Wire Mesh Mothers

41

The teacher hadn’t gone anywhere, big surprise. She was standing in the bathtub, shivering like a wet dog, one foot on top of the other, lips tinged blue, hands above her head and secured with the towel strip. The rod had bent, but was in place. A little bar of paper-wrapped soap had been knocked into the tub and was at the drain hole, gummy and torn. The room wasn’t steamy; the water had gone cold, probably a long time ago. Puddles of water stood on the tile floor.

But there was one disturbing difference. The teacher’s head wasn’t down. Her gaze was steady and cold as the water, locked on Tony.

Tony turned off the spigot, swiped the knife from her ankle and lifted it to the teacher’s throat. Her body stung and throbbed, and she was going to share all the joy she had to share. “Miss me? Oh, I bet you did. I’m sure you wish you could have gone with me on my little adventure.”

“Truth or dare,” said the teacher.

“What?” Tony was incredulous. “What did you say?”

The teacher smiled.

Tony pressed the tip of the blade into the teacher’s abdomen, and pushed until the felt the skin give with a silent little pop. The teacher’s smile tightened into a grimace, but she didn’t repeat what she said.

“Oh, tough now?” Tony scoffed. “Enjoy your bath?”

The teacher, eyes locked on Tony’s, nodded slowly. “You bet.”

“Yeah? Well you would enjoy what just happened to me. You smelly cunt, I bet you’d get all wet over what I just went through.”

The teacher’s eyed winced, but then narrowed and held. She said nothing.

Tony put the knife on the back of the toilet, kicked off her boots, then peeled off her jeans. The motions nearly made her sick, the sound of the denim sliding over skin. She clenched her teeth and remembered the laughter and the slobbering and the jabbing. She wanted to have them now in this bathroom with their pants down, she wanted to rip their members apart, just like they had ripped her insides. Tony threw her jeans and panties, crusted and hard with the boys’ cum, into the corner behind the toilet. She stood in just her sweatshirt. “I want you and Baby Doll to see something,” she said. “Kid! Get in here!”

“Why do you want Mistie in here?” asked the teacher.

“I’ll show you when I’m good and ready. Kid, now!”

“Mistie, don’t come in!” said the teacher.

Tony snatched the knife and drew an inch-long slice across the teacher’s stomach. The skin parted smartly. Tony’s seventh grade art teacher Ms. Black once said Tony could even draw a straight line; well, this one was pretty damn straight. The teacher gasped but didn’t cry out. Blood welled, then spilled down to the woman’s crotch in the wake of the sheen of shower water. There may have even been tears welling in the woman’s eyes, but tears and shower water pretty much matched.

“Kid! In here now!” shouted Tony.

“Mistie, no!” said the teacher.

Tony cut her again, a straight line under the first. A pair of red lips now, drooling. “Shut up, bitch. Mistie!”

The woman sounded like a snake now, hissing. “No, Mistie!”

“What’s wrong with you?” snarled Tony. “What’s fucked up your brain while I was gone?”

The teacher tipped her head slowly. “Truth?”

“What?”

“Or dare?”

“Truth? I’m gonna show you truth!” Tony knocked down the toilet lid and sat on it, leaned back and opened her legs. Like those fuckers did, goddamn them, I’d kill ‘em, fuckin’ kill ‘em! “Wanna see some truth? Watch me!”

Tony turned the knife about, and jammed the handle end into her vagina. Her insides exploded, hot and angry. She scraped with the rough steel against the soft tissue walls, digging, tearing to clean away all traces of the rape. Electrical agony inside, sending her heels into the wet floor and her spine arching against the porcelain toilet lid. Dig it out! Dig it out!

Tony turned the knife handle to get a better angle. She dug the space of her womb, her sex, her hands realizing now the urgency of the actions and refusing to let her instincts against destruction to stop them. “I’ll never be a mother!” she snarled, spittle flying. “I never want nothin’ to go here, nothin’ to grow here, fuck it all, it’s weak, it stinks! That’s the truth!”

In the corner of her vision, the teacher staring, her chin resting on the inside of her raised forearm. The stomach streaked red now like the lipstick on Whitey’s sweaty face.

She dug. “Mothers are worthless! My fucking Mam on her sofa, drinking bug-sprayed beer ‘cause she’s too lazy to get her own! Baby Doll’s mom, who hasn’t even put out a report her daughter is missing! Her real mother’s the T.V., you know that? The damn television, you see how she loves that thing? And you, a fucking teacher and mother, you think that’s something great, huh?”

The fireworks in her abdomen, red-hot, white-hot, blue-hot, like moonlight setting fire throughout the gulf of her bones.

“You say you got a kid, a what, daughter, son? Neither, both? What?”

Tears on her face now. Fuck tears, I hate tears, pussy tears! I don’t cry!

“Fuck you, fuck me, fuck ‘em all!”

The knife fell from her hand, clattered on the tile. Tony folded up and over herself, grabbing behind her knees and pushing against the pain. Breathing through locked jaws, she said, “Done now. Done.” Blood was warm between her thighs, black-red, rivulets carving down her legs in patterns Ms. Black would have thought expressive.

The bathroom tilted, and Tony went with it. Ride it out, ride it, squeeze it out, let it run.

Cramps, then, hard and insistent, nothing like the cramps she had with her period. She growled, hating the cramps, hating what she had there inside her, hoping it was cleaned out enough now to leave her the hell alone.

The teacher, “What happened while you were gone?”

“Fuck you.”

“Somebody pissed you off, didn’t they? What a constructive way to deal with your anger. I’m impressed.”

“Fuck you!”

Tony sat until the cramps subsided, and the blood had slowed and stopped. Lifting her head from her knees, the room spun, leveled out. She took a breath, and another.

In the bedroom, I Love Lucy had begun. And Lucy, as Tony could have predicted, was whining.