Chapter 11
All of Her All at Once
Anca stirred into hazy consciousness. Her eyes couldn’t open.
Swelling, a crust of dried blood across her left lid.
Her insides ached and her face ached and her parts ached, all of her all at once, a raw throbbing.
Acrylic or fiberglass, slick against her bare bottom.
The air was damp and liquid sloshed around her, a soupy, fetal immersion.
Her nostrils stung. Pain in the side of her neck, the bulge of her shoulder, remembrances of needle punctures.
Bathtub. She was in a bathtub. The water, no more than three inches deep. No, not water. Chemical something. The fumes, they were burning her nose. Pungent, sharp, metallic. Bleach? No, hydrogen peroxide, like she used to scrub stains out of her worn-thin carpet.
Memories rushed her, blips of semi-awakeness.
Animal grunts. Malign laughter. Hands on her, all over her, squeezing and grabbing and tweaking.
Pressed into a bare mattress, stomach down, limbs spread, fire and more fire inside.
Ski masks looming overhead, non-faces bulging with drugged distortion, dark eyes and smeared wet lips.
Her head lolled forward, an ache clenching her neck and shoulders. She felt presence around her, stirring, a strong masculine scent. Titters, voices. She scrunched her eyes shut hard and tried to pry them open, her right eye yielding a slit.
Moldy grout fingering between cracked white tiles.
A jaundiced light slanting through a filthy high-set window.
Her knobby knees before her, the soft white flesh of her thigh marred with thumb-wide bruises.
The periphery swam into blurry view. Jeans and bare waists and torsos, several forms rimming the bathtub.
One of the men had a tattoo of a goat skull covering his left pectoral, phallic ram horns spiraling up, a cyclops eye peering out from its bony forehead.
Her insides seized, bringing fresh pain.
“She’s up, she’s up.”
A voice from the other room. “Hit her again.”
With terror, she lifted her gaze.
Dark ski masks hovered above, peering down, smooth black-nylon heads. In the dirty light, she cowered, naked, defiled, the object of a bestial séance.
One of the bare-chested men moved, a syringe flashing in his hand.
A prick at her neck, a burn in her blood, and she tumbled back down into darkness.