Page 10

The punishment so far has been to limit my interaction with the others. What little time I spend with them is down to the few minutes of mute staring we get just before we are stuffed back into our cells. The rest of my time is spent in one room or the other being prodded, injected, studied, and in some truly twisted version of fate, having my fingers tightly wound around the neck of the next unfortunate piece of chitinous shit that had the fate of being stuck in the same room with me whenever I blacked out.

It feels so damn good,cathartic even to get my revenge in these small ways, not too major to warrant execution... somehow. Despite the dead bodies.

The nice little alien kill count I've wracked up since the beginning leaves me full of smiles no matter how long they spend leering at me from the observation deck with their stupid multi, concaved eyes.

I obey their instructions and allow myself to get stabbed full of vial after vial of panic-inducing substances. A good portion of that panic may or may not be due to the sheer size of the needle used to administer it.

I’ve learned how to placate them. Usually with crying and screaming.

So far so good, it has brought me less pain, and as any well-adjusted human in my current situation would…

How badly adjusted is not good? Thirty… ten… twenty percent.

“Five,” I announce.

It’s a no-brainer that less pain is better for my health than the pain that would come with stubbornly digging my heels in.

One of the other women, the one with creamy skin, and black hair, and a scowl that eerily reminded me of an unhinged animal being put in a cage, seemed to be the most stubborn of our mish-mashed bunch.

She didn’t last long.

Spitfire she may have been, but between the two of us, I like to think I’m making more headway in sticking it back to these psychos by playing the role of the weak, defective human that shies away from everything and cries harder than everyone else when subjected to even the most basic of bodily violations.

Well, until I choke the life out of one of them, of course. But I don’t say no.

Of course I don’t say no.

“Say yes. Say yes,” I nudge.

Not that bodily violations should be tolerated in any form.

“Zero percent,” I hiss out, the number not helping my mind settle at all. “Can’t say no.”

No. It shouldn’t be tolerated, but I like living. You’d think that after killing one of them that acting insane and apologizing wouldn’t work, but it does.

Misdirection. Directions are missed.

“Ninety-five percent,” I disagree. “Not five.”

That article three years ago said that I'd struggle with making my point if I did not outgrow my timidity.

What a load of bull… bull that suddenly makes me aware that I have been silently repeating the same line in my head over and over again as my mind fills up the blanks provided by the silence with its own voiceover of memories past.

Memories… memories.

“Five percent,” I mutter.

My mind is on fire.

Five fires. One fire. Ninety-five fires.

There is plenty to occupy yourself if you have a memory as vivid as mine. The fact that I seem only to have gotten better at it in captivity is just another example of how fucked up I am. Just like they always said.

All the places she sent me to get “fixed.” Twenty-three places in the US. Eight in the UK. That one in Sydney. All the years living away from my only safe space. My room. It did no good.

“Cannot be reformed,” I quote from the files.

Formed and reformed.