Page 1 of Senseless
Prologue
THE BLOOD BAG
NINE YEARS EARLIER
They cut deeply today, so much so that it made me almost grateful that I stopped feeling anything years ago.
Using the corner of my ragged shirt, I wiped at the blood still seeping out of the red line running from my shoulder to halfway down my arm. The cut throbbed, the skin red and angry around it. It would probably get infected, if it wasn’t already.
I looked to the far corner of my cage, where my water container sat with a dangerously low amount of liquid. The cut would feel better if I washed it, but that was also my drinking water. It could be another day, maybe more, before they refilled it. This was a predicament I ran into often—drink or wash my blood away.
Cleaning my cuts always seemed like a waste. The concrete floor of my cage was painted with years upon years of my spilled blood. And the cutting would never stop.
The last man who shared the cage with me said I was already dehydrated. Malnourished. Words he had to explain to me because I hadn’t encountered them in my reading yet.
He was surprised that I grew so tall after spending my whole life in here. I had no perception of how tall, short, or malnourished I was compared to other people, and didn’t know what to tell him.
The man was a doctor, or so he claimed. They were always different, but their occupations and life stories started to blur together after a few years. It was nice to have company in my cage that didn’t want to cut me, but it was always brief. The men would spend a couple nights in here with me, a week at the most, before being taken away, never to be seen again.
I used to cry. I had begged, pleaded, and clung to their legs as they dragged the men out. After the first dozen or so, I learned to stop being attached to my temporary companions. The result would always be the same.
“Those women are brainwashed,” the doctor had told me, pacing back and forth in our shared cell. “Not mentally ill, most likely, but manipulated. The old woman, the one up in the chair, she’s the master manipulator. The cult leader! Now that one’s got a whole slew of mental issues, narcissistic personality disorder for damn sure. Oh, and she’s a total sociopath, I’d bet my whole practice on it!”
“It doesn’t matter,” I’d said, watching his pacing feet scrape a trail through my dried blood on the concrete floor.
“And you.” He stabbed a finger in my direction. “You must have a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome, kid. How long have you been in here?”
I’d peered at him from where I sat against the wall. “I’ve never been anywhere else.”
“Oh, Jesus…” He turned back toward the bars, peering around the room beyond the cell as if looking for some way out. “Am I gonna die in here?”
“No.”Not in here, exactly. I went back to picking the scabs at one of my cuts. “Your stay won’t be much longer.”
He had been given a hearty meal later that night, a whole roasted chicken with piles of vegetables, rice, and an entire bottle of wine. More food than I ate in a week, usually. I’d learned to stop looking on enviously as they ate their last meal too. It only earned me more bleeding.
“You honor us,” the women had told the doctor with their pretty smiles. “Please eat and drink everything. You are our honored guest and will be released tomorrow.”
He fell for it. They always did. None of the men placed with me had known hunger and hopelessness for as long as I had. Their lives had given them reasons to hope. They all had something they wanted to return to. Usually a family, children, or some other purpose.
For me, hope was a foreign word. A concept I didn’t understand.
The women took him before sunrise the next morning. Hungover, he stumbled out willingly, hesitating only for a moment. “What about him?” he asked with a glance over his shoulder at me.
Sometimes my cellmates asked about me on their way out. Most didn’t care.
“He is a prisoner,” the woman holding his arm told him. “He hurt one of us, and is being punished for his crimes against us.”
I would have laughed if I had known how to.
The doctor was guided out of the dungeon, a woman on each of his arms. All the usual shuffles and thumps as they guided him to the top floor played out like clockwork. The first ray of sunlight poured through the crack in my wall as I passively listened to the monthly ceremony above my cell. Just one more out of so many hundreds of times I heard it before.
“Let me go! What—what’s that for?” I heard the doctor ask over the scuffling as he tried to struggle. “Why do you have a knife?”
“You honor us,” came the rough, warbling voice of the elder woman, “with your sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?!I thought I was being released! Ahhh, fuck!”
“You honor us,” she continued, “with your fear.”
