My Forever Home

All I could remember after a while was their laughing. It settled to a dull roar after all of us had given up hope.

After the screaming died down. After they stopped getting reactions out of us.

Bathing us in our own humiliation until we surrendered to it like I did.

Then it wasn’t fun anymore.

Then the hose turned off.

Our skin was agitated. But pristine. It felt softer than I’d ever felt it in my life.

We’d been sand blast exfoliated.

They didn’t have to ask us to get naked. The clothing was annoying after a while. It hurt to have on. We shed it off in the green goo.

Then we were marched.

Women of all shapes and sizes.

Into a room that had row, upon row, upon row of shelves in it.

On each of those shelves were packages.

Tight ones.

Sealed ones.

The air drawn completely out of them. Sucked flat and wrinkly.

Stacks of them red, stacks of them black, stacks of them white, stacks of them blue, green, mint, yellow, you name it.

“Press the button.”

I heard vaguely from the front.

Press the button?

I looked around the girl in front of me, all the way to the front of the twelve person line.

There was a counter.

An older woman sat at it. Above her head it said “Tailor”.

Well. Everyone was wearing military gear… supposed we’d get it too.

But as the first girl was walked around the counter into the fitting room, I saw the older woman take one of those blue packs from behind her, put it in a basket and slide it onto a conveyor belt.

Then another girl. Another colored package…

Then the next.

And the next.

And the next.

What was going on?

By the time I got up to the counter, I was nervous. My eyes were moving around excited and terrified…

I looked at her. She looked at me. She gestured at her counter.

“Well push the button…” She said.

I looked down, only then noticing the big red button in front of me. With a small, old fashioned LCD screen built into the counter above it.

“Oh. Uh… okay,” I said, nervously giving the button a push.

It felt like one of those toy buttons. Something for an infant to press. It felt kind of reassuring a little. It plundered just right. Felt squishy under my palm, but a little like a squeaky balloon.

I don’t know why I kinda liked and hated it at the same time.

But I pressed it.

The screen said:

[BLACK]

So she reached over her right shoulder, grabbed a black pack.

But then she stopped. Looked at me. Put it back and grabbed another black pack, then put that in the basket.

“Small.”

“Oh. Right.” I nodded. “I make up for it in the hips, right?”

“… Hon, I don’t care. Next!” She turned her hand over, doing that wiggle-grabby move that meant ‘come here’ to the person behind me.

I didn’t like it.

I just sorta shuffled over to the door as she sent my basket into the conveyor.

I stepped inside, naked as the day I was born as…

I looked at… not a hallway, or a room. It was a closet? Of sorts?

“Step inside.” A robotic voice demanded.

It was deep and terrifying.

So I did it. What else could I do?

I stepped inside. The world closed behind me… Or something did. I heard it slide shut.

My pulse started to race as I felt the floor move.

“Black zone,” It droned.

My stomach did that weird lurch thing as I felt myself move not up, not down, but laterally sideways. I lifted my hands to brace myself against the walls as I felt my little box room move on tracks.

It trundled and shook. Took weird, sudden turns as it navigated the quarantine wall.

I was trapped in there. Moving inside of a tunnel for vertical coffins. I could see through the seam in the door in front of me. I hadn’t noticed it before because it was so dark. I saw each wall slide by that separated zones as I made my way around the perimeter. They were so far apart.

I could see light peeking through. See the stations for each of them as I was moved to one of it’s many ‘black zones’, apparently.

It kept moving and I gave up caring what was outside of those doors. One same-same metal station after another. Glimpses of depressed looking women who would never see the light of day again.

Losers like me.

I slid down the wall and sat on the floor naked in the dark alone.

Feeling worry resting in my guts. Feeling like at any moment those doors could open and someone or some thing might take me into the night.

Do god knows what to me.

I was naked and afraid.

The air in my coffin box was uncomfortable. I could taste it. Feel it on my skin.

Or maybe that was the fact that my skin had been strip cleaned.

It still tingled all over like my body was going numb. Pin prickles of sensitivity.

Even when I blinked it felt like my eyelids were sticky.

When it finally stopped I jumped.

Scuttling up to my feet. Pressing my back against the side wall, not knowing which of the doors would open. Front or back.

The space was so tight, I almost wondered how the fat girls made it. Sealed in here like a hotdog in a roasting tube.

I didn’t want to put myself in that hell mentally.

The door to my left opened and rough female hands reached in to seize me.

Two women. They weren’t nice about it.

My neck they gripped and used like a handle to haul me out.

“Let’s go, Princess.”

I would have laughed if they weren’t shoving me around and strangling me.

I stumbled ahead of them into the medically white room, every time they shoved me I stumbled again. Glaring back at them.

“Get those pretty eyes off me, Doll. I’ll knock your teeth out.”

One of my officers said, and I turned around quick.

I wanted none of that.

She looked like one of those tough bitches from the hood.

She probably would really fuck me up.

I already had one ass kicking coming today, so said Officer Huxtable.

I didn’t want anymore enemies.

Down that narrow hallway, we went through a set of glass double doors ahead. Medical personnel walked around ignoring me. Other prisoners were getting moved about.

Some got hustled in on stretchers from the big doors leading out into…

My new world.

They were screaming. Inside of a skin tight latex suit with a bubble-like helmet, sealed in… covered in filth. That disgusting dark green sludge that was about to be the rest of my life.

That putrid smell I’d gotten used to.

I noticed why she was screaming immediately. Her leg was bent at an odd angle.

“Tell that bitch Kelso she’s getting another five years!” The doctor who rushed up to the stretcher said, yelling at the guards who had rolled her in.

Everyone. Absolutely everyone was in those skin tight suits…

Except me…

I felt like I was exposed all of a sudden. Like there was some contaminant I was supposed to be shielded against.

When they ushered me into a medical room, this time the door behind me sealed tight.

And no one followed.

It was just a shower pod against the left wall. The room was tight and small.

It had a toilet. A counter. A mirror. And a deep rubber pan.

I looked at myself. Looked down at my bruised and beaten body. My tight abs, my small breasts…

My black eye.

Jeez she slapped the shit out of me.

I really needed to learn to shut up.

I bit my lip.

“Where’d Daddy’s little girl go…”

God it was crazy… I made more jokes about family than any real time I spent with them.

I didn’t remember them at all.

But I missed them…

I thought about my life. About how I never knew anything but running and trouble. I found myself envying girls in the past who got to grow up in a world where at my age they were calling daddy to borrow money.

I was about to to do a five year bid in hell.

My daddy was dead.

My mom was dead.

I just lived my life existing. Not thriving.

I just remember state programs, juvenile detention centers. Avoiding beatings and scraping by being cute and a little funny.

Being a hooligan was easy in a dying world.

The wall in front of the counter opened a little slot and a tray slid through.

“Drink it."

“What if I don’t wanna?” I said, smiling a little.

The door to my right opened.

It was Barbarella.

“Told you.” She growled, marching towards me.

“Oh shit!” I lifted my hands to stop her but it was no use, “No, no, no, no!” I backed up rapidly, terror on my face.

“It’s too late now,” She shook her head, coming on like a rolling storm.

“Please. Please! Pl-glk!”

She grabbed me by the neck and her knee met me in the stomach.

Slamming my face on the counter, she snarled down at me.

“Ow… ow- ow…” I said, feeling her pressure my neck. Pain exploding and throbbing on the side of my head.

“Told you I was gonna fuck you up today. Didn’t I, Red?”

“Y… yeah…” I breathed.

She snatched me up by the neck and did just that.

She gave me that good ass whooping. She threw my pretty face around with punches, peppered my ribs a few times and bounced me off of the walls in the narrow medical room.

The entire time she had a sick half smile on her face. Enjoying fucking me up.

My back hit the wall hard, sliding down it to the floor.

A line of blood slid down from my nose. Another from the corner of my mouth.

It was so fast…

It was just so fast…

Pain blossomed all over me. I wasn’t even sure where she’d punched me I just knew she did a good job.

She walked over to me slowly. I heard her take the cup from the tray.

Then she squatted down and held it out between thumb and index finger… letting it swing-swing there.

I was embarrassed of my wounds. Of the pain…

Flashback memories of the way she gleefully beat me up forced my compliance as I stared her in the face, flabbergasted by her cruelty.

I took the cup and dumped it’s bitter contents down my throat without another word.

“Good girl.” She stood slowly and sauntered out.

I sat there reliving it… her savagery. The pre-packaged PTSD of a little girl who had what little bit of her safety bubble remaining utterly shattered.

The world was cruel.

People were cruel.

And I didn’t matter.

The look of grim enjoyment on her face while she pummeled me into the wall.

It was efficient. She didn’t prolong it. Like she was giving me my ‘welcome to the Irish’ moment.

One of many.

This is what life doing hard time is like… If you’re short and pretty you get fuckin’ manhandled. I was never supposed to be in a place like this.

This is my consequence.

My stomach gave a harsh grumbled.

My eyes went wide.

The next twenty minutes of my life I spent on the toilet.

And I figured out what the deep rubber pan was for while it sat in my lap catching my insides.

Whatever was in me. It definitely came out.

I felt like a lab rat…