it tried and mostly failed to reorient to the sudden change of environment. “Look at me,” he demanded, peering into my eyes as he grasped my chin. I locked eyes with him and fell into the vastness of space, free at last as I floated away.
