Abject fear, p.29
Abject Fear, page 29
“I asked where you have been, Musume!”
The chef grabbed Elle’s arm and spun her around. The violent motion aggravated a shoulder injury developed at a young age under the same hands that gripped her so firmly now. It could have been the same interrogation, even.
“Mama?” Elle whispered in disbelief.
The woman spit, as if disgusted by the title. Whether in defiance of her position as the matriarch, or simply hearing the word spoken in English, the woman made her displeasure known. Jerking Elle’s arm into the air, the woman spun her daughter around, examining the aftermath of whatever deeds the child had been up to. And Elle was a child. She felt small, helpless.
“Where have you been?”
The woman, while small in stature, had a large presence. In her sixties, the woman’s eyes remained sharp and piercing, though they squinted in disgust at her child. Her voice was unwavering, her questions provided their own answers and were nothing more than rhetorical. And accusatory.
“Were you with boys?”
“No, Mama. I told you where I was. The library,” Elle said in a small voice coming from a small girl.
“And are there no boys at the library?”
“Ouch!” Elle yelped as her mother squeezed her arm ever tighter before tossing the arm roughly away, as if trying to do the same to the child. Elle rubbed her arm.
“I asked if there were boys at the library.”
“Yes, Mama,” Elle said.
“Do they try to stick their tongues in your manko? Li-li-li-li,” the woman said as she flicked her tongue in a lewd manner.
Elle scrunched her face, sickened at the sight. Yes, many men made such gestures, especially when she was on the bus or on the street. She wished she could ask her mother how to deal with such grotesqueness coming from older (much older) men. But the conversation would not sit well with her mother.
“No, mama.”
“You lie! Look how you dress.”
Elle could not help but glance at her pink polo shirt covered by a distressed denim jacket. Off brands, thrift store finds. Her mother preferred her to wear dresses, but the men bothered her more when she did. It was easier to be androgynous and invisible in baggy clothing. But that was too American for her mother.
“Do they push your coat aside so they can see your oppai? Not that you have any. Probably never will. If you had waited for boys to touch you, maybe they would have grown in properly.”
Elle’s stomach turned. The same aromas that drove her hunger in youth had long since become associated with the hurtful words. She wanted boobs. She did like boys. But she did not like men and had no desire to touch them or be touched by them. Elle’s heart belonged to many teen actors and boy band singers. That was enough for her. Boys were mostly stupid, but she wanted them to like her.
Her mother frequently made it known that would never happen. According to Elle’s mother, Elle was so thin, and such a tomboy that she would have no boys chasing her. Yet every boy on the planet was out to get Elle. How could Elle be with everyone at once and no one ever? Elle’s head spun at her mother’s angry logic. The woman was only warming up.
“Fah! Why do you think you have no father?”
Because, unlike me, he had a car and driver’s license, Elle thought. Instead of saying anything, Elle simply released a tear that mapped her cheek.
“He knew the shame you would bring. With all the boys chasing you! How many more mouths will we have to feed by the time you are done?”
Elle could take it no longer. If her legs could move, she would run. Go back out the door, never come home. But then her mother had her by the hair. That meant one thing.
“Mama, no!”
Elle grabbed her head to stop the pain but also to change its trajectory. She knew where things were heading. Her resistance only caused her mother to tug harder, threatening to scalp her child. Elle had no choice but to follow her mother’s path. And that path led them to a tiny closet in the kitchen. The broom closet. So small they did not even keep the garbage inside. Only the broom, dustpan, and garbage bags.
The door was thick, built at a different time, when wood was solid rather than veneer, and when paint still contained lead. The door’s hinges were of a substantial size and thickness. Though the door closed tight, the thick metal created a tiny gap on the hinged side of the door. Enough for Elle to see into the kitchen during her punishment. But it also allowed her mother to watch and enjoy the show from the comfort of a warm kitchen.
It was the locks that bothered Elle the most. A triple lock, more fortified than their front door. A small slide latch above the pull handle, then a chain lock, and a second heavy duty hinged slide latch. Elle had tested the locks before many times. There was no give. And Elle was about to be locked inside. Again. Her mother’s righteous anger gave her strength. Elle could not free herself from the woman’s grip.
Elle’s head was on fire from the hair pulling. Her mother pushed Elle into the closet. Elle twisted, trying to turn to relieve the pressure of her hair. In doing so, she stepped awkwardly. One foot in the closet, one out. The awkward position caused her to fall forward fast. Elle’s head smashed into the closet wall. Worse, with her hands occupied, there was nothing to stop her from slipping. Her face rode painfully down the wall. Once crumpled on the closet floor, Elle’s mother kicked Elle’s legs into the closet.
Click, clack, click went the locks. Crumpled in an awkward ball, Elle panicked for a moment, stuck in the position with not enough room to turn around. She finally readjusted and nursed her wounds as best she could in the tight space. The only light available to her was through the same crack that looked out at a mother she wished not to see.
Spite made Elle wish to avoid her mother until she escaped the makeshift prison. It was difficult not to listen, however. Her mother hummed merrily while prepping the meal. Nothing in the woman’s demeanor suggested a battle had recently taken place on the very tile the woman now walked on. In stocking feet. (Her mother forbid shoes past the apartment’s threshold, which meant no Chuck’s in the house for Elle.)
The merry tune hummed by Elle’s mother suggested a copacetic home life. She kept humming while opening the oven (the metallic squeak gave it away). That meant the fish was done. Its odor wafted into the closet, causing Elle’s stomach to gurgle. Next step in the meal prep meant turning down the Miso soup to a simmer. The rice cooker would shut itself off. A miracle her mother used a modern device, Elle had thought when her mother purchased it.
That left the noodles. Elle knew the drill. Clicking signaled the ignition of the burner, followed by the clang of a wok dropped in place atop the oven. A splash of soy sauce in the pan sizzled, creating an aroma that overtook the entire apartment. Sh, sh, sh. Her mother shook the wok back and forth while pushing the noodles round with a spatula.
Then the click of the oven being turned off. Muscle memory of the routine allowed Elle to see despite her sitting fetal in the dark. Her mother would transfer noodles from the wok to a bowl before ladling in the miso soup. Elle was as hungry as she was angry, but she would not beg for food. She understood her mother used the food to enhance the punishment. Elle vowed silence, refusing to beg for a meal.
Something scraped across the floor. That was new. At Elle’s age, she could not battle curiosity. Elle pressed her face to the crack and noticed a chair in plain view of the hinged gap. Her mother arranged the seat so that it faced the broom closet. The silverware drawer sliding open meant chopsticks. After closing the drawer, Elle’s mother took a seat in the chair, holding a bowl and utensils.
Her mother stirred the noodles with chopsticks, then lifted a clump high above the bowl. Tilting her head back, the woman fed herself like a bird, allowing the noodles to slide down her throat. She smacked her mouth with satisfaction while locking eyes with her daughter. The woman fed herself another scrumptious round of noodles. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
“Look at you. Three locks it takes to keep your filthy mind away from the boys.”
The words enraged Elle, giving her the desire to fight back. She did not like boys as much as she liked books or science. Elle liked her friends of all sexes. Mostly, she liked the idea of going somewhere far away.
“Let them slurp on you? What do you do in that library all day?”
Her mother slurped again and somehow made it dirty, disgusting. Elle was losing her appetite. Elle had enough. Lean back into the dark and hide. That was the best course of action. Let her mother tire herself out. There were only so many accusations one person could make.
Then something odd happened. Her mother jolted upright in the chair with a strange look on her face. Her movement appeared involuntary. Once upright and rigid, the woman went still, staring straight ahead. Elle looked behind herself trying to see what had caught her mother’s attention. There was nothing but darkness. She turned back and saw her mother’s eye twitch.
Crash! The bowl fell from the woman’s hands and shattered on the floor. Her mother did not catch it, and worse, did not react to the crash. Elle pressed her face against the door, suddenly concerned.
“Mama?”
After a moment, her mother followed the path of the bowl. It was not a simple fall; it was as if she thrust herself out of the chair. A hard jerk of a movement thrusting her hips from the chair and then she hit the floor, falling onto her side while landing in the spilled liquid on the floor. Elle’s mother faced Elle from where she landed. The woman’s eyes remained wide open and unblinking.
“Mama!”
The woman did not answer, only stared at her daughter. Eventually, a tear dripped from one of the woman’s eyes. Elle’s mother murmured something unintelligible, as if drunk, then went silent, never looking away from her daughter. Elle fought to open the door.
“Mama, let me help you. Please, get up, open the door!” She grabbed the handle and pulled it. Nothing. Elle slammed her body against the door, to no avail. “Mama, let me help you. Mama, please, let me get you help. Mama, please, help me!”
Elle screamed with anguish, fighting a door that refused to budge. When that failed, she screamed for neighbors, but they were an end unit. There was only the world above and the world below. No one answered. Elle screamed until her voice grew hoarse. She stomped on the floor, hoping to raise the ire of some unknown neighbor, but got nothing for her troubles except sore feet.
Time stilled. She did not know how long she had been inside, but it felt like eternity, a moment frozen as solid in time as her mother remained frozen on the floor. Elle lost count of the times she threw herself against the entrance to her wooden tomb. All failed attempts.
“No! Help me! Mama, help me, please. Somebody help me!”
But no one did, so Elle dropped to the floor and cradled herself. The scent of rice, fish, and noodles made her stomach growl. Worse, her throat ached from the screaming. Water. There was none. The predicament hit her, and she sobbed, rocking back and forth in the tight confines of her closet.
Elle grabbed the broom at one point and used the handle to pound the closet’s ceiling, but received no reply. She listened for footsteps above or below to signal someone was home, but all remained silent. The closet muffled the outside world to the point she could barely hear passing traffic, which meant they would not hear her either.
A mop bucket was in the closet with her, and she used it as a restroom. The mop was still damp from a recent cleaning. Elle sucked on the loose strings for moisture. The dirt and cleaning chemicals were stomach churning, but there was some water in the mix. She grew increasingly hungry and thirsty. Oh, so thirsty!
The passage of time was hard to decipher, as Elle soon fell into brief periods of sleep, though she never woke from the nightmare. With no other way to understand the passage of time, Elle kept time based on the changes in her mother’s corpse. Not long after her mother fell from the chair, the woman’s face turned a certain shade of blue that Elle thought was quite beautiful. But as time passed, the face grew darker and darker until the flesh gave over to gravity and drooped toward the floor.
During her entrapment, Elle screamed about how she always liked boys, would touch them, and let them touch her. She said filthy things she had learned from the internet but knew nothing of in real life. She spoke the words, yelled them, cried them in the hopes it would so infuriate her mother the woman might return from the dead and tear down the door with a vengeance.
But eventually Elle’s words became a croak. As her bones sought the surface of her already skinny frame, she found it more uncomfortable and painful to sit in any position. At least as she grew weaker, sleep came involuntarily. But waking brought with it tremendous pain.
Elle dry heaved frequently over the foul odors of her dead mother and rotting fish combined. Dry heaving taxed her body and cramped her stomach while denying her the sweet release of vomiting. There was nothing left in her stomach. Even her tears had dried, though her sobbing rarely stopped. She never felt so alone.
Fading in and out of consciousness, Elle came to understand her mother better. If Elle was not careful, she would end up like her mother in the end. All alone. If there was a boy who liked her, if there was a good friend, someone would come to check on her. But there would be no rescue, no one to worry about her. She was too much like her mother. All alone.
Elle remembered one of her science classes where they discussed how long someone could live without water. The answer was four days. Six and a half days later, when neighbors finally complained to the landlord about the stench from apartment 4C, first responders arrived. Unconscious through most of her mother’s body retrieval, Elle cried out with a squeak. The shocked rescue crew rushed Elle to the hospital. Her heart stopped twice on the way. Though they restarted it, she was never the same.
CHAPTER 39
Elle leaped from her lab back into the corridor. She fought to breathe, battling anxiety at the thought of being trapped in the closet again. But there was no closet, merely her lab off to one side. She was no longer trapped. The long corridor helped her to breathe. She needed people. Once she found them, what would she say?
Forget the trip down memory lane. One could attribute the dark memory to lack of sleep, the drugs, or PTSD. But what to make of the odors accompanying the memory? From the aromatic rice to the rotting fish, it seemed real. Had Elle slipped into theoretical lucidity?
Unlikely. In lucidity, people could control their environment. Elle had failed to escape the closet until after she relived the horrible event. She shivered at the thought. So long ago, but always there in the back of her mind. Elle looked back at her lab where something lay on the floor close to where she injected the drugs. Too frightened to re-enter the lab and have it turn back into a closet, she pulled her cellphone out of her ass. From the back pocket.
She aimed it into the lab and snapped several photos of the large lump. Once finished, she opened a picture and finger swiped it bigger. Her heart stopped. Staring at her from the lab floor was her dead mother, frozen in place, just like in the kitchen back home.
She brought up the next and enlarged that. The image changed slightly. A woman appeared in the same prone position, but half the woman’s face was gone. Had half her mother’s face fallen off by the end, the skin sloughed off in death? Elle could not remember because she remained mostly unconscious at the end.
Yoshi. She needed to show him, find him. She needed someone. Elle bypassed the elevator for the stairs. Before entering the stairwell, she checked her phone. No service. Occasionally, they got service in certain corners of the building, sometimes on the roof of the dead wing where they occasionally partied. Even a text from someone she knew would help.
She stepped out onto Yoshi’s wing and ran for his lab, knowing it was unlikely that he would be there because he took the reporter to someone else’s lab. Elle struggled to remember whose lab. She was in a haze of Ink when Gillian arrived.
“Yoshi!”
Elle yelled his name even before she reached his lab. All the rooms along the way came up empty. His proved no different. Nothing but collectibles. No Yoshi. The wall of toys rose above his desk. Under the influence of the drug, the toys’ faces took on other forms.
A beast with three eyes. A screeching bat. The Gill Man from Creature of the Black Lagoon maintained its already horrific look, but with demonic, glowing eyes. The sound of plastic drew Elle’s attention. Inside one box, a toy with a half-destroyed face glared at Elle with its one available eye. The figure tried to push through the plastic center of the box, trying to get out. It mirrored the face she saw on the reporter. Strange.
Foolish. Nothing but toys. Elle blinked and the dead woman with half a face disappeared. In her place stood an anime character Elle recognized but could not name. Elle would learn them all if she ever hooked up with Yoshi. In her eagerness to always be with someone, Elle had many relationships. (Of which her dead mother would surely disapprove.) To keep people around, she latched onto hobbies of each new man she bedded down with.
None truly knew Elle because she always became who they wanted her to be, a cheerleader for their life, not her own. But most relationships reached tipping points where the other half found reasons to spend less time with her. Once the bloom was off the rose, Elle moved on to the next, anyone infatuated enough to spend more time together. During dry spells, she settled for one-night stands, including a few men at work.
Colt! They had slept together, and she knew where to find him. The lobby level lab. She did not wish to sleep with Colt again. The thought gave Elle pause. Colt would expect round two if Elle visited the man. She got angry at Yoshi, deciding his absence made her heart grow fonder of her former flame. Then it hit her. There remained one person available to her. Elle returned to the stairwell and headed toward the top floor.
