Strange Captive – James Nulick
July 3, 2021
I am a pincushion. He looks to me for some kind of external happiness, like I’m
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I don’t really like my body. Others do. I am eight years old. I’ve been living here for a long time, I’m not sure. Time becomes meaningless without clocks or bad habits. He found me wandering around the perimeter of a gas station, no parents, no friends, shabby coat, someone you wouldn’t give a second look. It’s the invisible who are always the most vulnerable. Exiting the small store attached to the gas station with a sheer plastic bag in hand, glancing around to make sure he was unnoticed, for he too is invisible, he invited me into his car, waving a beef jerky in my face. I was hungry and my stomach got the better of me. Once inside the car, he locked the doors using a magic trick, and from that moment, I was his. He directed me from the front seat, beside him, to the backseat. Get in back, lie down. I did as I was told. He was bigger, he was the adult, he had the keys — I was nothing. I flattened my belly against the cheap leatherette and wondered about my future. The ride home, my first, uneventful, save for the crouching in the backseat, his free hand pressing on my neck the entire time, the other hand steering, an illicit prize greedily unwrapped once safely indoors.
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He pulls my mouth toward the place where he grows, forcing himself inside me, his essence becoming one with my body. I concentrate on bowls, ice cream, hiding under the table, disappearing into myself, it will be over in a moment, this will be over in a moment. I am 8 years old, I’m not sure what that means, time doesn’t mean anything here, in this room, he turns me on my side, like a snake folding into itself, I shrink down into the smallest possible version of myself, trying to disappear, I will myself into the smallest version of me, and now me has disappeared into my body, my body is larger than my essence, so that I am mostly a deflated husk slithering on the floor, a manifestation of his desire, as if I were a soft supple glove one could delicately pull over their fingers, and I would make a fine mink coat, or a stole, you would look beautiful wrapped around my neck, he says, but I can’t take you outside, I will never take you outside, You want to escape, you want to leave, there are pictures of you everywhere, staple/taped on telephone poles, you’re like some beautiful transmission pointing your fingers toward God, and you will never leave me.
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My name has never been mine, it was given to me, and after it was given, it was taken away. I am without a name, my name having faded from inkjet posters long ago, my name a river of black sludge kissing handmade GARAGE SALE THIS SATURDAY signs posted by the children of morons, there is nothing to be gained by exploding your life across four folding tables on a Saturday morning,
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He keeps me velvet-roped in a small room, the only time I’m allowed outside is at night, to relieve myself, in the backyard. The backyard has high brick walls surrounding the entire perimeter. He laughs as he watches me relieve myself, so I turn away from full view. He has a highpitched laugh that splits the sky open, almost feminine, as if anything could be created from that body, sometimes he pushes his hand inside me and rearranges things, I’m just trying to massage your heart, he laughs, don’t be shy, I’ve seen it all before, I know every inch of your body, I have bathed you, fed you, dressed you and undressed you, everything that is yours is mine.
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You were stolen away from us. The door to my room is always locked. He is gone during the day for long periods, the hours unfurling before me like ribboned Christmas candies, the kind a child would throw away, and when he comes home from the place he doesn’t like, he is different, hollowed out, with no time for me, other than to feed me. But some days are different, the days at the end of the cycle, and on those days he seems more alive and plays a game with me. He toes open the door to my room –
Come on boy, come on, patting his kneecaps, and I strain against the collar fastened by a rope to the hasp secured to the wall, drywall to hasp to rope to hasp to collar to flesh, I strain against the metallic prison as if it were the most important thing in the world, Come on boy, I strain until I am dizzy, my throat twisted with desire, I am filled with his desire for my flesh, the desire to leave this world, the desire to make him happy, though for what, I don’t know, and now he is on my back, riding me like a horse, kicking my legs with the knobs of his ankles, he unhasps me and I gallop through the hallway, he weighs less than one would suspect, being thirtyfive and single and without a woman will eventually do that to a man, it hollows you out, smooths you down to nothing, a faceless gravestone in an overgrown cemetery, a man should be with a woman, and gain weight together, and have children, and a backyard for the children to get lost in, running along the sides of the house, hiding from the tall people, the tall people with inelegant rules that do not make sense, night or day.
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I am not a fixed document. He lets me out of the small room every night to sleep with him, he hasps me to collar around his neck, so that when I move he moves, he says my legs are sticks he likes having wrapped around him, sometimes he makes gentle rocking motions against me like we are on a yellow plastic boat in the water in the ocean just the two of us and he whispers Biblical things in my ear like he is building a palace in my honor to memorialize the forgotten and the nameless and despite myself and my wish to not give in I find myself growing into boyhood or a simulacrum of what that must be like.
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I miss the warmth of my mother, surely she is looking for me? I miss my brothers and my sister at my side, all of us on one bed, with mother, and mother loving each of us for who we are, without qualifiers, although she once commented on me being the smallest, and therefore the most delicate, though I never saw myself as she did, and certainly if she saw me now, maintaining despite the horrors I wake to each morning, a collar around my neck which barely allows me to breathe, and I am kept naked, in a room, on a blanket, by a man who refuses to call me by my name, the name on the sunbleached MISSING posters tacked all throughout the neighborhood, my face in five by seven and easily recognizable if I were to bolt from the house, the door open, but mother knows none of this, has no idea I am only a few houses down, perhaps on the next block. If he were to leave the front door open I’m not sure I would bother to leave, too afraid to set foot outside the door, too afraid of the unknown, and the unexpected sunlight streaming in my darkroom eyes, blinding me, the prison cell becomes a room your heart is willfully locked in, and yet I can feel her, her warmth, her love, as if I am as important now as I was on the first day, because there are only two days that matter in our lives, our first day and our last, everything else is filler, and I want you to know that since you were stolen away from us, people everywhere have been searching, praying and hoping for your safety and for answers…
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There are more good people than bad in the world and people still hope. When he has been in the kitchen too long, with a single fluorescent bulb humming over the kitchen sink, the InSinkErator stinking of death, and drinking, drinking, drinking, and talking to himself, he’ll pinball down the hall after three glasses in the sink, bouncing off the walls like an eight ball, I know this because he has a miniature pool table in the living room, but only he ever plays, and doesn’t allow me near it’s beautiful green nap, cheap though it is, how lovely it would feel against my nose, he comes to retrieve me from my room, unhasps me from the bolt fastened to the wall, undoes my collar like a lover and leads me into the living room, coaxing me on the sofa, where I am usually forbidden except on these nights, and he pulls me toward the center of the universe, his groin, and buries my face in it, my nose, I am highly sensitive, being in that room all day with only the door and his absence and myself to think about, and when I am out here, with him, when I feel his hand on my back, carefully cataloguing the buttons of my spine, it’s as if I finally exist, and I wonder, is it so bad after all, what he is doing to me? He recognizes that I exist, if only for him. Isn’t that what every hotblooded creature in this world wants, to know that someone knows they exist, that someone cares?
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He has no habits I am aware of, except for making himself grow and filling three glasses in the sink and the plant with the strong scent he inhales from a glass tube. After the plant he changes, his eyes glassy from almost wanting to cry, not quite knowing how, and he takes the rope from my neck and allows me into the living room, the blinds drawn, and it is very dark, peached sunlight violently slicing the darkness, and the window is on, shapes moving back and forth, speaking a language I do not understand.
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A pilot light burns at the base of my skull, drumtight flesh tautened over forehead, vibrating to the crown, the fiber optics of my hair pulsing with it, standing on end as if knowing this is the end, the body so weak, and ready to succumb, am I dying? How does a body know? I feel death washing over me, a sickness in my bowels. I want to hide under something, anything, a bed, a table, a stairwell, hide under it and die, alone, and with dignity, but there is nothing in this room except a bowl, a small horse blanket, blue, and a bucket. I am not allowed the decency to die alone as he corkscrews his fingers around my neck, twisting my collar until I feel I will explode, and he is doing the growing thing again. I am very tired and all I want is darkness
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Who will inherit this toy empire? It is not one of the tensed up days, it is the end of the cycle, and sometimes on these days he cracks the door open when it is warm, and today it is very warm, I can feel it inside me, the heat, I hear the ice cream truck keyboards, friends singing and making wishes but not yet, and this afternoon, after the plant with glass tube, he comes into my room to feed me, or rather to leave food in my bowl, which he toes toward me, then he does something he never does, unhasps the rope from my collar, I sense he is giddy and forgetful, the fingers of his mind expanding into the universe, and in that moment I break from his slackjawed grip hustle through the hallway and out the door into the dying sunlight, a rotten peach exploding in the sky, children gathered around an ice cream truck, the gummy heat off the asphalt tonguing my naked body as I trot into the street on all fours, my paws burning, I rush towards the ice cream truck running as I haven’t run in months, years, barking at the children as I sense the door of the house opening, barking until one of them in the queue, a boy of seven or eight, turns to me, forgetting he is waiting for something. He drops to his knees to hug me, and in that moment he recognizes I exist, if only temporarily, for him.