Otherworldly

by C F Rabbiosi

  Well, the torn up girl in the center of town probably doesn’t see it that way. Laying down next to my mother, what happened with Alexander tonight almost slips out. With nothing to do but think about it in the tense silence, too much time goes by and the moment is lost. Europa will listen to me about how he used my mouth like he would use a woman between her legs, I hope. Surely she will protect me from Alexander’s threats? Do I take that chance, knowing he might hurt my mother?

  Next on the torture-me-all-night list is what Momma told me about the thing she saw in the woods all those years ago. Maybe she was wrong about what took the traveler from her bed. Maybe it wasn’t a Koridon at all, but a human wanderer. It would be easy to mix up as a child.

  My thoughts slowly begin to settle and dreams make their way through the veil of my tormented consciousness. I dream of Alexander. He forces himself upon me all over again but then the scene changes. With no rules and no consequences, the dark places within me that usually hide from the light come to life…

  4

  ~Calypso~

  Hallows-Eve time always brings with it enchantment; it’s alive in the breeze as it tickles across goosebumps, the scent of the changing leaves mixing with the sight of the stormy sky above, and this natural phenomenon swirls through the spirit. On a normal morning as magnificent as this one, I would bask in its splendor, eyes closed under a moving sky, and in awe of life’s magic. But its joy has been stolen from me. From all of us, as this day was preceded by the desolateness of the night that cut our way of life open and left it bleeding, marked for change by her.

  I do not absorb any of the dusky morning’s beauty as I walk across the square toward the dining hall. Clumped red dirt and drag marks where she was lying burn her horrific image into my mind and suck every bit of well-being away.

  The smoky smell of first meal registers past chaotic thoughts as I step inside the inordinately quiet dining hall. Scarlet sits where we always do, at a middle table—unless it is day six, when we are assigned to the cooking in the back. I hope today, my day to tend the animals, will tear me from this fog.

  Scarlet stares at the medley of carrot, berry and pork on her plate and startles when I scoot in beside her. Annie, to my right, gives me a painfully forced partial smile. Scarlet turns to me, a greeting creaking off her tongue, but instead she averts her reddened eyes and takes a first bite. “Did you sleep at all?” I ask my normally carefree friend, staring at my own meal like it’s a venomous snake.

  She raises a brow and tucks her ash blond hair behind her ears. A strained swallow pulses down her throat before a sardonic chuckle jumps out. “Yep.” She holds up a blueberry between the pads of her fingers. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a more restful night.”

  We share a genuine laugh which eats the tension infusing the air, and those around us scrunch their faces in annoyance. “Me too. Amazing.” Her dry humor melts the anxiety twisting my stomach and the season’s fruit begins to transform into something possibly edible.

  Hallow’s Eve time saw many fruits and vegetables to ripeness and, thanks to the scavengers, many books on the subject were found and taught our people how to properly tend seeds and what time of year the different ones flourish.

  “You’re not hungry either?” she says and tosses one of the fruits onto my plate. “At least you get to go cozy up to some furry friends today. I get to go out to the fields and look at these damned food-stuffs all day.”

  Ooh. Today is Scarlet’s gardening day. She, along with the assigned others, will be weeding, fertilizing, and gathering up the ripe fruits and vegetables for the reserves. I pull her close and give a toast. “To another day of unnerving fear and the unknown, then.”

  She lays her head on my shoulder. “I am so glad you are still here,” she says. “And that I am still here.” I sense the smile through her words. “We’ve survived so far.”

  That makes me wonder how the intruders have survived here on this alien planet for so long. Once a strange book came through the village when I was very young, called War of the Worlds. I remember the frayed leather, burnt as it was read aloud during our moon celebration. It was an odd story, about the earth attacked by alien beings from another planet in three-legged machines. Having heard stories about the real demise of our planet, I listened in awe because my young mind believed it was our story.

  Eventually, I realized the truth, but it always brought questions forth as the years passed. Where did the Koridons come from? Why did they come here and, without being able to read our language, how do they know how to grow food in our soil? How can they survive here if, like in that book imagined by a man in the past, their development and adaptation would have been entirely based around a different atmosphere?

  “Were you just thinking about…that night?” Scarlet half-chews as she breaks me from my thoughts.

  I look down at my untouched meal of sweetened carrots, sow meat and wheat loaf and tread through the deep waters of my mind, wishing I could work out what she was talking about. Then it hits me. “You mean when we—”

  Her eyes flash wide open, a warning to swallow our sordid deed. Last year, we made a plan to sneak out of our mothers’ houses after the fires were out and run out of the bounds together, into the night. Our bare feet hardly made contact with the moist soil of the outside, the cool air of freedom inhaled through our nostrils, when my mother’s fierce whisper sounded from behind us. We went straight back inside with her fear and rage bristling at our backs. What Scarlet doesn’t know is that I was out there just before the attack. I wish I could tell her that. That and the other thing I’m hiding from her about Alexander.

  “What is it?” she asks, sensing my mood shift.

  “The girl who was loved to death last night…That could have been us.” Me. The strange rustling of something big moving outside the barrier last night reminds me how close I may have been to whatever did that to one of our own people at our doorstep.

  “Loved to death?” she remarks darkly.

  I suppose it’s a strange turn of phrase, but my mother’s story sank in while I slept and it hit me that maybe things aren’t as they seem. The glimmer inside gives way to intrigue. I dull down my voice. “We’re safe here. You know that, don’t you?” I take a bite as she plays with her food.

  She gives me a loud sigh in response.

  Alexander walks in and sits at the front table with his brother and her ladyship Europa. I see myself on my knees in the dirt before him, my mouth transformed into his vile tool. He finds me and impulsively I look away. Damn. Quickly reclaiming my fearlessness, I glower with an unstable edge and pour it into the air between us, hoping it touches him. Hoping it pierces him.

  Scarlet narrows at my line vision. “What are you—”

  “Momma says the creatures may be misunderstood to some degree,” I redirect, hoping to keep Scarlet out of whatever affair this is.

  “Really?” A chill seems to pulse up her spine and her shoulders shake. “Hard to misunderstand the bloody deadness of what it did to her, Calypso.”

  “She almost didn’t look human anymore.” I try to stay focused, but Alexander’s booming laugh sours the air. He converses with vivid hand gestures and gives no warning that, just last night, he monstrously forced my tongue to slither along his hardness, to stroke the length of his shaft until it felt so good he trembled and spilled with pleasure. Maybe he doesn’t see me as human, either; that would make it easier to have no remorse, I suppose.

  Scarlet shoves her plate aside as though the pork upon it had come back to life. “What if that happens to us? What if our settlement is found by the Koridons?”

  “They can’t,” I say halfheartedly. Alexander’s light hair jostles as he laughs, yet his eyes are unaffected, dead, compared to how they glimmered like dancing fire under the moonrays last night. His mate having been left behind when he was forced to come here, he must have been starving for what he took from me.

  Alexander blurs behind Finn, whose gaze captures mine. Sitting
in the table in front of us, I wonder how long he’s been watching me. He sits with the other young men in our age group and the corner of his mouth curls up. I hadn’t thought of him at all. In fact, even as the horrific image of the broken and bleeding girl on the ground glares like a foreboding mirror, my mind only twists with thoughts of Alexander. Any normal girl would be a tremulous mass of sobs had they been forced to endure a sexual act by an older, more powerful male for the first time. Here I am, feeling more intrigued than anything else. Not because of what he did, but because of the heart-pounding things I now want to do to him. They will be far from anything he’ll enjoy. I’ve never been given reason to hate anything here; people were kind to me, understanding of my condition. The deep-seeded aggression bubbling deep in my soul was never nurtured, never fed, but now it bursts into wildfire, consuming, begging me to explore it.

  Scarlet rests her hands under her chin and shakes her head. “Every moment is simply survival. Every moment filled with fear of the next. Sometimes, I don’t know if I want to live this way.”

  I touch her shoulder as her head dips, and she knows I feel exactly the same way. What do we have in this fallen world? Each other. The moment. But no future.

  ***

  The sun glows bright for a Hallow’s-Eve day and breaks through the whisping black pollution hanging in the sky. I move from one goat to another inside their enclosure, seeing to their food and water as well as inspecting for any abnormalities in appearance or behavior. Patting their fluffy bottoms and cooing to them, I say my goodbyes and move on to tend to the cattle. The others tending this station today move about doing other tasks such as clean-up and brushing out their fur and hooves.

  The cattle snort and bustle about into each other as I approach, not having much room due to the restrictions of space. I haul over buckets full of the grass and foliage the men had gathered outside the protection of our village and watch the new calves fight to stay nursing as their mothers go after the bucket. I check their coats for parasites and brush off the caked dirt to prepare them for their walk through the village, as they have done since they were very young, so they can be given attention and exercise. I love talking to them and petting their ears as we travel through the different areas. The little ones in their school hours love this part of the day as well, just as I did.

  Everyone here is taught from an early age how to perform all the daily tasks of the community, though there are some, such as hunting and gathering, which only the men can do. But doing one day of cooking, one day of sewing, a day of teaching and so on, keeps every day feeling new and different. I don’t think I could do just one job every day like the characters in the books, but people of the past were free to love, have children, or find adventures in far-away places, so maybe being stuck with one job was tolerable.

  As I walk around the pen to inspect the animals’ hindquarters, a bright pink gash on the steer’s back leg catches my attention. It will have to be cleaned and wrapped, then watched carefully for the next week. I’ll need to go get others in their animal stations as this job will take two more of us to complete. Mary-Shelley, a girl only a few years out of my age class, is tending the fowl; I’ll have her help. And Nancy too, she’s a tough old thing.

  Leaning down to retrieve the empty buckets, a voice startles me.

  “Calypso.” I slowly rise back up, my name spoken by a tongue I’d never heard it on before. Wrapped in all black, the hardest color to achieve in fine threads, Alexander stands casually against the fence.

  “Don’t use my name. It doesn’t have quite the same effect as mutated whore.” Emptying the last bits of green from the buckets, I push them through the fence to clear up room for the animals. They don’t have a lot of space as it is, and if I’m about to get harassed by a royal prick, I’d hate to forget them to be smashed or tripped over.

  He lets out a soft chuckle, then stands with his arms crossed. “You’re different.”

  Looking heavenward, I tire of his repetition. “I need to get back to work.” As I move past, he plucks a long strand of my hair from its tie. “The way you’ve been watching me. It’s fascinating.” He wraps it around his fingers and I grimace as it stops me.

  “I have work to do.” I pull away and the tendrils rip in his grasp.

  “Halt. Please.”

  It was his please, the slight quaver of it, that stops me. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know." A quick glance around the area proves us to be alone, and behind the animal pen, we can’t be seen anyway. I edge along the fence, working my way toward safe view. “Someone your age, with so little experience…I just expected you to be more ashamed. More… blush and cower.”

  “You have many lovers, do you?” Ones who let him get away with many carnal things because of his rank. Because of the threats against their loved ones. He’s a special kind of evil, knowing that the woman below him is fearing for her life as she begs her body not to respond to his physical stimulation. Knowing that every second, she’s in danger as those things might smell her excited state…

  “I’m not afraid of you, that’s all.” Long strands fall over one eye as I stare fiercely straight into his. For the first time, I…I feel beautiful. Powerful.

  His expression blackens and, in an instant, my back hits the wooden fence. The cattle snort and skitter. A firm hand rips my pants down and I swallow my scream.

  His hand moves past my undergarments and tickles across my pulsing center. “I’ve never been with a defective before,” he lulls, “but something about you,” his fingers dip lower, “has me completely on fire.” The hard wood digs into my back as he rips my leg up and pushes a finger inside me. Sick little shocks force their way through me, a blend of strange new feelings and discomfort.

  As he moves inside and out, I don’t bother telling him to stop, telling him how dangerous this is or how wrong. Because that’s what he likes about it.

  His breaths warm my neck, each one more intense than the last, and the dampness of his chest presses against me. His arousal is palpable. This is the most depraved moment of my life, but his response to me, a man possessed, has me morbidly fascinated.

  “You are a whore, aren’t you?” he whispers as my reluctant arousal drenches his fingers. “Last night when I saw you sneaking away, I didn’t have any plan. I had no desire to touch a defective. But you…” His other hand slides up my shirt and kneads my breast, then softly pinches the sensitive pink upon it. “I haven’t been able to think of anything else but feeling this treasure. Nature’s gift to men. My gift.” He removes his stimulation and reveals himself, engorged and purple over the top of his trouser line.

  “You’ve never felt a man inside you, have you?” His voice strokes my ear as I glisten from his unwanted stimulation, something inside me trying to pull his largeness into the slit it was made for. It disgusts me.

  “No,” is all I can manage. “I’m to be joined next month. With Finn.”

  “Ah. I get so tired of rules.” He groans as he slathers his waiting hardness. He twists it in his fist, up and down. “But right now, my numb state is gone. Like it never existed. So alive.” His tip nudges against my wet opening and I brace myself for the simple thrust of his hips that would give him everything but also take everything from me.

  No. He may strike fear into the women he forces, but I am not afraid. He won’t have me. I snap my legs closed. Shocked, he tries to open them again and I land my foot into his balls. He drops, giving me time to pull my clothing back into sorts.

  So alive, he’d said. As I jump back into the pen and tear away, silently, I say to him, Good. Then burn.

  5

  ~Calypso~

  The older man assigned to animal detail today, Ebenezer, and Mary-Shelley help soothe the bull while I work ointment into his fresh wound and wind a protective wrap around his angry flesh. Lost in thought, I ignore as the beast stamps and snorts its warning.

  Alexander lingers along the fence line, watching us. Mary-Shelley has a soft spok
en, good nature about her, so I don’t mind sticking next to her today. I have to figure out the best way to deal with this madman. My companions have noticed Alexander lurking, but they can’t possibly feel the heat emanating from him, meant only for me. By letting him touch me like that, my small murmurs, my daring gaze, I’ve made this a challenge for him. What in Faust’s hell is wrong with me?

  Afterward, Ebenezer goes back to his work with the sheep, while Mary-Shelly and I move on to tend the pigs. I’m blossoming with curiosity about the chest tightening, gut wrenching feelings I have been struck with between my dreams, Finn, and now the older man who would force me to experience them. “What has it been like, being married and—” I clear my throat and say more quietly, “And to be intimate with him?”

  “It’s not bad.” She runs her hand over the pink pig’s crusted ears and waggles them about. Sitting back on her heels, she lets a memory take her. “He looked different to me after our first night together. I didn’t know how to feel about him at first.” Minding the little pig’s wanting eyes, wondering where his pets went to, she gathers him into her lap. “He picked on me a lot, in fact.” Looking down as she says this, sadness engulfs me because Finn should have touched me in those places, love released from his pores. Alexander is opposite to him. A royal. Years older. Experienced in matters of physical love. And a goddamned asshole.

  “My ceremony with Finn is next month.”

  Her lips curl up as she continues to pet the little animal. “He’s a good looking one. Are you intimidated, scared at all?”

  “No.” My answer surprises her, but the dread Alexander has struck me with far outweighs anything Finn could do to me on our union night. Eh. Alexander’s glow as he pursued me; I could feel it all over him and it makes my blood spike. The depravity. The thrill of his threatening touch. What’s wrong with me? It must be my mutated genes. Perhaps I am just the defective whore he says.