Maria had been told she was lucky to have
acquired work in the city of Tartarus, so soon upon her arrival in the
netherworld.
It wasn’t much comfort. She could only
take the word of her co-workers -- her fellow slaves, more precisely – that to
be employed here brought a measure of protection from the Demons in place of
the punishments inflicted on those beyond the city’s borders. It was as
reassuring as being told that she should be thankful for having one leg
chainsawed off instead of two.
Seeing the Demon city of Tartarus for the
first time had been the third greatest shock of her afterlife. The first shock
had been that there was an afterlife (she had been one of the only
Mexicans she’d ever known not to be devoutly religious) and the second greatest
shock had been that the afterlife adjudged for her was as a citizen of Hell.
Mexico City was dwarfed by Tartarus,
though to Maria’s mind the population of her own former city might have been
greater. Perhaps that was only an illusion because of the vast scale of this
place, which rendered all (mock) life microscopic, and because of its absence
of streets, of commerce. Its very expanse and scope made it seem empty, its
fullness made it desolate, and most strangely, its hideousness made it terribly
beautiful.
Every structure was a skyscraper, many of
them vanishing into the almost solid layer of slowly churning clouds that
forever obscured the sky. These skyscrapers were not so much ranked beside each
other as merged with each other, so that often the only way one might
tell them apart (if indeed they were in any sense apart) was to notice how the
color of one was shaded slightly darker or lighter than another, or how a
building composed of nothing but uncountable, tiny opaque windows faded into a
building that appeared to be entirely constructed (within as well as without?)
out of gigantic auto parts blended with a madman’s plumbing system combined
with computer circuit boards...some of this machinery glossy smooth, other
sections corroded rust red. Though a building might be a ghostly pale hue and
another so dark it seemed one existed in day while the other loomed at
midnight, there was a bleak sepia tone over the whole of the city that made it
weirdly homogenous. Her own former city had been notorious for its smog, but
sectors of this city seemed to loom out of a more subtle mist that blurred its
edges, while other areas stood out with a sharpness of line and detail that
stabbed the eye. White, luminous fog wound like a living entity between the
fissures and irregular gaps in the mountains of concrete and metal, and steam
plumed out of apertures, some of these like grates or exhaust ports while
others were more like organic orifices. Because worked into the weave of
Tartarus was an unmistakable organic element, as if the city wasn’t actually
built from concrete and metal, plastic and stone, but had been grown
like one titanic living body. There was thick tubing that looked both flexible
but vitreous and that snaked down the faces of buildings, that ran in and out
of their very bodies, like arteries. There were huge, glassy bulbs or boils or
tumors of some kind which were filled with that glowing mist or else with
seething black masses like gigantic worms in rows of immense egg sacs. There were
portions of the city that looked formed out of translucent bone, out of some
calcified matter like a coral reef, out of tons of oxidized fossil. Buildings
that seemed made of polished insect chitin, structures that were not linear and
hard-edged but fluid and asymmetrical and a chaos of shape and design. All of
these things in unlikely conjunction were Tartarus, unified by its leeched
brown color however it might shade, compressed so tightly together it was like
one colossal building alone, unified by its strange silence despite the ringing
and hammering heard here and there as its mechanical flanks pumped and
pistoned, unified by its atmosphere of hopelessness and loneliness...like an
abandoned city haunted only by ghosts. Of which Maria was one.
Maria had been raped again. It was bad
enough when a Demon raped her, but much worse when one of her co-workers did.
She expected better from them, since they shared her plight. She supposed these
men needed to vent their terrible, frustrated rage. Or else they simply felt
that this world was a place where evil was expected, being the very substance
of the walls, their masters, of their own mock flesh. Still, they expressed
their humiliation by humiliating her. Spent their bottled anger by filling her
up with it instead.
A Demon had come along the narrow corridor
in which they lay, and had kicked the man hard in the ass. The man had
scampered to his feet, his slick cock bobbing ridiculously, and scampered off
down the passageway to wherever his work station was. The Demon had then
strolled on, not bothering to help Maria up from the floor. As she rearranged
her wrenched and ripped clothing, she watched the Demon recede. He hadn’t been
concerned for her, but only for the work that waited to be done.
The first man who had raped her, on her
second day in Tartarus, she had afterwards struck across the back of the head
with a huge two-handed wrench swung from over her shoulder. He had dropped to
her feet with blood already pouring heavily out of his nose and ears. An hour
later, the damage almost entirely regenerated, the rapist had sought her out
with a lead pipe in his hand for his own club...but a Demon had pushed him away
and told him to leave her alone. “Thanks,” Maria had told the creature.
“Go back to work,” it had rasped at her.
And several days later, she thought it was this very same Demon who raped her
against the wall of a hiss-filled boiler room...though it was hard to tell some
of them apart, especially the ones like this who were less human in form.
Brushing off her bottom with both hands,
Maria resumed her interrupted journey to her current work station for the
beginning of her shift. She picked up her pace, afraid of being late, and thus
punished. She had been allowed a period of sleep so as to recuperate from
yesterday’s seemingly endless shift, and the workers were even given food to
eat. These sham bodies they possessed did not really require sleep or
sustenance, just as it wasn’t true blood that ran in their veins or live sperm
that spurted from rapists’ pricks. (And nerves did not really scream at the
touch of a torturer’s brand or blade, however it might seem they did.)
The bodies of the Damned thought they were
still alive, and so they had the urges and instincts of the living.
Tartarus was one of those far-spaced
cities of Hell in which its Demonic population was not only trained for their
duties...but made.
This was Maria’s line of work. She was,
for all intents and purposes, a manufacturer of the very creatures that had
rustled her up for this employment.
Shifts were long. One often burned or
froze their hands, depending on what sort of Demon – or what stage of that
Demon’s progression – they were working on. Toward the end of today’s shift, a
gust of hot steam had scalded Maria’s left hand...but already, on her way to
this floor’s showers, the pain and angry redness were fading.
Whenever she was badly burned, by steam or
splashed corrosive chemical or by bumping into a red-hot metal surface, Maria
was reminded of her father. His right arm had been terribly scarred as a
toddler, when he had tipped a pot full of boiling water off the stove top. He
had told Maria that his mother was passed out on the sofa at the time. He had
told Maria that his mother was a worthless bitch and whore, and a neglectful
mother who ultimately left her husband for a man who was younger but just as
drunken as herself.
Maria’s own mother had met her father
while she was living for a time in San Antonio. He was white, she a Mexican.
When she was eight years old, after an escalating series of terrifying fights,
her father left her mother. She had never seen him again, and her mother had
moved them back to Mexico to be with family.
Maria had thought that her father loved
her; that he would never leave her as his mother had ended up leaving him. Now,
she couldn’t even remember his face clearly. But she remembered the scars on
his arm. They had never faded away, like the burn on her own hand today.
Maria nodded in mute greeting to the three men
who stood watch outside the women’s shower area. The Demons had not assigned
them to this duty; they had volunteered, to protect the women from other men
who might enter the showers to attack them. On the rare occasion, though, a
Demon or even a pack might enter into the showers, and for them the men lowered
their eyes and stepped aside.
Maria stripped and angled her wide pretty
face toward the pelting hot streams, turned slowly around, her long hair plastering
to her back. Opening her eyes, stepping back a little, she gazed upwards as she
exposed her underarms to the irregular streams that fell from the machinery
high overhead, the fallen water then trickling into a grated floor rough
against her bare feet. This large chamber was not intended for this use, but
the Demons shrugged it off, didn’t bother stopping them. High above, cloudy
cocoons in row after row were suspended pendulously like a crop nearly ripe for
harvesting. The raining water rinsed these subtly pulsating sacs. Here and
there, Maria could see a more pronounced bulge where a limb or wing pressed at
the membrane that sheathed its owner.
A reverberating thud made her step
entirely out of the torrents for a moment or two to listen. An explosion,
perhaps. Another boiler blown? It wasn’t too uncommon. A dangerous mistake on
the part of a worker (though even if shredded to chum, he would reconstitute)
or simply an overtaxed machine. No further detonations followed, and Maria
ducked back into the downpour.
After bathing herself, she dipped her shed
uniform into a mechanical recess in one wall that had collected a puddle of
this falling hot water, so as to clean it as best she could – then she changed
into her fresh uniform and headed out of the shower chamber, her hair still
dripping wet. At the entrance, one of the guards (his name was Russ, he’d
recently told her) smiled at her again and shifted in his hands the heavy
mallet he carried as a weapon. “So Maria, how are ya?”
“I’m fine,” she told him, smiling a
little. She couldn’t believe people could still ask such inane questions. Empty
civility. Like robot servants after a nuclear war, making tea for mummies long
dead in their armchairs. Russ was that robot and that mummy at the same time.
She dropped her eyes and hurried past him without trying to look obvious about
it. “You?” she called back over her shoulder obligatorily. She saw he was
watching her go.
“Okay. Goin’ to the mess hall?”
“Yup.”
“Maybe I’ll see you there in a few.”
“Sure.”
He was cute enough, she supposed. White. A
redhead. And she could not conceive of falling in love with any man here in Hades.
As numb as she was, as hollowed out inside, as automaton-like in her work and
her daily routines, she was not some robot with a bolted-on grin. Her
programming had been shorted out. Civility had been an illusion all along.
Affection was a sham better left to the
living.
When Maria turned a corner of the cramped
hallway, the rainfall hiss of the showers still in her ears, she looked up to
see a Demon plant itself in front of her.
“What is your sin?” it snarled, and
backhanded her across the jaw.
The Demons didn’t apparently use names to
distinguish one infernal race from another, but for their own convenience
(since they had to manufacture them), the workers had given them designations,
and this species was called a Caliban. It was like a cross between a sumo
wrestler and an insect, bulgingly soft in some places and armored in others,
the same sepia brown as the exteriors and interiors of Tartarus, except that
its eyes glowed a bright white and its primary forearms shaded to almost black
at the ends of their scorpion-like pincers. It was one of these appendages that
had just sent Maria to the floor.
“What is your sin?” it demanded again,
taking another threatening step toward her so that she smelled the choking
incense scent burned into its dimpled flesh and glossy chitin. She might have
made this creature herself for all she knew.
Her mouth lubricated with blood, which
drooled out over the middle of her bisected lower lip, Maria managed to get
out, “I have forsaken the Father.”
It was true, wasn’t it?
On the night of the great and final fight,
that frightening last battle like some apocalyptic war, after her father had
left, Maria had found a crucifix on the floor. She recognized it as her
father’s, and realized her mother must have wrenched it off his chest in their
shoving and slapping. Without her mother seeing, she swept it up in her fist.
And buried it under her pillow that night. But the next day, the first day of
her father no longer being in her life, Maria had taken the chain and little
cross out into their backyard and buried it there, partly out of angry
rejection, partly out of despair.
Was it that some neighbor child or even
adult had seen her dig the hole, and had dug up the silver crucifix? Or was it
that her vision had been so blurred with tears at the time? Whatever the case,
when Maria went to exhume the crucifix out of guilt and longing a week later,
it wasn’t in the spot she had thought it would be. She tried another spot, and
there she came upon a bundle in a green plastic trash bag. Now she remembered
what she had buried in this vaguely familiar spot; their cat, which had been
hit by a car a year ago. Disinterring this poor corpse was too great a
punctuation mark to her pain. She reburied the cat, and didn’t try to find her
father’s necklace again.
She had left it buried. And with it, her
faith in family, in solace, maybe even in love. She had continued to attend
church with her devout mother. But she had narrowed her eyes in contempt at the
larger version of that symbol hanging above the altar. The man with his hands
pinned where they could do no one any good.
The Caliban seemed satisfied with her
answer. It shambled on down the hallway, and Maria pulled herself to her feet,
blood still running off her lip. She had refused to cry, however. She prided
herself on holding her tears even when she had no control over the flow of her
blood. But the wound would heal, so that more wounds could take its place.
Hadn’t it been the same, pretty much, when she had still been alive, before she
was raped and murdered?
Maria continued on her way. But not to the
mess hall. She felt vaguely apologetic as far as Russ was concerned, but she
had lost her appetite.
When she reached the enormous chamber in
which she had been assigned a place to sleep, Maria realized that the explosion
she’d heard earlier had occurred in here.
This chamber was circular and disturbingly
organic, its ceiling lost in gloom but apparently taking the form of a dome.
Honeycombed into the curved walls were row upon row of elliptical openings like
slots in a mausoleum waiting to be filled. Formerly, this had been a tank in
which were nurtured a species of Demons since discontinued. They had been one
of the more human-like breeds, and perhaps it was because of their human traits
that a number of them had rebelled in the infernal city of Oblivion. Most of
these Demons had been killed by now, but there were still those that had
escaped the purging.
Her own little cocoon space was in the
third tier, and she kept a few belongings inside, which no one had ever deemed
worthy of stealing. There, she would rest between shifts, curled like a fetus,
reborn – or aborted – every day in an endless cycle.
But today there had been some unknown
mishap, and from the room’s obscure heights, torrents of a thick,
orange-colored gelatinous fluid were raining down to plop and puddle.
Fortunately, the floor was subtly concave and the ooze was draining slowly
toward a grille in its center. The foul-smelling matter put Maria very much in
mind of the gruel they were fed in the mess hall – the only sustenance they
were given – though that substance had a chemical-sharp citrus smell and taste,
like slurping orange-scented dish detergent.
The irregular deluge went largely ignored
by a few weary laborers who had also skipped mess hall and preceded her into
the chamber, and who now climbed toward their cramped sarcophagi. Maria stared
up into the leaking darkness only a few moments herself before navigating
between aggregations of the viscous slime toward her section of the wall.
Having arrived at it, she hoisted up one leg to begin the ascent to her own
depression.
She hesitated, however, as her eyes were
attracted to where some of the rotten-smelling matter had flowed down the wall
and accumulated in a particularly large, glistening heap. She saw that there
were several bones protruding from it; some ribs, and the bat-like struts of a
wing. Not the bones of a human; humans reconstituted, their bodies were
notional, they could not be killed. Demons, however: they could die. But there
was more than the bones. One spot in the mound was subtly but definitely
pulsing. Also, Maria could just discern a muted gurgling sound with an unsettling,
familiar quality.
Holding her breath against the reek, she
crouched by the edge of the pile, and from it drew a loose leg bone. She then
used this to probe the slime in the area where it was undulating. There was
resistance as she prodded a mass buried within it. And then, a tiny arm thrust
up through the jelly, its stubby fingers wriggling.
Maria used the bone to paddle away as much
of the slime as she could around the arm. Then, leaning forward carefully, she
reached out and took hold of it. It was slippery, and cold, and she was
repulsed by the fingers that squirmed against her wrist, but she pulled...and
in standing, she extracted a body drooling streamers of muck. She held the
thing out at arm’s length to examine it. Pudgy legs pedaled the air sluggishly,
eyes squinted open in its sliding mask of ooze, and its wings moved as if to
fan the goo from them. Free of the half-congealed amniotic fluid in which it
had once been nurtured, the Demon gurgled more freely, but not loudly enough
for anyone else to have noticed as yet.
Though Maria had never seen a mature
version, she realized what this creature was. One of those discontinued Demons
that had been nurtured in this chamber before it had been emptied and converted
into barracks. It was a miracle – or,
more accurately, an oversight – that it had survived this long. Overlooked in
the cleansing that had eliminated all its siblings. Now, accidentally but
belatedly miscarried.
Maria was afraid to bring the infant
Demon close to her, but was even more afraid of being seen holding it. She
glanced behind her furtively, but determined that her back had as yet shielded
her find from anyone who might have looked in her direction. She then did the
first thing that came impulsively to mind. Rather than drop the immature
creature back into its afterbirth, rather than fetch an adult Demon to tend to
this matter, she again hoisted up a leg to begin climbing to her tiny nook. In
so doing, she was forced to fold the creature close to her chest.
She was afraid that at any moment, the
larval Demon would snap its jaws onto her throat. But instead, it merely mewled
faintly, and instinctively clung to her so as not to fall.
Working through her interminable shift,
knowing what she had left hidden in her skull socket of a bed chamber, Maria
was agitated and distracted and made a number of clumsy mistakes. Her function,
of late, was to pour large glass jars full of maggots into molds that crawled
past her on a conveyor belt. The squirming, pale brown things were not truly
maggots, but close enough for the workers to refer to them as such. A
co-worker, Patty, told Maria how this particular process reminded her of a
carbonated soda plant she’d worked for in life, where bags of hard plastic
pellets were melted down so as to be shaped into the two liter soda bottles
they would become. But here, Patty and Maria were molding containers of flesh
instead of those of plastic. To be filled with bile, venom and vitriol instead
of corn syrup and caramel color.
Patty would hand Maria a bottle of the
maggots, which she would tip into one of the molds (today, they were for
Baphomets, a towering Demon with a blackened, goat-like head enshrouded in a
caul of cool white flame). Maria would pass the empty jug back to Patty, who
would set it aside to be washed out and reused later.
At one point Maria fumbled and dropped a
bottle, which shattered below the little platform she stood on. Patty jumped
back as the pool of writhing, half-alive matter spread at her feet. Fortunately,
they were able to sweep it all up and dispose of it before any of the Demon
supervisors could see them.
Sometimes, when there were no supervisors
in sight, Maria would spit into the open molds as she filled them.
She was relieved when the shift ended at
last, but also dreaded returning to her sleep chamber to find her secret
discovered...or expired. Before she could check on it, however, she first had a
stop to make.
Russ the shower guard was entering the
mess hall as Maria was just leaving it. He looked like he was coming off his
regular duties; his uniform was stiff with caked Demon blood, from recycling
old bodies for the recasting of new. When he saw her, he grinned and said,
“Hey! There’s the pretty senorita. I missed you yesterday.”
Maria could not speak. In her mouth she
held some of the orange, gel-like gruel she had been served in a bowl by one of
the human mess hall workers. She tried to smile at Russ, rubbing her belly and
wagging her head as if to indicate she didn’t feel well. Concern flashed into
his face and he stepped aside to let her pass.
“Are you going to be sick?” When she
nodded, he asked, “Can I help you?”
She shook her head, patted him on the arm
as she moved forward again (hoping he didn’t take the contact as having
flirtatious meaning) and left her would-be beau behind.
It was not unrealistic for him to believe
she might be ill. In Hell, there were microscopic Demons, or at least infernal
creatures, that could infest, infect, cause grief to the Damned. Maria knew
this well; from the irregular holes rotted open in the walls on the 53rd
floor of this building, she had been able to look outside at a narrow building
that reminded her of a spinal column, in which these viruses were manufactured
by other workers like herself.
“Hope you feel better!” he called after
her.
When Hell freezes over, she thought.
She had walked only a few steps when she
heard Russ cry out in alarm and pain. Turning, she saw that a Caliban had
loomed up behind him and seized him in its pincers. One of his wrists, pinned,
was half severed and jetting blood. Another pincer had ripped his trousers
down, while a third was closed around his genitals as if to masturbate or
castrate. The weight of the immense body doubled him over and the creature was
no doubt entering him.
“What is your sin?” the Demon wheezed.
Russ and Maria held their eye contact.
Russ looked more ashamed than in pain. Maria was ashamed, too, that there was
nothing she could do for him. She knew the next time they met he would be
physically healed, at least...and she knew they would not discuss this.
As she left him behind, she heard the
Demon grunt more demandingly, “What is your sin?”
We have forsaken our Father, Maria thought.
And He has forsaken His children, the ultimate deadbeat dad.
There were more people in the sleep
chamber than there had been yesterday, when she had retired without a trip to
the mess hall first. Many of the orifices were already occupied, like eggs
filled with termites that would hatch tomorrow to take to their labors. She
climbed up the rib-like ridges that protruded between two columns of the
elliptical hollows, and then ducked into her own in the third tier.
Against the back wall of her sleep space,
her spare uniform lay crumpled up. And that crumpled heap was subtly moving,
like the heap of gelatin had been yesterday.
Maria pulled aside her clothing to reveal
the larval Demon lying on the glassy hard surface beneath it. Its eyes shifted
toward her, held her gaze, blinking. Its fingers plucked and kneaded at the
air. Her eyes trailed down to its puny genitalia; it was a boy.
She pinched the infant boy’s nostrils
shut. The creature’s squirming became more pronounced, and she was afraid he
would cry out. So far, he hadn’t cried or made any loud sounds. In fact, even
his soft burbling sounds had decreased over the hours of her rest period, which
made Maria both relieved and concerned. Was he making less sounds because he
was content, or because he was ailing, growing weak?
The thought of clamping her free hand over
his mouth came into her mind. The Damned were immortal, so that they might
suffer through eternity. The Demons could perish. The Demons were only
machines, so to speak. This diabolic cherub was at her mercy. He was one of the
many genera of her tormentors. And her torments might be increased in severity
if she was found to have been hiding him. He was the enemy...
Last night, she had considered smuggling
him out of this room and abandoning him in some little-used corridor, or in the
space between two machines, and leaving him to the Fates. But there were no
Fates, just Demons, and if they found him they’d kill him to further the
factory recall, or genocide, of his species.
So what if they killed him? So what?
But it was because they’d want to
kill him that she hadn’t killed him. Though still a Demon, he was now something
kindred to her.
Maria pinched his nose, but didn’t cover
his mouth. His mouth opened in a disgruntled gasp, and leaning over him, she
drooled the orange, citrus-flavored gruel out of her own mouth into his, like a
bird feeding her winged but flightless chick.
One could still dream in Hades. Sometimes,
Maria dreamed of Los Dias de Muertos. Markets filled with flaming marigolds and
family crypts in pastel shades. Seeing through the eyes of a plastic ghost or
ghoul or devil mask. Rows of sugar skulls with sequin eyes. Sometimes, in her
dreams, Maria imagined these skulls were the heads of Demons waiting to be
attached to their bodies, and come alive. The bread called pan de muerto.
Edible crucifixes, in a kind of communion...
Sometimes, Maria would dream of paging
through the blood-soaked tabloid Alarma! and seeing photos of her own
raped and murdered corpse there for the entertainment of the masses.
Tonight, she dreamed of sneaking out of
her mausoleum nook...of stealing down the curved wall of the sleep chamber...of
creeping out into the maze of hallways with a bundle tight against her breasts.
She dreamed of climbing staircase after
staircase, or scrambling up ladders, or mounting inclined ramps, until at last
she had reached the 53rd floor of the structure she worked and lived
her undead life in. The level -- perhaps near the top, perhaps only halfway up
– where great, irregular holes had rotted open in the resin-like, semi-organic
walls. Holes looking out upon the immensity of the Demon city, Tartarus, where
winds whistled or wailed between the tightly packed skyscrapers of bone, winds
which set her long black hair flapping as she neared the lip of one such
opening.
She uncovered the face of the infant in
her arms, and he gazed up at her dumbly. Not crying, not cooing. She had no
idea what thoughts, if any, breathed in his head. Would his interrupted
progress resume? Would he mature to an adult, or remain at this stage forever?
Though he would be helpless out in the world of the underworld, she found the
latter possibility agreeable. That he should remain an eternal innocent.
Maria unwrapped the creature’s swaddling,
and as if he guessed her purpose, his wings began to flex and fan. She held him
under his arms, held him up at the level of her face. For a moment, she almost
kissed his bare belly, where there was a navel though it had never had an
umbilicus fed into it. But she didn’t kiss the white flesh, instead turned the
infant in her hands to face the city sprawling beyond. She stepped closer to
the rim. She held him higher aloft. Her arms slipped out into the biting wind
of the air, beyond the lip of the wound. And then, she let him go.
She was afraid he might plummet, but he
did not. Instinctually, his wings began to beat so quickly, like those of an
insect or hummingbird, that he was buoyed up, and the currents of air howling
through the canyons of skyscrapers did much of the work. Up, he rose, and up.
Out over the darkness of unseen depths below. Up and into the mist between two
particularly gargantuan edifices...until he was lost from sight. Until he was
free.
In a building so close to hers they were
practically conjoined, she saw a figure in one of the windows. A witness to her
act. But just as the figure turned away, she recognized who it was and became
less afraid. She knew that her father would not betray her this time.
When she awoke and uncovered the Demon
larva beside her, she found he had expired while she was asleep, his lids half
closed over his already clouded eyes.
Maria did not stir for a long time. She
was almost late to work because of it. But at last, she covered his head again
under her spare uniform...and this she carried with her to work as she often
did, so that she might wash it in one of the basin-like recesses in the shower
chamber when her shift was over.
She waited until there were no patrolling
Demon guards or supervisors in view. She waited even until Patty, her co-worker,
had briefly left to roll in another cart loaded with bottles of maggots. Then,
swiftly, she dragged out her bundle from under the conveyor belt. Unwrapped
it...took the immobile, rubbery little body in her hands...and dropped it into
the next open mold. Then, she poured the contents of one jug of maggots over
that. She watched the mold be borne away along its track.
Today they were making Calibans. Would the
human-like Demon live on, in some sense, in the body of a new Demon despite its
different form? Or had her act been purely one of defiance? Would the Caliban
born from this mold be more human, like those rebellious Demons who were being
hunted down and cleansed from existence...or would this new Caliban one day
rape his own mother?
When Patty returned with the cart she
became concerned for Maria, touched her arm. She told Maria she had never seen
her cry before. But Maria laughed a little, and touched her arm in turn, and
they resumed their work.
It was not Russ’ turn to guard at the
entrance to the women’s showers today, but Maria sought him out in the mess
hall, and found him, seated herself directly to his left. He turned and looked
a little surprised to see her there. Her smile made his rising shame over the
other day drop away again.
“Hi,” she said to him.
“Hi,” he said, sounding a little confused
at her open tone. Maria had always been reserved with him, her smiles polite,
not showing teeth. Now she smiled more warmly at him.
She stole her hand under the long table
they sat at, and rested it upon his own hand.
Russ’ uncertain smile grew, as well. But
now it was his turn to avert his eyes shyly. He didn’t withdraw his hand from
hers, however; instead, curled his fingers around it.
They ate like that, side by side. Almost
like a husband and wife. Almost like parents at their supper table.
