Abducted Chapter Seven: Tabitha's Letter From the Retreat
From the novel I'm working on while I'm in school to keep working on my writing skills.
Dear Bradford, (aka My Favorite Boy)
I told you so! I’m ecstatic that you’ve enjoyed yourself so much. It’s good for boys to be around other boys of their own age to horse around. I can scarcely imagine you jogging around in oversized clothes with dirty fingernails and stinking of sweat. Pretty soon you’ll be a man. By this I mean not needing your big sisters protection and guidance. In any case remember to take care of those corns on your feet like I showed you.
My time at the retreat has been pleasant and memorable. Much like your vacation, mine entails a stay at a similar cabin, without internet, electricity, or indoor plumbing. All of us frumpy late teens and early twenty somethings crowded in a dense cold space. No pedicures, our hair like twine, our skin dry like parchment. Anything but boring, our jail provides an escape from the routine of having our needs met and our desires fulfilled. Here, rather than being subject of rumor and scorn, the others our brought down to my haggard level. Equals. Not just in social standing, but also in appearance and gait. Hobbling from exhausting work and fretting over hangnails, they ask me how to clean the flue so the cabin doesn’t fill with smoke. All of them asking after my knowledge of cleaning trapped animals, and cooking. Like you, I’ve experienced a strange freedom in exposing my skin unembarrassed. Like those girls who wear high skirts or low cut shirts in public. Of course you don’t want to hear about all that gross girl stuff!
I want to tell you about something strange that happened.
Just like you without my cell phone my mind has been free to wander to places unhindered. I’ve been very, very bored. Staring at walls, playing in dirt, laying on my back and gazing at the sky, and strangely I’ve become obsessed with counting things. Like the shoes by the door… Well, it’s like this; all of us girls were sitting in a circle on the floor clicking our tongues about nonsense when all of a sudden I found myself staring at our feet. Not hard, as I’m usually concerned about my own and how much they hurt, but my eyes were drawn to the others. None of their shoes had orthopedic splints, or were otherwise remarkable, but in any case we were all given the same originally white non-descript shoes, filthy brown by now, but the existence of so many feet in one small, cramped place was captivating. Didn’t know why, but my fascination led me to count them several times though I already knew there were 32 pairs. That means individual 64 shoes. 64 heels. 1,664 bones. Hundreds of muscles. Tens of thousands of ligaments and tendons. 320 toes. 32 evolutionary lines from all over the world that traveled to this place to be here at this moment. The numbers statistics of the commonplace are so mindboggling I was consumed with it. Couldn’t walk away from the thoughts. It was like that day when you were scared of taking your first Adderall so I took it with you and we ended up reading all of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in a night. The charge counselor burst into the cabin and told us to pack up for an impromptu midnight hike up the mountain. After a few weak protestations we bucked up and did as we were told. My mind was released from the statistical anomaly for the next 12 hours of grueling drudgery.
In any case, the shoes didn’t come up again until the next night. Couldn’t tell what time, but I was awoken by a strange mewling noise coming from outside the cabin. Thought maybe it was one of the girls up late vomiting in the outhouse. (For some, the Retreat isn’t about escaping from their lives, but several month’s long weight loss program. Not that I’m complaining, I’ve lost 23 pounds.) The vomitier paused to catch their breath, driving their slimy finger back in their throat, they hurled up what little food they’d eaten into the outhouse toilet.
Out of curiosity, I sat up and quickly counted heads to see who it was. Probably Janet Manahan, heiress to the Brightstar Tissue Company. Ugly just like me, she’d do anything to stay under 90 pounds. But she was snoring away. I won’t do the count for the rest of the girls, that’d bore you to sleep, you know all the usual names, Lockland, Heidegger, Bond, etc., but they were all accounted for. 32 including me. Whoever was puking amongst the crickets and thickets it wasn’t one of us.
There were the shoes. Not a pile, or by our beds, but a neat straight line all facing out on either side of the door. 2, 4, 6, 8, … 30. Not a big issue. Probably one of the girls was sleeping in with their shoes on even after the repeated admonishments, and punishments not to. Fixated again, I got dressed in my sweat clothes, slipped on my shoes, and rebelling for the first time since arriving, slipped into the moonlit night undetected. Around and behind the cabin, I followed the noise. The outhouse door was open on its hinges and creaking ever so slightly, accompanying the wind rustling the leaves and grass.
Was like the beginning of a horror movie. Only, you know the only thing that scares me is Mom. In the open doorway a little girl was kneeled over the bowl, hacking, coughing, but also eating something. Nearing the outhouse, I could she wasn’t vomiting but forcibly attempting to stuff something into her mouth that was too big to fit. Like when we get those oversized hoagies at the pier in Falls Beach? Remember how we have to cut them up and eat them like a giant oily salad? In both her chubby fists was what I thought at first was a knotted handkerchief or T-Shirt.
I asked, “Are you okay?”
She didn’t look up or even acknowledge me. Merely tipped her head up as if trying to facilitate the object’s going down her throat. That’s when it hit me that she wasn’t just gagging, but also growling, like a feral little beast. In her hands was one of the missing shoes, laces draped over her shoulders. Circling the outer sole were tiny bite marks but no separation. Her sophomoric teeth could no more cut the sole of the shoe than could a blunt rock but there she was with the toe of the shoe up to the eyelets in her mouth gumming it like a baby feeling a toy with its tongue.
Jogging to her I said, “stop it.” Attempting to take the shoe from her hands, I was met with her bundled fist impacting my chest and she brushed me aside like The Hulk would a tank. Knocked the wind out of me. As I caught my breath, I watched in horror as the child folded the sole of the shoe sagittal, then deep throated it to the heel hole. Remember seeing the snakes at the zoo? How they could dislocate their throats to accommodate entire rabbits? Well the little girls neck did just that. Tripling in size it accommodated the entirety of the shoe. Then her mouth closed around the heel and she swallowed it whole into her gullet then belched like dad after drinking too much.
I know you’re thinking right now that this was a dream and indeed it was, but that’s not so much the point as what happened when I woke up. Breathing again, I stood and the little girl turned her head to look up at me and squinted her eyes as a warning. Her mouth and neck had resumed normalcy, she looked a sweet growling baby. I don’t know what possessed me right then, but at her kneeled knees was the twin of the other shoe. Reaching down, I took it up, and momentarily the growling got deeper, like as if she was worried about me stealing the other shoe. Instead I handed it to her and helped her tip her chin back with my index.
Again she opened her mouth triple wide, her gullet triple wide, and I dropped the shoe in to be with its sister. Right then the girl stopped her fit of growling, licked her lips, rubbed her stomach, and made a yummy noise. As if to show me proof it was all real, she lifted her shirt to her ribs, and pointed to the protruding shoe’s toes, said, “All the good shoes. I’m pregnant with them if the gods smile on me.”
You can guess right about then I woke up. Not the normal slow drift to consciousness but a sudden bolt upright sitting on the edge of my bed coughing, hacking. It was daylight out, early morning, and the others were going about gathering their towels and soap for freezing cold river baths. Leaning over me, like as if she’d been just about to tap me awake was Janet Manahan, hand out watching me like when you hold a friends hair back so they can vomit unencumbered after getting Blitzkrieg drunk.
“You okay?” Then, “oh, Jesus, guys, she’s choking!”
Huddling like a sowing circle each of the girls came by and tapped my back like it would help dislodge the awful feeling in my throat like something was stuck. Old Grandpa Graves came to mind with his pika, choked to death on a tablecloth at that awful nursing home! Somehow I’d swallowed something like a golf ball, coin, bottle cap, tacks, or pushpin and was going to have to have surgery to have it removed that was of course unless I could cough it up. Hitting harder now, the girls drummed on me rap, rap, rap, rap, rap, rap in a line, each of them getting their fill of hurting someone unhindered. Some wadding their fists to add weak force that didn’t help.
Just then a line fell over my tongue. A string. Reaching into my throat, I tugged at it. Whatever I’d swallowed was wadded wet and fibrous. I got it out of my trachea, past my esophagus, over my tongue, and out. The girls stopped their hitting. In the palms of my hands was a bile soaked wad of shoe lace, strings of sputum running from it to my mouth.
There was a collective, “eww,” amongst the gaggle and I breathed for the first time in several minutes.
Gods, Bradford. I’ve never been so confused. Me! Confused!
Problem is… no one’s laces were missing. All 32 pairs were accounted for including my own. Like as if I’d conjured it out of thin air. Nightly, the others hide their shoes. Understandable being were only given one pair to last the summer. They’ve been calling me the dream goblin. All the time saying I growl in my sleep.
Oh baby brother, I’d planned on this letter being a nonchalant explanation of the events. Emotionless. But as I write this I feel the wad in my stomach, in my throat, like as if it’s a sign of something more emotionally ominous. So I’ll end this letter with a question. Have you ever seen me sleep walking or sleep eating? Have I ever spoken of a little girl who haunts my dreams? Don’t be afraid to answer. I need to know the truth.
Love,
Your Biggest Sister Tabitha.