This Town Needs a Monster

by Andersen Prunty

  Still, I was cautious. Aside from the perceived neediness, this was the other main reason for not reaching out to her. It had always seemed like the more I wanted something—the harder I reached out for it—the further away it got.

  When I was younger I thought I would live life to its fullest. I never wanted to be able to say I hadn’t tried. Now that I was forty, I wished I hadn’t wasted so much time trying. Trying had become synonymous with failing.

  Not to sound too clichéd, but Dawn had become something of a drug and I needed a fix. Not a big one even. Just a little hit would do. I imagined myself going down on her again, running my tongue along the lips of her pussy, pulling her clit into my mouth. And I thought about doing a lot more and wondered why I hadn’t tried it yet. Maybe it was because, until a few days ago, I’d actually thought of myself as a good person. I didn’t really think that anymore. And I didn’t really care.

  Surprisingly, I refrained from masturbating. I didn’t need an erection to go down on Dawn but I felt like if she was going to have any ‘assignments’ for me, like my encounter with Fiona Sanders, I should be able to perform. Apparently I still had that robotic worker drone mentality.

  When my phone vibrated, I became unrealistically excited. It had to be from Dawn.

  It was.

  “I’m dropping off a present for you.”

  Dawn’s interpretation of a present could be a little ambiguous so I wasn’t as excited as if someone else had said they were dropping off a present to me but by that point I didn’t really care. At least it was something. Dawn hadn’t forgotten about me.

  I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, the lack of food and sudden rush of blood making me a little dizzy. I went into the kitchen, opened a can of ravioli, and ate most of it cold.

  There was a soft knock on the door.

  I tossed the can into the trash, wiped my mouth off with a paper towel, and went to answer the door.

  It was one of the prostitutes from the party.

  My stomach did an odd flopping. I hoped she was here for the reason I thought and that made me excited but standing there looking at her made me uneasy.

  Maybe she was legal.

  I told myself she was legal.

  But deep down I just didn’t see how it was possible.

  The only thing I was certain of was that it wasn’t Dawn.

  I thought about what Bob Sanders had said: “It’s like they grow them in a lab somewhere.”

  Was that how they managed to take advantage of these girls and not feel bad about it? Convince themselves they weren’t even real?

  The girl wasn’t wearing a dress like they all had been the other night. She was dressed like any other teenage girl on a hot summer night. Red tank top hugging small firm breasts. Tiny denim shorts barely covering her. Untied high tops.

  She was nearly a foot shorter than me and stared up at me.

  “Come in,” I said.

  She came in from the hallway and I shut the door after scanning to make sure none of my neighbors had seen her.

  “Do you have a name?” I asked.

  She moved to the edge of my bed, facing me, staring at me. She briefly glanced up at the ceiling and took a couple of steps to her left. I looked in the direction she had and noticed the tiny little camera for the first time.

  How could I have been so stupid?

  How many more of them were scattered around the apartment?

  How many times had Dawn and Barcie or Plopsy or, fuck, Officer Bando or whoever shared a laugh over something ridiculous I’d done while I thought I was alone?

  No.

  I couldn’t let myself think about any of that right now.

  Dawn had given me a present.

  I was looking forward to unwrapping it.

  The girl, not taking her eyes from me, kicked off her shoes and peeled down her shorts and underwear. She sat down on the edge of the bed and pointed to her cunt.

  I walked over to her, got on my knees, and went to work.

  The taste was familiar. If given a blind taste test, I couldn’t have distinguished between her and Dawn. This girl was actually responsive, though. She twisted her hand in my hair and moved her hips and moaned. I felt a little of what I felt when going down on Dawn. It was like a diluted version of Dawn.

  When I decided I was finished I stood and removed my clothes. Took off her top. She had a jewel stud in her bellybutton. Looking more closely, I wasn’t even sure she had a bellybutton. I tried not to let it distract me.

  I thought about being gentle but kept flashing back onto my sexual encounter with Fiona Sanders. Thought about Dawn saying, “Some girls like to hurt.”

  * * *

  By the time I was finished, I was completely exhausted.

  The girl grabbed her clothes and went into the bathroom.

  It looked like she’d cleaned off all the blood when she came back out.

  She headed for the door.

  I was physically tired but the encounter had renewed some sort of life within me.

  The girl shut the door and I quickly put on my clothes and went after her.

  The hot day had suddenly turned cooler with nightfall. Mist swirled around the blue streetlamps and I thought I’d already lost the girl.

  I caught the outline of her to my left and went in that direction. Because I was following her, I had it in my head I should keep some type of discreet distance but she was so acquiescent and passive I couldn’t imagine her stopping if she heard me, let alone telling me to get away and leave her alone. For all I knew, I could follow her to wherever she was going, break in and do the same thing I’d just done to her and it would not be met with any aggression or hostility.

  A couple blocks away she turned to the left.

  I thought the municipal building was in that direction, housing the police and fire department and public works utilities. There was also Veterans’ Park.

  The fog gave everything a hushed dreamlike quality. I liked it.

  She reached the sidewalk across from the municipal building and turned right.

  The houses around us were silent and dark. Even the midsummer insect sounds were faint. The fragrance of some night blooming flower hung in the fog and had a nearly narcotic effect. I passed a house with a car idling in the driveway, its lights off, no one in it.

  The girl continued to move robotically through the fog.

  I don’t know what I was expecting.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if she turned and walked up to one of the houses. I could just as easily imagine her going down to the darkened basement and powering down as I could imagine her sneaking past her parents and going up to her high school girl’s room.

  A black car waited at a stop sign at the end of the street.

  The front doors opened and two men wearing black suits got out. I thought back to my night in the motel.

  I stopped short, took a few sliding steps back. I wondered if I should be recording this.

  “Please come with us,” one of the men said.

  The girl didn’t say anything.

  “Get in the car.”

  I would like to say I detected a humiliated slump to the girl’s shoulders, anything denoting some semblance of humanity or resistance, but I didn’t. She simply bent and slid into the car with that same borderline lifeless demeanor. What were they going to do with her? She was filled with my come and I didn’t know why that made me uneasy.

  The car turned to the left and came toward me. I took a step back, trying to find the foggy shadows, but the guy driving the car, maybe a federal agent, maybe not, must have spotted me because he shouted, “Go home, retard!” without slowing down.

  I instinctively turned to do just that but after getting to the end of the block, I no longer wanted to go back to my sad, monitored apartment. I patted my pockets out of habit and had a brief flash of panic when I realized I’d forgotten my phone.

  The panic quickly transitioned into relief.

  I felt
free.

  The phone was like the final tether. I could feel myself surrendering to Dawn more and more and decided to utilize what remained of this one evening. I didn’t know how many more there would be.

  I continued walking through the neighborhood, careful to avoid the main road in case the men in the car were still out.

  I began walking up a hill toward one of the small suburbs populated with little brick ranch houses on the outskirts of Gethsemane. While I felt freer than in the presence of Dawn or in my apartment waiting for my phone to vibrate with a message from her, I flashed back to our first encounter and again had the realization that I wouldn’t feel completely divorced from this unless I was somewhere very far away. After all, hadn’t she originally snatched me by finding me wandering along a road late at night?

  Snatched?

  That seemed like a funny way of looking at it but it felt true, in a sense.

  How could things have really happened any other way?

  I looked up toward the neighborhood at the top of the hill and noticed the large ghostly white water tower looming over it. They’d had to rebuild it nearly a decade ago after the bizarre storm had rolled through the area. A number of people had died and they’d built a memorial in front of the water tower with all the names of the dead. Seemed as good a place as any. It was surrounded by a park I hadn’t been to since I was a kid.

  I briefly thought about going to the carryout to see if Kren was around but decided I would rather be alone and take advantage of my lack of communication.

  This was nice. I didn’t know why I had never really done it before. I thought it would be especially nice at dawn.

  Dawn.

  There was that name again.

  The name of a person. The name of a thing. Maybe I was trying to make too much out of it.

  What was dawn?

  The end of the night? Or the beginning of a new day?

  Both?

  What was Dawn?

  Some kind of savior sent to liberate me from my boring life? Or some kind of witch, out to control and ultimately destroy me?

  That seemed like a perversely egotistical thought. Who was I to be sought out for control and destruction? I was nobody. If I was anything to Dawn, it was simply for use as a cog in the larger machine of whatever she was running. But who knew? Maybe I fit some type she was looking for. Almost every employer typecasts. During my first long term relationship right out of high school, I’d spent a few years going to college and working in a bookstore. Eventually, I’d decided poverty was the most obviously overt strain on our relationship and decided to seek out a higher paying job. I began applying to a number of factories. I filled out the applications neatly and accurately, listing my job history that only consisted of the bookstore and my couple years of college. I showed up well dressed and well spoken at the interviews. I never even got called back. I even got rejected from the factory my dad had retired from. Finally I filled out an application very sloppily, misspelled things, didn’t list any previous employment or college. I showed up at the interview wearing a stained t-shirt and jeans. I didn’t talk a lot. I wanted to seem quiet and desperate. I got called back and hired two days later.

  They were looking for a type. They wanted someone they could mold into their way of thinking.

  I worked there one day and never went back.

  Turned out they were right.

  The days past threatened to break into this thick night and poison it with some kind of overly sunny nostalgia.

  I quit thinking about the past.

  I thought about the impending dawn.

  Dawn.

  The future.

  Dark and beautiful and cruel and so close I could taste her on my tongue.

  I took a deep breath of the damp night air and looked up at the looming water tower.

  I looked around the park. Some swing sets, a merry-go-round, a baseball backstop, a slide and a wooden jungle gym, the whole park rimmed with tall pine trees.

  A bench sat across from the water tower. I thought it was an odd place for a bench. Who wants to sit in the park and stare at a somewhat ugly, slightly rusty water tower? For that matter, why was the water tower in the middle of the park at all? Maybe this was the highest point in Gethsemane. I didn’t know if that mattered or not. Then I remembered the memorial and figured that was probably why the bench was there. The sculpture was of a tornado, the names of the dead engraved into it. I thought it seemed a little weird, but then Christians saw the cross as some kind of memorial so maybe it made sense to a certain type of person.

  And why was there a man sitting on the bench?

  I went over to the bench and sat down next to the man.

  He stared glassy eyed at the tower, looked haunted, and smelled strongly of whiskey.

  “Would it bother you if I sat here?” I asked.

  He jumped a little, as though this were the first time he’d even noticed me.

  “No,” he said. “I . . . sometimes I do this.” He stood up. “You can have it. It’s all yours now.”

  Then he made his way through the fog swept park and disappeared out of sight.

  I sat and listened to the very distant sound of traffic and the faint jingling of a flagpole but mostly there was silence. And a hum. Coming from the water tower. Some kind of low hum I felt as much as heard. Probably some sort of engine running within it. After a while, I closed my eyes and had a sense the water tower was pulling me into it, swallowing me.

  I must have fallen asleep because I had a seemingly endless dream of walking through a massive junkyard and beating on the trunks of cars and yelling for Travis and woke up to a crazy old man with a trenchcoat and wild hair beating me with a newspaper.

  I mumbled, “Popular spot,” and wandered back to the apartment amidst the explosion of sunlight and birds.

  Dawn had arrived.

  * * *

  A couple days later, back in the apartment, I again felt like I was going out of my head. I was one of those people who prided themselves on being able to cope with boredom. Now I saw that in a somewhat sad light. It wasn’t that I really never got bored before, it was just that I’d never really had anything else to do and had become adept at entertaining myself. I had probably been bored my entire life and just too blind to notice.

  I convinced myself Dawn had grown tired of me. She had probably found some other poor schmuck who entertained her more. I resolved to try to be more entertaining but didn’t really know what that would entail. Being more ridiculous than I already had been, maybe. I was a novelty to Dawn. Novelty always wore off, nearly by definition.

  If she had grown tired of me, I feared it was only a matter of time before she forwarded the images on to White Power Larry and then I’d be fucked. I again came up with plans of leaving but hit the inevitable roadblock.

  Funds.

  Maybe I could rob Kren.

  But how much would that really yield?

  Given my last attempt at escape, I couldn’t even say funds were the only problem. I didn’t know if I’d physically be able to stay away. I could quit thinking about leaving. Gethsemane was where I belonged. It was where I needed to be.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d masturbated. I’d come a couple of times when Dawn had sent the girl over but hadn’t touched myself except to go take a piss since then. That was exceptionally hard being as bored as I was. Especially when the focus of my thoughts was Dawn, a girl who I very much wanted to fuck. I almost thought about employing a technique I’d used in the past when obsessed with certain girls who were unobtainable. That technique would have been to masturbate to them as much as possible. That way I was almost bored with them before anything even had the chance of happening. Ultimately though, it was probably just because my obsession shifted to someone else. In order for that to happen, I’d have to leave the apartment.

  Dawn’s unobtainable quality was what made her worthy of obsession. After all, my focus hadn’t shifted to Stasia or Fiona Sanders or the gir
l. And that was probably because I’d had them in one way or another.

  Therein was a possible difference between men and women. I couldn’t imagine a woman being obsessed with a guy—no matter how good looking—who just wanted his cock sucked and nothing more. Because, really, that’s all I’d done with Dawn, and still wanted her more than ever.

  Maybe the next time she asked me to do that, I’d try to do more.

  Or would I?

  Even if I got away with it, if it were something she didn’t want, she had a way of making my life hell.

  My phone vibrated with a text from Dawn.

  “Meet me out front.”

  I practically ran to the door.

  She was in the refurbished cop car. Sitting in the back. She pointed to the back passenger side door. I opened it and got in.

  She swiveled around, slid down so she rested against the door, and spread her legs.

  She wasn’t wearing any underwear.

  I was hard but knew what I was supposed to do.

  “Close the door,” she said.

  I closed the door and put the seat in front of me up as far as possible. I bent down and greedily went to work on her pussy. The present she’d sent over had provided a sip, but this was the gulp I needed. It wasn’t even dark out. There wasn’t a lot of foot traffic in downtown Gethsemane but there also wasn’t a lot going on, not a lot of distractions, and I felt something like this would surely be noticed. That’s what made it so exciting.

  I reached between Dawn’s legs, pressing my middle finger against her.

  “Just your mouth,” she said.

  I heard the chain before I felt it.

  It only came down once, hard, connecting with the back of my neck and shoulders.