The softness within me intensified, and I smiled back at him, hoping this connection would last. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel so empty and alone, and I could sink into him as if he were a blanket.
The memory struck me like a physical blow, leaving me breathless and weeping silently in the shadowed corners of the cage, each tear a hot dropagainst my skin.
A bitter taste filled my mouth as I mourned the loss of our innocence, the missed chances echoing in my memories.
His gentle nature, like a soft, delicate flower, infused me with a comforting warmth, akin to sunshine breaking through clouds.
But the petals decayed, their tender texture turning brittle and crumbling, and the sunshine was swallowed by a barren, starless blackness, silent and opaque.
We can never go back. Our innocence was slaughtered too soon. Time just keeps spinning. A maddening blur. We just keep circling this carousel of hateful rage and tragedy. Always finding the dark, never reaching the light.
I cried in the dark. I wept for our lost innocence, for something that we could never go back to.
THE PRESENT
AMELIA
I always dreaded the moments when the basement door would open with a heavy and slow creak.
It meant the arrival of our tormentor.
When the bolt scraped back, it sounded like a guillotine being readied. I pressed my hands to the glass, not for comfort or hope, but just to anchor myself to something that proved I was still here. Still real.
He trailed a smell of wilted lilies and machine oil, a bouquet of death and industry.
I saw his mouth before I saw his eyes. A crescent, wide and white. He smiled as if we were old friends meeting for cocktails. “My pets,” he crooned, and the word was a caress and a threat in equal measure, “I do hope the accommodations are to your liking.”
He circled, as always, making a show of ignoring us for as long as he pleased.
He always stopped and stared at Caiden first, as if the very sight of him was a slow-motion car wreck he could not get enough of. “You look different today,” he observed, cocking his head. “Did you two have a lover’s quarrel, or are the rats finally winning?” He grinned, showing teeth that did not look real, as though he’d filed them to points for aesthetic effect. “You should know that hunger is not fatal, but apathy is. Most of my prior tenants have succumbed to the latter long before the former.”
He drifted closer, and I felt his eyes crawling over my skin; I have never in my life felt so truly naked. “Do you dream about me?” he asked, as though inquiring after a pet’s digestion. “Do you see me in the static of your nightmares?”
I spat at the floor, but my mouth was so parched it only sent a fleck of grayish foam to my lap.
He studied me with the patience of a botanist watching a mold bloom. “I want you to know,” he said, voice soft, “that I find your progress exhilarating. You are transforming marvelously. Not just physically, though I see the desperation in your eyes, the hunger that has nothing to do with food. No, my dear, the real change is happening in your soul.”
I didn’t look at him.
I looked at Caiden, who was coiled against the opposite wall, a statue of scorched earth.
Caiden’s eyes, which had once been so alive with hate, now looked fossilized. Like something that had already died, been excavated, and was now on display for a sadist’s amusement.
The man leaned closer. “Tell me, have you reached any epiphanies in the dark? Found God? Or perhaps, found each other?” He grinned, a wet slit in the mask of his face. “I wonder what it’s like to love someone you also wish would die. Isn’t that a peculiar kind of hunger?”
I thought I would be sick. He put his palm to the cage right where my forehead had just been. I flinched without meaning to.
“Fuck you,” Caiden said, his voice so hoarse it sounded like sandpaper on bone.
The man did not acknowledge him. “You want to know the secret of the universe, my dear?” he asked me directly. “It’s entropy. Everything falls apart, and the only thing that matters is how beautiful the ruins can be.”
He let that echo. His hand slipped from the glass.
He turned away and circled Caiden’s side of cage on the outside. “You want to kill me,” the man murmured. “I can see it. You would rip the skin from my face with your teeth if you could, if I let you.” He cocked his head, as if listening to some secret music. “That’s good,” he said. “Very good. I prefer my subjects with bite.” Apause. “But you’ll never touch me, son. Not really. You’ll only dream of it until the hunger is all you are.”
Then, pivoting with a showman’s flourish, he spun back toward me. “As for you, you’re different. You think your anger makes you special, but it’s your capacity for shame that truly sets you apart.” He leaned in, his face so close I could see the pattern of stubble on his jaw, the way his smile never touched his eyes. “You hate yourself for how much you want to live,” he said. “You’d eat the flesh off his bones if I asked, and then you’d pray for forgiveness. You’d still beg for seconds.”
I tried to punch him through the cage, but my knuckles thudded dully, the divide as thick and final as a tombstone. The man laughed. “You see? The animal is always closer to the surface than you’d like to believe.”
