As determined as Sunny was to make today a wonderful day, she understood intuitively that she couldn’t control every factor. And yet, she could have fooled herself with the weather. The sun was shining, the temperature was above freezing. There was still color hanging on some of the trees planted on her street’s median. Especially for Minnenoona, it was a glorious autumn day. Probably one of the last of the year. Ever since going sober—sober-ish, anyway—she rarely found a moment to just appreciate the sights and scenery. Despite the aging “For Rent” signs occupying old storefronts, despite the slowly growing number of windows boarded up rather than repaired, there were still signs of that same life Sunny had grown up with. There remained decrepit neighborhood institutions dutifully limping along to deliver service to those that stayed. Just off the main commercial drag, some townhouses remained near-pristine, tended to doggedly by stubborn old residents who refused to abandon their little front gardens to the rising tides of urban decay And though many of the legacy residents treated it as signs of interlopers, Sunny could never bring herself to dislike the graffiti that had crept out from the alleyways onto the faces of some buildings. It was still new life, after all. It brought new colors to faded bricks.
Her neighborhood could change. It had to—and it had, even if many could only see the uncomfortable stagnance when they looked. In Sunny’s lifetime, the median had lost streetcar lines and gained trees. In her lifetime, new families had replaced some of the old. And she and the kids had kept their little garden growing. They still decorated for the holidays. Some of the neighbors still did too. But the decorations changed. And some of the new neighbors decorated too. A few had decorated for Halloween this year, and had yet to remove their decorations. And yet, where it had gotten stagnant, there were good parts too. Yes, the urban decay had killed off some of the liveliness of the area. But that meant, while many of the residents were at work, school, or running errands, there were quiet, peaceful—almost cul-de-sacian spells during the middle of the day. Sometimes, anyway. Maybe not today.
Turning the corner to her street, Sunny saw black cars of an assortment of models, all relatively pristine, swallowing up the streetside parking on the approach to the stitched-together trio of townhouses that comprised the orphanage. Must’ve been time for another check-in. She couldn’t control that, yes. But despite the serious look of it all, Klimant generally didn’t like to stretch business out. She could work around it just fine. Sally would need a bit of extra encouragement to have a good day, as the guy who checked for wires and taps never seemed to treat her any kinder despite Sunny’s routine chiding. So she kept strolling down the street with bags of groceries in her arms, humming a simple tune to herself as she tallied up what she’d owe Sally to smooth things over.
“Aih-ioh!”
Sunny stopped humming. For a moment, she stood perfectly still, perfectly silent. Had she hallucinated? The screaming continued—gravelly, strained, pained—each new word, each new word forced through vocal chords begging for rest.
“Ka—fu—iohiohioh let me go—Fucker!”
Unmistakably Cherry, even a block away. Sunny burst into a sprint. She dropped the groceries outside the door and grabbed the door handle. Locked. Locked? Her heart thundered alive and crawled up her throat as she fumbled her keys into the lock. How’d someone get in if it was still locked? Had the kids let someone in? Had someone broken in? Had the guy she left Sally with gone rogue? The door clicked open. She tore through it and slammed it shut. She dashed through the hallway and laid eyes on Cherry near the top of the stairs. Sunny’s mouth went dry.
A hulking man dragged a struggling, kicking, expletive-bleating Cherry down the stairs. Sunny ran to her, then stopped. In her peripheral, she spotted the rest of the kids lined up against the wall. She snapped her head to look. There were more men standing over the kids. All of the kids were lined up along the wall, standing straight. Some shook with fear, others stood frighteningly still. One of the younger ones had a bruised eye. Not one dared move from their position. Some of them began to turn their heads, only to snap them back forward as though they’d been previously punished for looking away. The mixture of fright and resignation, how the men paced before them, looking down on them no matter their actual heights—it made Sunny’s skin crawl. It evoked two scenes. At best, soldiers at attention. At worst, the POWs she’d lined up to execute with her squadmates back in Viet Nam. And then, she thought she recognized one of the men. Didn’t he work for…
The Nadolnys? Had someone done something? Had she done something?
She belted out the ultimate question on her mind. “What in blue blazes is goin’ on?”
Several of the younger kids snapped to look at her again, before realizing their mistake as a man slapped one of them. The older ones kept their eyes averted to the floor. The man on the stairs continued wrestling Cherry down.
“Please be gentle!” Sunny exclaimed.
Her words fell on deaf ears. Among the assembled men, one finally spoke. He seemed to be in no rush, entirely unconcerned—disturbingly calm, even. His accent was heavy, unmistakably East European. And his voice was steady, stern, yet as relaxed as the rest of his body language. Of course, whoever this was had been running the show. He radiated it.
“Ah. Here is mama.”
Sunny tried in vain to keep her calm, only succeeding in momentarily twisting her outrage to sound more like worry. “Where’s Klimant? Why are the kids lined up? And for goodness’ sake, would you stop manhandling her!”
The mook made it to the bottom of the stairs, still indifferent to her pleading. Sunny trailed along, trying to help Cherry to her feet, support her—anything—all while trying to avoid being trampled by the great man who seemed to regard her more so as a minor tripping hazard than a frightened woman.
The leading man made some gestures that Sunny didn’t catch, and gave one of his men an order in their language. The mook dragging Cherry brought her to the end of the row with the rest of the kids and slammed her up against the wall. Cherry lost her breath. As she wheezed, Sunny tried to wedge herself between them.
“Can’t you see she’s hurt?” She pushed with all of her strength. Like some awful machine, the mook seemed determined to keep pinning Cherry to the wall, entirely too roughly. All the while, Cherry’s desperate kicking made intermittent collisions with the mook, Sunny, the wall, and anything and everything else in range. Every time Cherry wriggled an arm free, she scratched. She bit between screams, relentless and vicious in her resistance. While trying in vain on her tip-toes to pry the mook’s fingers from Cherry, Sunny shot glances back towards the leader.
“What’s…the matter…with you?”
He wandered past her, failing to give her a first look, much less a second. He passed the threshold into the kitchen, where on the table sat a pile of all manner of things from around the house. Candy from the younger kids. Weed and cigarettes from the older ones. Medical supplies—neosporin, Cherry’s bag from the vet, Sunny’s jar of pretty pills, and the house’s stash of lidocaine gel. The man softly chucked as he briefly toyed with the open tube. “For boo-boos.”
“Yes, yes. For boo-boos,” Sunny affirmed, desperately trying to hurry things back to her question, “What’s going on?”
The man tossed the tube back into the pile, turned, and popped open the freezer.
“What are you doing? J-Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph, would you please talk to me?”
From the freezer, the man produced a bargain tub of Neapolitan ice cream. He cracked it open and made a quiet, mildly intrigued noise as he took stock of the Swiss-precise little scoop marks in the strawberry and vanilla from routine desserts and of the great haphazard gash in the chocolate from someone’s most recent late-night special order.
He flung it—still open—onto the table as though it were trash. It slid across, teetered on the edge, and fell to the floor. He turned his attention to Sunny.
“Ah. We are…tsk, shit…” He gesticulated idly. “How to say?”
Without further prompting, the mook holding Cherry and holding off Sunny finished the thought for him.
“Inspection.”
Sunny’s grip loosened. She looked into the mook’s stern face, then back at the leader. Her fingers quivered. She released her grip. Goosebumps trailed down her spine.
“Did—did Klimant tell you to do this?” Her voice wavered. It took as much force to produce a plea as it had just moments before taken to yell. “Why?”
The man strolled towards them. “Klimant go…bye-bye.” As Sunny fought her impulse to wilt away, he reached past her and birdflapped a hand against Cherry’s ear. His fingers fluttered through the struggling girl’s hair. She bent her head towards him and snapped so hard her teeth clicked. She missed. The man’s hand retreated lazily, as though her attempt on his fingers had little to do with the motion.
“He is…well…eh…”
Sunny reached for Cherry and tried to grab and pull. “I—W—Could please-please-please put Cherry down? She’s real—”
The leader removed himself from them and meandered towards the kitchen. He thumbed his shoulder at Sunny and drawled an order to one of his other subordinates.
“—roughed up. We’re trying to make sure she heals up in time for Thanksgiving.”
The feeling was familiar. Elsewhere, Sunny had long learned to accept that nothing she said mattered. But here? With the kids? It ought to have mattered. It needed to matter. And yet they ignored her, more so than she’d even been ignored when she truly was just one of the other kids. Like she wasn’t even there.
All the while, the leader rifled through the kitchen drawers. He picked up items from them and dismissively dropped them back in as he failed to find what he sought. The way he manhandled everything, the way he ignored her pleas—the way he’d had the kids treated—began to stimulate a long-unfamiliar feeling within Sunny. Frustration didn’t cut it. Whoever he may have been, what made him feel he ought to do this? What kind of a heartless jerk was he? Where did he get off on this? She gave a final emphatic tug to try and break the mook’s grip. Again, not even a budge. She turned and started towards the leader.
“Would you please just speak to me already? What did we do t—?”
A thud. Cherry grunted. Sunny turned back to look. Crack. She caught the wheeze on instinct, but the power spiking from the mook’s oversided back-hand to her cheek squeezed a sound like the last squeak of a dog’s toy from her. Her hand jerked to her cheek as she stumbled back. Her arm down to the shoulder tensed and locked it there. She tried to dart forwards, to get between him and Cherry, who was scurrying into the wall in the fetal position, shaking and shooting a wide-eyed evil eye at the mook. With his great hands, he pulled Sunny back. Sunny stopped fighting. Cherry scurried back into the wall and glared past her shaking knees with a wide, viscerally hate-filled, narrow-pupiled evil eye.
The leader moseyed back towards Cherry. He seemed to address Sunny, though made no effort to speak to her in English. One of his other men—a guy Sunny vaguely recognized as Klimant’s former assistant—acted as his voice.
“You’ve got balls. A waste that you cut them off.”
He stood over Cherry for a moment. Cherry vibrated as though she were fit to explode and take the house with her. Sunny stood frozen and mute with the mook’s hands resting on her shoulders. She just gazed at him, with a blank, emotionless sort of expression usually only coaxed out by still more violent sorts of men. The man walked through her field of vision, past the two of them, tapping on crisp leather shoes down to the end of the line. He drifted past Fi, still stark-naked and freshly glazed from her last job. He stopped at Sally.
A snap. In his hands, a switchblade. Sally tensed suddenly from the sound. She peeped out a question in a small voice which bore less doll, more baby, and a sprinkling of shaky nerves in its quality. “Wo-uld you like me to s-trip—Sir?”
The leader cast an almost bemused side-eye to his nearest minion. “Polish?” he remarked, “A dźěćo’s tongue.” In a fluid motion, he reached for her nape and shoved her down and forward. Sally yelped and hit the wall with a grunt smothered by how her face slammed into the wall. An uncomfortable crackle from her spine punctuated her fall to her knees and eventual hands. Like a deflating balloon, the remaining air escaped Sally in an agonizing wheeze, then cut short by the leader grasping her shirt-collar and pulling it up, gagging her on it. He drew his switchblade through it and tore it open. He nicked her in the back as he snapped her bra strap. Then he hooked a belt loop on her jeans to pull them taut and proceeded down the seam. As though he were peeling an orange.
He reached over and shoved her head down as she began to hesitantly lift it, then he took a knee. Like a farmer, he spread her, inspected the orifices intently, then uneventfully stood and knocked the next in line down. Miggy attempted to anticipate. Perhaps he misjudged. Perhaps this man adjusted to compensate and ensure his head collided even harder with the wall. Miggy wheezed and hissed after his head made such a firm contact with the wall that it made an audible sound. He was summarily peeled, spread, and inspected. The man used the frighteningly sharp blade to maintain a surgical, professional distance to his inspection, lifting Miggy’s testicles up to get a good look at his bruised boyhood. The man made a single, mildly interested sound before ditching him and continuing down the line.
At last, Sunny melted from her handler’s grasp and spoke. “Kids?” Her voice wavered. It didn’t feel right to order them. But if she could take the fall for sparing their clothes… “Please strip for Mister…uh…” Though she received no help in filling in the name, to her surprise, she wasn’t prevented from helping the younger kids strip. She managed to save most of the remaining clothes, save for Bibi, who lost his to the leader’s inspection and received as nasty of a bump as Miggy for failing to pull his pants down fast enough. The leader spoke as he worked, evidently displeased with what he was seeing. Sometimes, his men responded. Klimant’s name came up often, usually with tones of derision or disgust. Though Sally kept her face firmly pressed to the wall, unwilling to make even the smallest move to look at what was happening, Sunny knew enough Sorbian to pick out a few remarks. “Happy little family” and “Brady Bunch” emerged among self-aggrieved, dismissive chuckles. Though Sunny couldn’t make out quite how bad it was, “If Klimant isn’t dead yet—” couldn’t have been good news.
As soon as the stripping concluded, Sunny carefully approached the leader. “Can I help you with anything else, Sir?”
No response. He didn’t even look at her. Not even a shooing away. He simply continued his inspection with the same cold, clinical rigidity as before. He stopped before Cherry, snapped his finger, and beckoned Sunny. He hissed out another phrase—one his translator hesitated on, but one for which Sunny needed no translation to know the gist of. The translator finally spoke.
“Why are these piglets suckling more lollipop than cock?”
An outraged squeak escaped Cherry.
Sunny kept her eyes on the leader; her eyes darted across every inch of him as she thought. She remained silent for a moment, furrowing her brow. Her mouth quivered half-open, as the words kept failing to manifest themselves. “I…I thought…we wanted to k-eep a low profile?” She cocked her head and reeled back, uncertain of her answer. That had always been the way of things, even back before Klimant, back when she was just a real shaking child herself. Surely, it had only gotten more essential to be careful. The laws, those careless child-protection laws, had been tightening the noose for some time now. And what would happen then, if they were found?
For the kids, they’d be scattered to the wind, wrapped up like burritos in red tape, and would never have a shot at love or the light of day. And Sunny? They’d probably find some dark pit with a few meaner, scarier hands than those in the army, just waiting to snap her bones and pick their teeth with them. They’d all be alone, forever. Bobbing along with truly nothing left to their names. The thought made her back tingle with dread. She could hardly bear to even have an accidental nightmare over the possibility. And that wouldn’t just be bad for them, would it?
And this awful, indifferent man? He looked past her—through her—and then turned to his translator, who more faithfully delivered the next message.
“And such a job you’ve done. The kurwičky are saving themselves for marriage!”
His gaze turned to Cherry. With a fine, freshly-polished Italian monkshoe probably worth more on its own than ever Sunny imagined she’d go for as a discount mail-order bride, he tilted Cherry’s chin up. The overwhelmed, crumpled little girl reeled, yet his gentle lift of her chin kept her cornered such that she could not easily escape.
“Finally, a girl who works for a living.” He nodded towards her and her bruised nape and torn orifices. “Thirteen little orphans, and at last I’ve found the one who isn’t useless.”
Sunny gingerly knelt next to Cherry and looked between her and him as the leader drew back his shoe. Her eyes widened. The color drained from her face. She all but stopped breathing. As though she’d seen a ghost. “You…want us to take the rough ones? Those ones put the kids out of commission for…good golly…way too long.” For every few perfect gentlemen, there were monsters. Monsters she’d taught the kids they could scream and escape from for their safety. A privilege she’d never enjoyed. She’d lost her baby teeth to them. She’d lost consciousness. She’d been thrown like a ragdoll and kicked like a dog. She’d been choked and broken, dragged back and forth, in and out, punted over the Pearly Gates and then torn from God’s hands back to Earth like a human tennis ball. Even on drugs, she struggled to love them. She couldn’t ask the kids to try so hard like that. Things were supposed to be easy now. She had tried so hard to make happiness and wellness come easier. But the old ways were creeping up and taking the beautiful new world back.
“Sir, you—you aren’t suggesting?”
The leader’s expression sank. He cast a frustrated glare towards his trusted translator. Then he spoke. Sentence by sentence, call and echo, a pale reflection of what he had actually said still bore down heavily.
“So, you’re ‘in charge’ here, yes, That’s what you seem to think, isn’t it?”
He paced as he spoke. He marched down the line, taking stock of the assembled disappointments, his moustache never loosening from its tight, disgusted scowl.
“You cut off your little man, called the caping stump a pussy, and now you’re Mommy. Now you bake pies…”
He kept busy as his translator condensed musings into digestible form. The translator seemed fatigued, solemn—like he in that moment mourned that man would say such things as he heard to his fellow man. Perhaps the old man felt a kernel of pity for Sunny or for the kids, and for that was stripping the rant down to its essentials. Perhaps he didn’t want to dwell on it himself. The leader kept his attention on the kids—his stock. The translator looked through Sunny. Neither looked at Sunny.
“You prance along as if you just feel them enough treats and read enough bedtime stories, you’ll convince them to make believe in this little Barbie’s Dreamhouse.”
He grasped Fi’s face. “Ah,” he commanded. He gave her little time to imitate his agape mouth before he snapped his shut and pried hers open.
“And then you can all pretend you’re not just some deranged eunuch. Then the world will make sense, mmm? If they’re all as slow as this one, maybe you’d have had a chance.”
He tilted Fi’s face up towards the light and looked in. Then he moved to the next kid.
“If only you had the job you seem to think you do. But Klimant is gone, Schwulette. There has been a—restructuring.”
He grabbed Sally by the hair next. He pried her mouth open and yanked her hair back to force her staring up into the light.
“I am letting you have the weekend to grieve what you must.”
He unceremoniously let go of Sally. Miggy opened his mouth and tilted into the light before he was able to grab him. The leader gave no indication of approval save for expediting the process. The other kids followed suit. The leader strolled along them, using his knife as a tongue depressor on a few, seemingly following no particular pattern in who he chose. He continued speaking all the while.
“Then, expect changes. I will return again next week. Before Thanksgiving, there will be a cock in every mouth, in every asshole—no more of this wasted potential. If I grab a random man off the street and cut his belt, his dick had better smell like one of these little sluts. Maybe then this place will be worthy of the weeds it’s built on. Then again—maybe not.”
He approached Sunny. She opened her mouth. He flicked it shut.
“I already know I’m disappointed today. Focus on not being a disappointment tomorrow.”
He gestured towards the door. The men began to file out.
“Are those our orders?”
He kept walking. The only sounds were those of footsteps. On the roof. Down from the windows. Cars started. The men left, and said nothing.
Her neighborhood could change. It had to—and it had, even if many could only see the uncomfortable stagnance when they looked. In Sunny’s lifetime, the median had lost streetcar lines and gained trees. In her lifetime, new families had replaced some of the old. And she and the kids had kept their little garden growing. They still decorated for the holidays. Some of the neighbors still did too. But the decorations changed. And some of the new neighbors decorated too. A few had decorated for Halloween this year, and had yet to remove their decorations. And yet, where it had gotten stagnant, there were good parts too. Yes, the urban decay had killed off some of the liveliness of the area. But that meant, while many of the residents were at work, school, or running errands, there were quiet, peaceful—almost cul-de-sacian spells during the middle of the day. Sometimes, anyway. Maybe not today.
Turning the corner to her street, Sunny saw black cars of an assortment of models, all relatively pristine, swallowing up the streetside parking on the approach to the stitched-together trio of townhouses that comprised the orphanage. Must’ve been time for another check-in. She couldn’t control that, yes. But despite the serious look of it all, Klimant generally didn’t like to stretch business out. She could work around it just fine. Sally would need a bit of extra encouragement to have a good day, as the guy who checked for wires and taps never seemed to treat her any kinder despite Sunny’s routine chiding. So she kept strolling down the street with bags of groceries in her arms, humming a simple tune to herself as she tallied up what she’d owe Sally to smooth things over.
“Aih-ioh!”
Sunny stopped humming. For a moment, she stood perfectly still, perfectly silent. Had she hallucinated? The screaming continued—gravelly, strained, pained—each new word, each new word forced through vocal chords begging for rest.
“Ka—fu—iohiohioh let me go—Fucker!”
Unmistakably Cherry, even a block away. Sunny burst into a sprint. She dropped the groceries outside the door and grabbed the door handle. Locked. Locked? Her heart thundered alive and crawled up her throat as she fumbled her keys into the lock. How’d someone get in if it was still locked? Had the kids let someone in? Had someone broken in? Had the guy she left Sally with gone rogue? The door clicked open. She tore through it and slammed it shut. She dashed through the hallway and laid eyes on Cherry near the top of the stairs. Sunny’s mouth went dry.
A hulking man dragged a struggling, kicking, expletive-bleating Cherry down the stairs. Sunny ran to her, then stopped. In her peripheral, she spotted the rest of the kids lined up against the wall. She snapped her head to look. There were more men standing over the kids. All of the kids were lined up along the wall, standing straight. Some shook with fear, others stood frighteningly still. One of the younger ones had a bruised eye. Not one dared move from their position. Some of them began to turn their heads, only to snap them back forward as though they’d been previously punished for looking away. The mixture of fright and resignation, how the men paced before them, looking down on them no matter their actual heights—it made Sunny’s skin crawl. It evoked two scenes. At best, soldiers at attention. At worst, the POWs she’d lined up to execute with her squadmates back in Viet Nam. And then, she thought she recognized one of the men. Didn’t he work for…
The Nadolnys? Had someone done something? Had she done something?
She belted out the ultimate question on her mind. “What in blue blazes is goin’ on?”
Several of the younger kids snapped to look at her again, before realizing their mistake as a man slapped one of them. The older ones kept their eyes averted to the floor. The man on the stairs continued wrestling Cherry down.
“Please be gentle!” Sunny exclaimed.
Her words fell on deaf ears. Among the assembled men, one finally spoke. He seemed to be in no rush, entirely unconcerned—disturbingly calm, even. His accent was heavy, unmistakably East European. And his voice was steady, stern, yet as relaxed as the rest of his body language. Of course, whoever this was had been running the show. He radiated it.
“Ah. Here is mama.”
Sunny tried in vain to keep her calm, only succeeding in momentarily twisting her outrage to sound more like worry. “Where’s Klimant? Why are the kids lined up? And for goodness’ sake, would you stop manhandling her!”
The mook made it to the bottom of the stairs, still indifferent to her pleading. Sunny trailed along, trying to help Cherry to her feet, support her—anything—all while trying to avoid being trampled by the great man who seemed to regard her more so as a minor tripping hazard than a frightened woman.
The leading man made some gestures that Sunny didn’t catch, and gave one of his men an order in their language. The mook dragging Cherry brought her to the end of the row with the rest of the kids and slammed her up against the wall. Cherry lost her breath. As she wheezed, Sunny tried to wedge herself between them.
“Can’t you see she’s hurt?” She pushed with all of her strength. Like some awful machine, the mook seemed determined to keep pinning Cherry to the wall, entirely too roughly. All the while, Cherry’s desperate kicking made intermittent collisions with the mook, Sunny, the wall, and anything and everything else in range. Every time Cherry wriggled an arm free, she scratched. She bit between screams, relentless and vicious in her resistance. While trying in vain on her tip-toes to pry the mook’s fingers from Cherry, Sunny shot glances back towards the leader.
“What’s…the matter…with you?”
He wandered past her, failing to give her a first look, much less a second. He passed the threshold into the kitchen, where on the table sat a pile of all manner of things from around the house. Candy from the younger kids. Weed and cigarettes from the older ones. Medical supplies—neosporin, Cherry’s bag from the vet, Sunny’s jar of pretty pills, and the house’s stash of lidocaine gel. The man softly chucked as he briefly toyed with the open tube. “For boo-boos.”
“Yes, yes. For boo-boos,” Sunny affirmed, desperately trying to hurry things back to her question, “What’s going on?”
The man tossed the tube back into the pile, turned, and popped open the freezer.
“What are you doing? J-Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph, would you please talk to me?”
From the freezer, the man produced a bargain tub of Neapolitan ice cream. He cracked it open and made a quiet, mildly intrigued noise as he took stock of the Swiss-precise little scoop marks in the strawberry and vanilla from routine desserts and of the great haphazard gash in the chocolate from someone’s most recent late-night special order.
He flung it—still open—onto the table as though it were trash. It slid across, teetered on the edge, and fell to the floor. He turned his attention to Sunny.
“Ah. We are…tsk, shit…” He gesticulated idly. “How to say?”
Without further prompting, the mook holding Cherry and holding off Sunny finished the thought for him.
“Inspection.”
Sunny’s grip loosened. She looked into the mook’s stern face, then back at the leader. Her fingers quivered. She released her grip. Goosebumps trailed down her spine.
“Did—did Klimant tell you to do this?” Her voice wavered. It took as much force to produce a plea as it had just moments before taken to yell. “Why?”
The man strolled towards them. “Klimant go…bye-bye.” As Sunny fought her impulse to wilt away, he reached past her and birdflapped a hand against Cherry’s ear. His fingers fluttered through the struggling girl’s hair. She bent her head towards him and snapped so hard her teeth clicked. She missed. The man’s hand retreated lazily, as though her attempt on his fingers had little to do with the motion.
“He is…well…eh…”
Sunny reached for Cherry and tried to grab and pull. “I—W—Could please-please-please put Cherry down? She’s real—”
The leader removed himself from them and meandered towards the kitchen. He thumbed his shoulder at Sunny and drawled an order to one of his other subordinates.
“—roughed up. We’re trying to make sure she heals up in time for Thanksgiving.”
The feeling was familiar. Elsewhere, Sunny had long learned to accept that nothing she said mattered. But here? With the kids? It ought to have mattered. It needed to matter. And yet they ignored her, more so than she’d even been ignored when she truly was just one of the other kids. Like she wasn’t even there.
All the while, the leader rifled through the kitchen drawers. He picked up items from them and dismissively dropped them back in as he failed to find what he sought. The way he manhandled everything, the way he ignored her pleas—the way he’d had the kids treated—began to stimulate a long-unfamiliar feeling within Sunny. Frustration didn’t cut it. Whoever he may have been, what made him feel he ought to do this? What kind of a heartless jerk was he? Where did he get off on this? She gave a final emphatic tug to try and break the mook’s grip. Again, not even a budge. She turned and started towards the leader.
“Would you please just speak to me already? What did we do t—?”
A thud. Cherry grunted. Sunny turned back to look. Crack. She caught the wheeze on instinct, but the power spiking from the mook’s oversided back-hand to her cheek squeezed a sound like the last squeak of a dog’s toy from her. Her hand jerked to her cheek as she stumbled back. Her arm down to the shoulder tensed and locked it there. She tried to dart forwards, to get between him and Cherry, who was scurrying into the wall in the fetal position, shaking and shooting a wide-eyed evil eye at the mook. With his great hands, he pulled Sunny back. Sunny stopped fighting. Cherry scurried back into the wall and glared past her shaking knees with a wide, viscerally hate-filled, narrow-pupiled evil eye.
The leader moseyed back towards Cherry. He seemed to address Sunny, though made no effort to speak to her in English. One of his other men—a guy Sunny vaguely recognized as Klimant’s former assistant—acted as his voice.
“You’ve got balls. A waste that you cut them off.”
He stood over Cherry for a moment. Cherry vibrated as though she were fit to explode and take the house with her. Sunny stood frozen and mute with the mook’s hands resting on her shoulders. She just gazed at him, with a blank, emotionless sort of expression usually only coaxed out by still more violent sorts of men. The man walked through her field of vision, past the two of them, tapping on crisp leather shoes down to the end of the line. He drifted past Fi, still stark-naked and freshly glazed from her last job. He stopped at Sally.
A snap. In his hands, a switchblade. Sally tensed suddenly from the sound. She peeped out a question in a small voice which bore less doll, more baby, and a sprinkling of shaky nerves in its quality. “Wo-uld you like me to s-trip—Sir?”
The leader cast an almost bemused side-eye to his nearest minion. “Polish?” he remarked, “A dźěćo’s tongue.” In a fluid motion, he reached for her nape and shoved her down and forward. Sally yelped and hit the wall with a grunt smothered by how her face slammed into the wall. An uncomfortable crackle from her spine punctuated her fall to her knees and eventual hands. Like a deflating balloon, the remaining air escaped Sally in an agonizing wheeze, then cut short by the leader grasping her shirt-collar and pulling it up, gagging her on it. He drew his switchblade through it and tore it open. He nicked her in the back as he snapped her bra strap. Then he hooked a belt loop on her jeans to pull them taut and proceeded down the seam. As though he were peeling an orange.
He reached over and shoved her head down as she began to hesitantly lift it, then he took a knee. Like a farmer, he spread her, inspected the orifices intently, then uneventfully stood and knocked the next in line down. Miggy attempted to anticipate. Perhaps he misjudged. Perhaps this man adjusted to compensate and ensure his head collided even harder with the wall. Miggy wheezed and hissed after his head made such a firm contact with the wall that it made an audible sound. He was summarily peeled, spread, and inspected. The man used the frighteningly sharp blade to maintain a surgical, professional distance to his inspection, lifting Miggy’s testicles up to get a good look at his bruised boyhood. The man made a single, mildly interested sound before ditching him and continuing down the line.
At last, Sunny melted from her handler’s grasp and spoke. “Kids?” Her voice wavered. It didn’t feel right to order them. But if she could take the fall for sparing their clothes… “Please strip for Mister…uh…” Though she received no help in filling in the name, to her surprise, she wasn’t prevented from helping the younger kids strip. She managed to save most of the remaining clothes, save for Bibi, who lost his to the leader’s inspection and received as nasty of a bump as Miggy for failing to pull his pants down fast enough. The leader spoke as he worked, evidently displeased with what he was seeing. Sometimes, his men responded. Klimant’s name came up often, usually with tones of derision or disgust. Though Sally kept her face firmly pressed to the wall, unwilling to make even the smallest move to look at what was happening, Sunny knew enough Sorbian to pick out a few remarks. “Happy little family” and “Brady Bunch” emerged among self-aggrieved, dismissive chuckles. Though Sunny couldn’t make out quite how bad it was, “If Klimant isn’t dead yet—” couldn’t have been good news.
As soon as the stripping concluded, Sunny carefully approached the leader. “Can I help you with anything else, Sir?”
No response. He didn’t even look at her. Not even a shooing away. He simply continued his inspection with the same cold, clinical rigidity as before. He stopped before Cherry, snapped his finger, and beckoned Sunny. He hissed out another phrase—one his translator hesitated on, but one for which Sunny needed no translation to know the gist of. The translator finally spoke.
“Why are these piglets suckling more lollipop than cock?”
An outraged squeak escaped Cherry.
Sunny kept her eyes on the leader; her eyes darted across every inch of him as she thought. She remained silent for a moment, furrowing her brow. Her mouth quivered half-open, as the words kept failing to manifest themselves. “I…I thought…we wanted to k-eep a low profile?” She cocked her head and reeled back, uncertain of her answer. That had always been the way of things, even back before Klimant, back when she was just a real shaking child herself. Surely, it had only gotten more essential to be careful. The laws, those careless child-protection laws, had been tightening the noose for some time now. And what would happen then, if they were found?
For the kids, they’d be scattered to the wind, wrapped up like burritos in red tape, and would never have a shot at love or the light of day. And Sunny? They’d probably find some dark pit with a few meaner, scarier hands than those in the army, just waiting to snap her bones and pick their teeth with them. They’d all be alone, forever. Bobbing along with truly nothing left to their names. The thought made her back tingle with dread. She could hardly bear to even have an accidental nightmare over the possibility. And that wouldn’t just be bad for them, would it?
And this awful, indifferent man? He looked past her—through her—and then turned to his translator, who more faithfully delivered the next message.
“And such a job you’ve done. The kurwičky are saving themselves for marriage!”
His gaze turned to Cherry. With a fine, freshly-polished Italian monkshoe probably worth more on its own than ever Sunny imagined she’d go for as a discount mail-order bride, he tilted Cherry’s chin up. The overwhelmed, crumpled little girl reeled, yet his gentle lift of her chin kept her cornered such that she could not easily escape.
“Finally, a girl who works for a living.” He nodded towards her and her bruised nape and torn orifices. “Thirteen little orphans, and at last I’ve found the one who isn’t useless.”
Sunny gingerly knelt next to Cherry and looked between her and him as the leader drew back his shoe. Her eyes widened. The color drained from her face. She all but stopped breathing. As though she’d seen a ghost. “You…want us to take the rough ones? Those ones put the kids out of commission for…good golly…way too long.” For every few perfect gentlemen, there were monsters. Monsters she’d taught the kids they could scream and escape from for their safety. A privilege she’d never enjoyed. She’d lost her baby teeth to them. She’d lost consciousness. She’d been thrown like a ragdoll and kicked like a dog. She’d been choked and broken, dragged back and forth, in and out, punted over the Pearly Gates and then torn from God’s hands back to Earth like a human tennis ball. Even on drugs, she struggled to love them. She couldn’t ask the kids to try so hard like that. Things were supposed to be easy now. She had tried so hard to make happiness and wellness come easier. But the old ways were creeping up and taking the beautiful new world back.
“Sir, you—you aren’t suggesting?”
The leader’s expression sank. He cast a frustrated glare towards his trusted translator. Then he spoke. Sentence by sentence, call and echo, a pale reflection of what he had actually said still bore down heavily.
“So, you’re ‘in charge’ here, yes, That’s what you seem to think, isn’t it?”
He paced as he spoke. He marched down the line, taking stock of the assembled disappointments, his moustache never loosening from its tight, disgusted scowl.
“You cut off your little man, called the caping stump a pussy, and now you’re Mommy. Now you bake pies…”
He kept busy as his translator condensed musings into digestible form. The translator seemed fatigued, solemn—like he in that moment mourned that man would say such things as he heard to his fellow man. Perhaps the old man felt a kernel of pity for Sunny or for the kids, and for that was stripping the rant down to its essentials. Perhaps he didn’t want to dwell on it himself. The leader kept his attention on the kids—his stock. The translator looked through Sunny. Neither looked at Sunny.
“You prance along as if you just feel them enough treats and read enough bedtime stories, you’ll convince them to make believe in this little Barbie’s Dreamhouse.”
He grasped Fi’s face. “Ah,” he commanded. He gave her little time to imitate his agape mouth before he snapped his shut and pried hers open.
“And then you can all pretend you’re not just some deranged eunuch. Then the world will make sense, mmm? If they’re all as slow as this one, maybe you’d have had a chance.”
He tilted Fi’s face up towards the light and looked in. Then he moved to the next kid.
“If only you had the job you seem to think you do. But Klimant is gone, Schwulette. There has been a—restructuring.”
He grabbed Sally by the hair next. He pried her mouth open and yanked her hair back to force her staring up into the light.
“I am letting you have the weekend to grieve what you must.”
He unceremoniously let go of Sally. Miggy opened his mouth and tilted into the light before he was able to grab him. The leader gave no indication of approval save for expediting the process. The other kids followed suit. The leader strolled along them, using his knife as a tongue depressor on a few, seemingly following no particular pattern in who he chose. He continued speaking all the while.
“Then, expect changes. I will return again next week. Before Thanksgiving, there will be a cock in every mouth, in every asshole—no more of this wasted potential. If I grab a random man off the street and cut his belt, his dick had better smell like one of these little sluts. Maybe then this place will be worthy of the weeds it’s built on. Then again—maybe not.”
He approached Sunny. She opened her mouth. He flicked it shut.
“I already know I’m disappointed today. Focus on not being a disappointment tomorrow.”
He gestured towards the door. The men began to file out.
“Are those our orders?”
He kept walking. The only sounds were those of footsteps. On the roof. Down from the windows. Cars started. The men left, and said nothing.
Written in collaboration with @TokyoPewPew
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