The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sixth Annual Collection

MARTYRDOM Joyce Carol Oates

A sleek tiny baby he was, palpitating with life and appetite as he emerged out of his mother’s birth canal, and perfectly formed: twenty miniature pink toes intact, and the near-microscopic nails already sharp; pink-whorled tiny ears; the tiny nose quivering, already vigilant against danger. The eyes were relatively weak, in the service of detecting motion rather than figures, textures, or subtleties of color. (In fact, he may have been color blind. And since this deficiency was never to be pointed out to him, he was arguably “blind” in a secondary, metaphysical sense.) His baby’s jaws, lower and upper, were hinged with muscle, and unexpectedly strong. And the miniature teeth set in those jaws—needle-sharp, and perfectly formed. (More of these teeth, soon.) And the quizzical curve of the tail, pink, hairless, thin as a mere thread. And the whiskers, no more than a tenth of an inch long, yet quivering, and stiff too, like the bristles of a tiny tiny brush.

What a beautiful baby she was, Babygirl the loving parents called her, conceived in the heat of the most tender yet the most erotic love, fated to be smothered with love, devoured with love, an American Babygirl placed with reverent fingers in her incubator. Periwinkle blue eyes, fair silk-soft blond hair, perfect rosebud lips, tiny pug nose, uniform smoothness of the Caucasian skin. A call went out to nursing mothers in ghetto neighborhoods requesting milk from their sweet heavy balloon-breasts, mother’s milk for pay, since Babygirl’s own mother failed to provide milk of the required richness. Her incubator filtered our contaminated air and pumped pure oxygen into her lungs. She had no reason to wail like other infants, whose sorrow is so audible and distracting. In her incubator air humid and warm as a tropical rain forest Babygirl thrived, glowed, prospered, grew.

And how he grew, though nameless even to his mother! How he doubled, trebled, quadrupled his weight, within days! Amid a swarm of siblings he fended his way, shrewd and driven, ravenous with hunger. Whether he was in the habit of gnawing ceaselessly during his waking hours, not only edible materials but such seemingly inedible materials as paper, wood, bone, metal of certain types and degrees of thinness, etc., because he was ravenously hungry or because he simply liked to gnaw, who can say? It is a fact that his incisors grew at the rate of between four and five inches a year, so he had to grind them down to prevent their pushing up into his brain and killing him. Granted the higher cognitive powers generated by the cerebral cortex, he might have speculated upon his generic predicament: is such behavior voluntary, or involuntary; where survival is an issue, what is compulsion; under the spell of Nature, who can behave unnaturally?

Babygirl never tormented herself with such questions. In her glass-topped incubator she grew ounce by ounce, pound by pound, feeding, dozing, feeding, dozing—no time at all before her dimpled knees pressed against the glass, her breath misted the glass opaque. Her parents were beginning to be troubled by her rapid growth, yet proud too of her rosy female beauty, small pointed breasts, curving hips, dimpled belly and buttocks and crisp cinnamon-colored pubic hair, lovely thick-lashed eyes with no pupil. Babygirl had a bad habit of sucking her thumb so they painted her thumb with a foul-tasting fluorescent-orange iodine mixture and observed with satisfaction how she spat, and gagged, and writhed in misery, tasting it. One mild April day, a winey-red trail of clotted blood was detected in the incubator, issuing from between Babygirl’s plump thighs, we were all quite astonished and disapproving but what’s to be done? Babygirl’s father said, Nature cannot be overcome, nor even postponed.

So many brothers and sisters he had, an alley awash with their wriggling bodies, a warehouse cellar writhing and squeaking with them, he sensed himself multiplied endlessly in the world, thus not likely to die out. For of all creaturely fears it is believed the greatest is the fear of, not merely dying, but dying out. Hundreds of thousands of brothers and sisters related to him by blood which was a solace, yes but also a source of infinite anxiety for all were ravenous with hunger, the squeak! squeak! squeak! of hunger multiplied beyond accounting. He learned, on his frantic clicking toenails, to scramble up sheer verticals, to run to the limits of his endurance, to tear out the throats of his enemies, to leap, to fly—to throw himself, for instance, as far as eleven feet into space, from one city rooftop to an adjacent rooftop—thus thwarting his pursuers. He learned to devour, when necessary, the living palpitating flesh of prey while on the run. The snap! of bones radiated pleasure through his jaws, his small brain thrummed with happiness. He never slept. His heartbeat was fever-rapid at all times. He knew not to back himself into a corner, nor to hide in any space from which there was no way out. He was going to live forever!—then one day his enemies set a trap for him, the crudest sort of trap, and sniffing and squeaking and quivering with hunger he lunged for the moldy bread-bait and a spring was triggered and a bar slammed down across the nape of his neck snapping the delicate vertebrae and near severing his poor astonished head.

They lied to her, telling her it was just a birthday party—for the family. First came the ritual bath, then the anointing of the flesh, the shaving and plucking of certain undesirable hairs, the curling and crimping of certain desirable hairs, she fasted for forty-eight hours, she was made to gorge herself for forty-eight hours, they scrubbed her tender flesh with a wire brush, they rubbed pungent herbs into the wounds, the little clitoris was sliced off and tossed to the clucking hens in the yard, the now-shaven labia were sewed shut, the gushing blood was collected in a golden chalice, her buckteeth were forcibly straightened with a pliers, her big hooked nose was broken by a quick skilled blow from the palm of a hand, the bone and cartilage grew back into more desirable contours, then came the girdle-brassiere to cinch in Babygirl’s pudgy twenty-eight-inch waist to a more desirable seventeen-inch-waist, so her creamy hips and thighs billowed out, so her gorgeous balloon-breasts billowed out, her innards were squeezed up into her chest cavity, she had difficulty breathing at first, and moist pink-tinted bubbles issued from her lips, then she got the knack of it, reveling in her classic “hour-glass” figure and new-found power over men’s inflammable imaginations. Her dress was something fetching and antique, unless it was something sly and silky-slinky, a provocative bustline, a snug-fitting skirt, she was charmingly hobbled as she walked her dimpled knees chafing together and her slender ankles quivering with the strain, she wore a black lace garter belt holding up her gossamer-transparent silk stockings with straight black seams, in her spike-heeled pointed-toed white satin shoes she winced a bit initially until she got the knack and very soon she got the knack, the shameless slut. Giggling and brushing and making little fluttery motions with her hands, wriggling her fat ass, her nipples hard and erect as peanuts inside the sequined bosom of her dress, her eyes glistened like doll’s eyes of the kind that shut when the doll’s head is thrust back, the periwinkle-blue had no pupils to distract, Babygirl was not one of those bitches always thinking plotting calculating how to take advantage of some poor jerk, she came from finer stock, you could check her pedigree, there were numerals tattooed into her flesh (the inside of the left thigh), she could be neither lost nor mislaid, nor could the cunt run away, and lose herself in America the way so many have done, you read about it all the time. They misted her in the most exquisite perfume—one whiff of it, if you were a man, a normal man, there’s a fever in your blood only one act can satisfy, they passed out copies of the examining physician’s report, she was clean of all disease venereal or otherwise, she was a virgin, no doubt of that though tripping in her high heels and grinning and blushing peering through her fingers at her suitors she sometimes gave the wrong impression, poor Babygirl: those lush crimson lips of such fleshy contours they suggested, even to the most gentlemanly and austere among us, the fleshy vaginal labia.

Filthy vermin! obscene little beast! they were furious at him for being as if, incarnated thus, he’d chosen his species, and took a cruel pleasure in carrying the seeds of typhus in his guts, bubonic plague virus in his saliva, poisons of all kinds in his excrement. They wanted him dead, they wanted all of his kind extinct, nothing less would satisfy them firing idle shots at the town dump as, squeaking in terror, he darted from one hiding place to another, reeking garbage exploding beside him as the bullets struck, they blamed him for the snap! of poultry bones in predators’ jaws, they had no evidence but they blamed him for a litter of piglets devoured alive, and what happened to that baby in the ground-floor apartment on Eleventh Street left unattended for twenty minutes when its mother slipped out to buy cigarettes and milk at the 7-Eleven store a block away—Oh my God! Oh oh oh don’t tell me, I don’t want to know—and a fire that started and blazed out of control in the middle of a frigid January night because insulation around some electrical wires had been gnawed through, but how was that his fault, how his, where was the proof amidst hundreds of thousands of his siblings, each possessed by a voracious hunger and a ceaseless need to gnaw? Pursuing him with rocks, a gang of children, whooping and yodeling across the rooftops injuring him as in desperation he scrambled up the side of a brick wall, yes but he managed to escape even as his toenails failed him and he slipped, fell—fell sickeningly into space—down an air-shaft—five storeys—to the ground below—high-pitched squeaky shrieks as he fell—plummeted downward thrashing and spiraling in midair, red eyes alight in terror for such creatures know terror though they do not know the word “terror,” they embody terror, that’s to say embody it, though every cell in his body strained to live, every luminous particle of his being craved immortality, even as you and me. (Of the suffering of living things through the millennia, it is wisest not to think, Darwin advises.) So he fell off the edge of the roof, down the airshaft, the equivalent of approximately one hundred seventy times his size measured from nose to rump (but excluding his tail which, uncurled, straight and stiff, is longer than his length— eight inches!) so we were watching smiling in the knowledge that the dirty little bugger would be squashed flat, thus imagine our indignation and outrage to see him land on his feet! a tiny bit shaken, but uninjured! untouched! a fall that would have broken every bone in our goddam bodies and he shakes his whiskers and furls up his tail and scampers away! And the rancid night parted like black water to shield him.

It was the National Guard Armory, rented for the night at discount price, a slow season, and in the cavernous smoke-filled gallery fresh-groomed men sat attentive in rows of seats, their faces indistinct as dream-faces, their eyes vague and soft as molluscs focussed on Babygirl, fingers fat as cigars poking in their crotches, genitalia heavy as giant purplish-ripe figs straining at the fabric of their trousers. Yes but these are carefully screened and selected gentlemen. Yes but these are serious fellows. Most of them pointedly ignore the vendors hawking their wares in the Armory, now’s hardly the time for beer, Coke, hotdogs, caramel corn, the men’s eyes are hotly fixed on Babygirl my God get a load of that. To find a worthy wife in today’s world is no simple task. An old-fashioned girl is the object of our yearning, the girl that married old dead dad is our ideal, but where is she to be found?—in today s debased world. So Babygirl tossed her shimmering cinnamon curls and prettily pouted, revealed her dazzling white smile, in a breathy singsong she recited the sweet iambic verse she had composed for this very occasion. So Babygirl twirled her gem-studded baton. Flung her baton spinning up into the rafters of the Armory where at the apogee of its flight it seemed for a magic instant to pause, then tumbled back down into Babygirl’s outstretched fingers—the rows of staring seats burst into spontaneous applause. So Babygirl curtsied, blushed, ducked her head, paused to straighten the seams of her stockings, adjusted an earring, adjusted her girdle that cut so deeply into the flesh of her thighs there would be angry red indentations there for days, Babygirl giggled and blew kisses, her lovely skin all aglow, as the auctioneer strutted about hamming it up with his hand-held microphone, Georgie Bick's his name, cocky and paunchy in his tux with the red cummerbund. Hey whooee do I hear 5,000, do I hear 8,000, gimme 10-, 10-, 10,000, in a weird high-pitched incantatory voice so mesmerizing that bidding begins at once, a Japanese gentleman signaling a bid by touching his left earlobe, a swarthy turbaned gentleman signaling with a movement of his dark-glittering eyes, Hey whooee do I hear 15,000, do I hear 20,000, do I hear 25—, 25—, 25,000, thus a handsome moustached Teutonic gentleman cannot resist Yes, a Mediterranean gentleman, a gentleman with a shaved blunt head, a gentleman from Texas, a heavyset perspiring gentleman rubbing at the tip of his flushed pug nose, Do I hear 30,000, do I hear 35,000, do I hear 50,000, winking and nudging Babygirl, urging her to the edge of the platform, C mon sweetie now s not the time for shyness, c’mon honey we all know why you’re here tonight don’t be coy you cunt, clumsy cow-cunt, gentlemen observe those dugs, those udders, and there’s udder attractions too, hardee-har-har! And from up in the balcony, unobserved till now, a handsome white-haired gentleman signals with his white-gloved hand Yes.

He was battle-weary, covered in scabs, maggot-festering little wounds stippling his body, his once-proud tail was gangrenous, the tip rotted away, yet he remained stoic and uncomplaining gnawing through wood, through paper, through insulation, through thin sheets of metal, eating with his old appetite, the ecstasy of jaws, teeth, intestines, anus, if the time allotted to him were infinite as his hunger it’s certain he would gnaw his way through the entire world and excrete it behind him in piles of moist dark dense little turds. But Nature prescribes otherwise: the species into which he was born grants on the average only twelve months of survival—if things go well. And this May morning things are decidedly not going well here on the fourth floor of the partly empty ancient brick building on Sullivan Street housing on its first floor the Metropole Bakery, most acclaimed of local bakeries, “Wedding Cakes Our Specialty Since 1949,” he has nested in a nook in a wall, he has been nibbling nervously on a piece of something theoretically edible (the hardened flattened remains of a sibling struck by a vehicle in the street, pounded into two dimensions by subsequent vehicles) sniffing and blinking in an agony of appetite: on the fourth floor, with his many thousands of fellows, since, it’s one of Nature’s quiddities, when BROWN and BLACK species occupy a single premise, BROWN (being larger and more aggressive) inhabit the lower levels while BLACK (shier, more philosophical) are relegated to the upper levels where food foraging is more difficult. So he’s eating, or trying to eat, when there’s a sound as of silk being torn, and a furry body comes flying at him, snarling, incisors longer and more deadly than his own, claws, hind legs pummeling like rotor blades, every flea and tick on his terror-struck little body is alert, every cell of his being cries out to be spared, but Sheba with her furry moon face has no mercy, she’s a beautiful silver tabby much adored by her owners for her warm affectionate purring ways but here on this May morning in the ancient brick building housing the Metropole Bakery she is in a frenzy to kill, to tear with her jaws, to eat, the two of them locked in the most intimate of embraces, yowling, shrieking, he’d go for her jugular vein but, shrewd Sheba, she has already gone for his jugular vein, they are rolling crazily together in the filth, not just Sheba’s terrible teeth but her maniac hind legs are killing him; yes but he’s putting up a damned good fight yes he has ripped a triangular patch of flesh out of her ear, yes but it’s too late, yes you can see that Sheba’s greater weight will win the day, even as he squeaks and bites in self-defense Sheba has torn out his throat, she has in fact disemboweled him, his hapless guts in slimy ribbons now tangled in her feet, what a din! what a yowling! you’d think somebody was being killed! and he’s dying, and she begins to devour him, warm-gushing blood is best, twitchy striated muscle is best, pretty Sheba shuts her jaws on his knobby little head and crushes his skull, his brains inside his skull, and he goes out. Just goes out. And the greedy tabby (who isn’t even hungry: her owners keep her sleek and well fed, of course) eats him where they’ve landed, snaps his bones, chews his gristle, swallows his scaly tail in sections, his dainty pink-whorled ears, his rheumy eyes, his bristly whiskers, as well as his luscious meat. And afterward washes herself, to rid herself of his very memory.

Except: wakened rudely from her post-prandial nap by a sickish stirring in her guts, poor Sheba is suddenly wracked by vomiting, finds herself reeling ungracefully and puking on the stairs, descending to the rear of the Metropole Bakery, mewing plaintively but no one hears as, teetering on a rafter above one of the giant vats of vanilla cake batter, poor Sheba heaves out her guts, that’s to say him, the numerous fragments and shreds of him: a convulsive gagging and choking that concludes with the puking-up of his whiskers, which are now broken into half- and quarter-inch pieces. Poor puss!—runs home meek and plaintive and her adoring mistress picks her up, cuddles, scolds, Sheba where have you been! And Sheba's supper comes early that evening.

Madly in love, Mr. X is the most devoted of suitors. And then the most besotted of bridegrooms. Covering Babygirl’s pink-flushed face with kisses, hugging her so tight she cries Oh! and all of the wedding company, her own daddy in particular, laugh in delight. Mr. X is a dignified handsome older gentleman. He’s the salt of the earth. He leads Babygirl out onto the polished dance floor as the band plays “I Love You Truly” and how elegantly he dances, how masterfully he leads his bride, blood-red carnation in his lapel, chips of dry ice in his eyes, wide fixed grinning-white dentures, how graceful the couple’s dips and bends, Babygirl in a breathtakingly beautiful antique wedding gown worn by her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother in their times, an heirloom wedding ring as well, lilies of the valley braided in the bride’s cinnamon curls, Babygirl laughs showing the cherry-pink interior of her mouth, she squeals Oh! as her new husband draws her to his bosom, kisses her full on the lips. His big strong fingers stroke her shoulders, breasts, rump. There are champagne toasts, there are gay drunken speeches lasting well into the evening. The Archbishop himself intones a blessing. Babygirl on Mr. X’s knee being fed strawberries and wedding cake by her bridegroom, and feeding her bridegroom strawberries and wedding cake in turn, each sucking the other’s fingers, amid kisses and laughter. Chewing her wedding cake Babygirl is disconcerted to discover something tough, sinewy, bristly in it, like gristle, or fragments of bone, or tiny bits of wire, but she is too well-bred and embarrassed to spit the foreign substance, if it is a foreign substance, out: discreetly pushes it with her tongue to the side of her mouth, behind her molars, for safe-keeping. For his part, Mr. X, a gentleman, washes his mouthfuls of wedding cake down with champagne, swallows everything without blinking an eye. This is the happiest day of my life he whispers into Babygirl’s pink-whorled ear.

It was an experiment in behavioral psychology, in the phenomenon of conditioning, to be published in Scientific American, and there to cause quite a stir, but naturally he wasn’t informed, poor miserable bugger, nor did he give consent. Semi-starved in his wire mesh cage, compulsively gnawing on his own hind legs, he quickly learned to react to the slightest gesture on the part of his torturers, his monitored heartbeat raced in panic, his jaundiced eyeballs careened in their sockets, a metaphysical malaise permeated his soul like sulphur dioxide, after only a few hours. Yet his torturers persisted for there were dozens of graphs and charts to be filled out; dozens of young assistants involved in the experiment. In the gauging of “terror” in dumb beasts of his species they shocked him with increasing severity until virtual puffs of smoke issued from the top of his head, they singed his fur with burning needles, poked burning needles into his tender anus, lowered his cage over a Bunsen burner, wiped their eyes laughing at his antics, shaking and rattling his cage, spinning his cage at a velocity of ninety miles an hour, they marveled at how he was conditioned to respond not just to their gestures but to their words as if he could understand them and then, most amazing of all,—this would be the crux of the controversial article in Scientific American—after forty-eight hours he began to react unerringly to the mere thought that the torture would be resumed. (Provided the experimentors consciously thought ’ their thoughts inside the laboratory, not outside.) A remarkable scientific discovery!—unfortunately, after his death, never once to be duplicated. Thus utterly worthless as science and a bit of a joke in experimental psychology circles.

How Mr. X adored his Babygirl!—lovingly bathing her in her fragrant bubble bath, brushing and combing her long wavy-curly cinnamon hair that fell to her hips, cooing to her, poking his tongue in her, bringing her breakfast in bed after a fevered night of marital love, insisting upon shaving, with his own straight razor, the peachy-fuzzy down that covered her lovely body, and the stiff “unsightly” hairs of underarms, legs, and crotch. Weeks, months. Until one night his penis failed him and he realized he was frankly bored with Babygirl’s dimpled buttocks and navel, her wide-open periwinkle-blue eyes, the flattering Oh! of her pursed rosebud lips! He realized that her flat nasal voice grated against his sensitive nerves, her habits disgusted him, several times he caught her scratching her fat behind when she believed herself unobserved, she was not so fastidious as to refrain from picking her nose, frequently the bathroom stank of flatulence and excrement after she emerged from it, her menstrual blood stained the white linen heirloom sheets, her kinky hairs collected in drains, her early-morning breath was rancid as the inside of his own oldest shoes, she gazed at him with big mournful questioning cow-eyes, Oh what is wrong dearest, oh! don’t you love me any longer? What did I do! lowering her bulk onto his knees, sliding her pudgy arms around his neck, exhaling her meaty breath in his face, so, cruelly, he parted his knees and Babygirl fell with a graceless thud to the floor. As she stared at him speechless in astonishment and hurt he struck her with the backside of his hand, bloodying her nose, Oh you will, bitch, will you! he grunted, will you! Eh!

Mating, and mating. Mating. A frenzy of mating. In the prime of his maleness he fathered dozens, hundreds, thousands of offspring, now they’re scurrying and squeaking everywhere, little buggers everywhere underfoot, nudging him aside as he feeds, ganging up on him, yes a veritable gang of them, how quickly babies grow up, it’s amazing how quickly babies grow up, one day an inch long, the next day two inches long, the next day four inches long, those tiny perfect toes, claws, ears, whiskers, graceful curved tails, incisors, ravenous appetite And the horror of it washed over me suddenly: I cannot die, I am multiplied to infinity. It was not his fault! His enemies are even now setting out dollops of powdery-pasty poison, to rid the neighborhood of him and his offspring, but it was not his fault! A fever overtook him, him and certain of his sisters, almost daily it seemed, yes daily, maybe hourly, no time to rest, no time for contemplation, a two-inch thing, a sort of a knob of flesh, a rod, hot and stiff with blood, piston-quick, tireless, unfurling itself out of the soft sac between his hind legs, yes and he was powerless to resist, it was more urgent even than gnawing, more excruciatingly pleasurable, he was but an appendage! thus innocent! But his enemies, plotting against him, don’t give a damn, they’re cruel and cold-blooded setting out dollops of this most delicious poison, sugary, pasty, bread-moldy, delicious beyond reckoning, he should know better (shouldn’t he?) but he’s unable to resist, pushing his way into the sea of squeaking quivering young ones, seething sea, dark waves, wave upon wave eating in a delirium of appetite, a single feeding organism you might think, it’s a diabolical poison however that doesn’t kill these poor buggers on the premises but induces violent thirst in them thus shortly after feeding he and his thousands of sons and daughters are rushing out of the building, in a panic to find water, to drink water, to alleviate this terrible thirst, they’re drawn to the dockside, to the river, there are screams as people see them emerge, the dark wave of them, glittering eyes, whiskers, pink near-hairless tails, they take no notice of anyone or anything in their need to get to water, there in the river a number of them drown, others drink and drink and drink until, as planned, their poor bodies bloat, and swell, and burst. And city sanitation workers wearing gas masks complain bitterly as they shovel the corpses, small mountains of corpses, into a procession of dumpster trucks, then they hose down the sidewalks, streets, docks. At a fertilizer plant he and his progeny will be mashed down, ground to gritty powder and sold for commercial/residential use. No mention of the poison of course.

Grown increasingly and mysteriously insensitive to his wife’s feelings, Mr. X, within their first year of marriage, began to bring home “business associates” (as he called them) to ogle Babygirl, to peek at her in her bath, to whisper licentious remarks in her ears, to touch, fondle, molest—as Mr. X, often smoking a cigar, calmly watched! At first Babygirl was too astonished to comprehend, then she burst into tears of indignation and hurt, then she pleaded with the brute to be spared, then she flew into a tantrum tossing silky garments and such into a suitcase, then she was lying in a puddle on the bathroom floor, nights and days passed in a delirium, her keeper fed her grudgingly and at irregular intervals, there were promises of sunshine, greenery, Christmas gifts, promises made and withheld, then one day a masked figure appeared in the doorway, in leather military regalia, gloved hands on his hips, brass-studded belt, holster and pistol riding his hip, gleaming black leather boots the toes of which Babygirl eagerly kissed, groveling before him, twining her long curly-cinnamon hair around his ankles. Begging, Have mercy! don’t hurt me! I am yours! in sickness and in health as I gave my vow to God! And assuming the masked man was in fact Mr. X (for wasn’t this a reasonable assumption, in these circumstances?) Babygirl willingly accompanied him to the master bedroom, to the antique brass four-postered bed, and did not resist his wheezing, straining, protracted and painful lovemaking, if such an act can be called lovemaking, the insult of it! the pain of it! and not till the end, when the masked figure triumphantly removed his mask, did Babygirl discover that he was a stranger—and that Mr. X himself was standing at the foot of the bed, smoking a cigar, calmly observing. In the confusion of all that followed, weeks, months, there came a succession of “business associates,” never the same man twice, as Mr. X grew systematically cruder, hardly a gentleman any longer, forcing upon his wife as she lay trussed and helpless in their marriage bed a man with fingernails filed razor-sharp who lacerated her tender flesh, a man with a glittering scaly skin, a man with a turkey’s wattles, a man with an ear partly missing, a man with a stark-bald head and cadaverous smile, a man with infected draining sores like exotic tattoos stippling his body, and poor Babygirl was whipped for disobedience, Babygirl was burnt with cigars, Babygirl was slapped, kicked, pummelled, near-suffocated and near-strangled and near-drowned, she screamed into her saliva-soaked gag, she thrashed, convulsed, bled in sticky skeins most distasteful to Mr. X who then punished her additionally, as a husband will do, by withholding his affection.

So light-headed with hunger was he, hiding in terror from his enemies beneath a pile of bricks, he began to gnaw at his own tail—timidly at first, then more avidly, with appetite, unable to stop, his poor skinny tail, his twenty pink toes and pads, his hind legs, choice loins and chops and giblets and breast and pancreas and brains and all, at last his bones are picked clean, the startling symmetry and beauty of the skeleton revealed, now he’s sleepy, contented and sleepy, washes himself with fastidious little scrubbing motions of his paws then curls up in the warm September sun to nap. A sigh ripples through him: exquisite peace.

Except: two gangling neighborhood boys creep up on him dozing atop his favorite brick, capture him in a net and toss him squeaking in terror into a cardboard box, slam down the lid that’s pocked with air holes, he’s delivered by bicycle to a gentleman with neatly combed white hair and a cultivated voice who pays the boys $5 each for him, observes him crouched in a corner of the box rubbing his hands delightedly together chuckling softly, Well! you’re a rough-looking fella aren’t you! To his considerable surprise, the white-haired gentleman feeds him; holds him up, though not unkindly, by the scruff of his neck, to examine him, the sleek perfectly-formed parts of him, the rakish incisors most particularly. Breathing audibly, murmuring, with excited satisfaction. Yes. I believe you will do, old boy.

No longer allowed out of the house, often confined to the bedroom suite on the second floor, poor Babygirl nonetheless managed to adjust to the altered circumstances of her life with commendable fortitude and good humor. Spending most of her days lying languorously in bed, doing her nails, devouring gourmet chocolates brought her by one or another of Mr. X’s business associates, sometimes, in a romantic mood, by the unpredictable Mr. X himself, she watched television (the evangelical preachers were her favorites), complained to herself in the way of housewives in America, tended to her wounds, clipped recipes from magazines, gossiped over the telephone with her female friends, shopped by catalogue, read her Bible, grew heavier, sullen, apprehensive of the future, plucked her eyebrows, rubbed fragrant creams into her skin, kept an optimistic attitude, made an effort. Of the disturbing direction in which her marriage was moving she tried not to think for Babygirl was not the kind of wife to whine, whimper, nag, not Babygirl so imagine her surprise and horror when, one night, Mr. X arrived home and ran upstairs to the bedroom in which, that day, she’d been confined, tied to the four brass posts of the marital bed by white silken cords, and in triumph threw open his camel’s hair coat, See what I’ve brought for you, my dear! unzipping his trousers with trembling fingers and as Babygirl stared incredulous out he leapt—squeaking, red-eyed, teeth bared and glistening with froth, stiff curved tail erect. Babygirl’s screams were heartrending.

Mr. X and his (male) companions observed with scientific detachment the relationship between Babygirl and He (as, in codified shorthand, they referred to him): how, initially, the pair resisted each other most strenuously, even hysterically, Babygirl shrieking even through the gag stuffed in her mouth as He was netted in the bed with her, such a struggle, such acrobatics, He squeaking in animal panic edged with indignant rage, biting, clawing, fighting as if for His very life, and Babygirl, despite her flaccid muscles and her seemingly indolent ways, putting up a fight as if for her very life! And this went on for hours, for an entire night, and the night following, and the night following that. And there was never anything so remarkable on Burlingame Way, the attractive residential street where Mr. X made his home.

He did not want this, no certainly he did not want this, resisting with all the strength of his furry little being, as, with gloved hands, Mr. X forced him there—poor Babygirl spread-eagled and helpless bleeding from a thousand welts and lacerations made by his claws and teeth and why was he being forced snout-first, and then head-first, then his shoulders, his sleek muscular length, why there—in there—so he choked, near-suffocated, used his teeth to tear a way free for himself yet even as he did so Mr. X with hands trembling in excitement, as his companions, gathered round the bed, watched in awe pushed him in farther, and then farther—into the blood-hot pulsing toughly elastic tunnel between poor Babygirl’s fatty thighs—and still farther until only the sleek-furry end of his rump and his trailing hind legs and, of course, the eight-inch pink tail were visible. His panicked gnawing of the fleshy walls that so tightly confined him released small geysers of blood that nearly drowned him, and the involuntary spasms of clenching of poor Babygirl’s pelvic muscles nearly crushed him, thus how the struggle would have ended, if both he and Babygirl had not lost consciousness at the same instant, is problematic. Even Mr. X and his companions, virtually beside themselves in unholy arousal, were relieved that, for that night, the agon had ceased.

As, at her martyrdom, at the stake in Rouen, as the flames licked mindlessly ever higher and higher to consume her, to turn her to ashes, Jeanne d’Arc is reported to have cried out “Jesu! Jesu! Jesu!” in a voice of rapture.

And who would clean up the mess. And who, with a migraine, sanitary pad soaked between her chafed thighs, she’s fearful of seeing her swollen jaw, blackened eye in any mirrored surface weeping quietly to herself, padding gingerly about in her bedroom slippers, mock-Japanese quilted housecoat. The only consolation is at least there’s a t.v. in most of the rooms so, even when the vacuum is roaring, she isn’t alone: there’s Reverend Tim, there’s Brother Jessie, there’s Sweet Alabam’ MacGowan. A consolation at least. For, not only did Babygirl suffer such insult and ignominy at the hands of the very man who, of all the world, was most responsible for her emotional well-being, not only was she groggy in the aftermath of only dimly remembered physical trauma, running the risk, as she sensed, of infection, sterility, and a recrudescence of her old female maladies,—not only this but she was obliged to clean up the mess next morning, who else. Laundering the sheets, blood-stained sheets are no joke. On her hands and knees trying (with minimal success) to remove the stains from the carpet. Vacuum the carpet. And the dirt-bag is full and there’s a problem putting in a new dirt-bag, there always is. Faint-headed, wracked several times with white-hot bolts of pain so she had to sit, catch her breath. And the pad between her legs soaked hard in blackish blood like blood-sausage. And the steel wool disintegrating in her fingers as gamely she tries to scour the casserole dish clean, dissolves in tears, Oh! where has love gone! so one evening he surprises her, in that melancholy repose, the children are in on it too, what’s today but Babygirl’s birthday and she’d tormented herself thinking no one would remember but as they sweep into the restaurant, the Gondola that’s one of the few good Italian restaurants in the city where you can order pizza too, the staff is waiting, Happy Birthday! balloons, half-chiding there’s a chorus, Did you think we’d forgotten? and Babygirl orders a sloe gin fizz which goes straight to her head and she giggles and suppresses a tiny belch patting her fingers to her mouth, later her husband is scolding one of the boys but she’s going to steer clear of the conflict, goes to the powder room, checks her makeup in the rose-lit flattering mirrors seeing yes, thank God the bruise under her left eye is fading, then she takes care to affix squares of toilet paper to the toilet seat to prevent picking up an infectious disease, since AIDS Babygirl is even more methodical, then she’s sitting on the toilet her mind for a moment blissful and empty until, turning her head, just happening to turn her head, though probably she sensed its presence, she sees, not six inches away, on the slightly grimy sill of a frosted-glass window, the red-blinking eyes of a large rodent, oh dear God is it a rat, these eyes fixed upon hers, her heart gives a violent kick and nearly stops. Poor Babygirl’s screams penetrate every wall of the building.