Inside my head, I can hear myself screaming, but no sound escapes my cold lips. I can hardly feel my limbs anymore as numbness shoots through me.
I glance to Brian, watching his glazed-over eyes locked blankly up at the massive face of the psychotic sixteen-year-old who just murdered his innocent sister between her teeth. He looks to be in shock, as do the others.
Julia swishes around her mouth one more time, probably to get up the excess of Beth’s pulpy remains, licking her jaw and leaving a tiny blood smear along her plump lower lip before swallowing hard again. She sighs with satisfaction, placing a hand on her stomach and rubbing it in a circular motion.
“She was a delicious appetizer before dinner, Brian. Step out of line one more time and maybe I’ll give you a try, too. Make you my main course. I’d bet good taste runs in your family,” states Julia, fighting back the giggling at her pun, but quickly narrows her eyes as she looks down upon all of us. “But don’t think I don’t want to try your flavors, too. Especially you, Anna,” she says, raising an eyebrow and causing Anna to flinch out of her state of shock. “I’ll bet you’re just all the sweeter with that little maggot growing inside of you.”
There’s dead silence for a moment. Absolute dead silence.
All I can feel is freezing chills in my bones and bloodstream.
Julia crosses her arms, taking a seat, and simply observes for a moment, swiping her tongue back across her bloodstained lower lip, raising an eyebrow and tilting her head expectantly at us. Daring us to make a move. Wanting to see us make some kind of show of rage at what she just did to a helpless outsider who had no idea what she was getting herself into.
And we do nothing. I know if any of us move, we’d probably piss our pants and die of a heart attack before Julia even had a chance to curl a menacing finger around our necks to snap them like twigs in the breeze. So, we remain silent, our souls screaming for release, our bodies tensed, our hearts pounding wildly. But we say nothing.
Nothing.
Goddamn, what are we? We can’t possibly still be human.
“You all disgust me,” snarls Julia at long last, breaking the silence of what feels like hours, even though it’s probably only a few minutes. She wrinkles her cute nose up, her upper lip rippling, and she idly taps a finger against her shoulder, her eyes glued to all of us. “I’ve given you everything. EVERYTHING. Everything I have to give. A home. Food. Clothes. School. A… a life. And… and how do you repay me?” she continues, and I can almost hear a crack in her voice. Almost like she’s ready to cry. She glares at us some more, shaking her head. “You betray me. All of you… all of you who were here before… and… and, taking advantage of me like that… when Jack was sick, and you all just… just…” she mumbles, hardly able to fathom it.
Julia slams a fist down on the desk, toppling us all over onto our backs, where we remain, cowering as the rage continues bubbling up inside the sixteen-year-old giant girl.
“I LOVE HIM! I LOVE HIM, AND NONE OF YOU STUPID LITTLE WORMS ARE GOING TO USE THAT AGAINST ME!” she screeches, a few tears trickling down her cheeks. “And you know what? I’ve realized something. I… I tried treating you like human beings. Clothes, cleaning, a bed, all the food you could want, activities… and you threw it back in my face, because you’re all just a bunch of stupid… ungrateful… little… fuckers,” growls Julia, a few tiny globs of spit spraying from her teeth as she gnashes them wrathfully at us.
She wipes a hand across her lips, the spittle bubbles and the darkening blood of all that remains from Beth smearing together across Julia’s knuckle.
“So… there’s gonna be some changes around here now,” she says solemnly, pursing her lips angrily. “You can’t stand being treated like human beings? Fine. Then I’ll treat you like what you are. Pets. MY pets. Now don’t move, any of you, or you’ll be joining Beth on a one-way trip out my butt,” growls Julia with a kind of slimy darkness that makes us want to hurl, clacking her teeth together one more time before moving swiftly out of her bedroom, closing the door behind her.
We remain silent. Gina clasps her hand against mine. Kelly, seemingly going weak in the knees, crouches down, staring, devoid of visible emotion, at the desktop. Anna begins sobbing silently, clutching herself to Brian in an embrace. Brian himself seems to be still in shock, his whole body tensed and frozen in place, still staring up at the place where his sister died high above our heads.
I turn around. Charlie looks ashen and fazed, certainly, but he seems calm. At ease, almost.
It frightens me to imagine what sorts of experiences in his life have allowed him to view all this carnage without so much as a tremble.
Minutes pass and still nothing is said. We can’t. Probably because if any of us did, we’d simultaneously start crying and vomiting. There’s nothing to say. Nothing to fight for right now. No reason to move. No time to mourn Beth’s death.
No hope.
Julia arrives back after what feels to us like a cold eternity of silence and pain, frozen in our respective positions. We are shaken out of our stupor, however, when we hear a loud clacking sound of glass bases smashing against the wooden desktop. Gina and I release each other’s hands, afraid of being seen. We turn to see Julia laying down a small armload of empty jelly jars on the table.
Five. Almost the same number as there are of us.
“You all refused to listen… after all the warnings I gave you, after all the chances… and you still didn’t learn. Well, now, I think…” sighs Julia with a demonically triumphant grin as she brandishes one of the jars in her hand, unscrewing the lid. “…after you spend some time in your new little cages, you’ll see just how nice I was treating you before. No more school. No more baths. No more house. You’re going to sit in here until you’ve learned how things work around here. And then… someday… when you’re all groveling in here, begging for a breath of fresh air, begging to worship the ground I walk on and I BELIEVE it in your voice… then maybe you can taste the good life again. But until then…” continues Julia, removing the first jar lid and setting it down on the desk.
From the looks of it, a knife was jammed through the lid four or five times to give us some oxygen. The slits are tiny: probably just enough to make sure we don’t suffocate.
“First things first. You’re not people anymore. You don’t want to be. You’ve made that very clear to me. You’re just animals now. And you know what animals are?”
Oh, God, no. No.
“Naked,” she insists, raising an eyebrow. “Everyone strip down and lay your clothes down on the desk. You won’t be needing them anymore.”
We all pause, partly out of some inexplicable disbelief at what she’s saying and partly still out of our numbed emotions, but we aren’t given much time to recover.
“Off now,” hisses Julia in a voice so throaty and fiery all we want to do is run as fast as we can in the other direction until our lungs give out, but we know such a thing would only result in more pain. Our minds still off in some PTSD dream world, we comply, stripping quickly and robotically, kicking our clothes forward in front of us until all six of us are completely nude. Somehow, we aren’t even embarrassed to be exposed in front of one another, after all we’ve been through. All we can feel is emptiness right now.
“Good, pets,” coos Julia, her voice becoming much nicer now that we’re doing her bidding, one of our last lines of mental defense finally coming down. She scoops all of our clothes into her hands and sweeps them off with her fingers right into the wastebasket that sits next to her desk, closing the lid with a satisfied slap of finality.
She’s not done yet, though.
Without even waiting to ask anyone to get into her hand, Julia’s pointer finger and thumb pinch around Brian’s body, plucking him unceremoniously from the table. She lowers her hand into the opening of a jar, releasing him and allowing him to tumble to the bottom. He remains flopped on his side, unwilling to expend the energy necessary to pull himself up. Smirking with delight at his state, Julia screws the lid back on Brian’s jar, and reaches down for Anna.
A few minutes later, everyone but me has been placed in a new glass home. I nod to the fearful Gina, who looks on the verge of tears finally, but manages to hold it back a bit longer as Julia grips her in her huge fleshy fingers and flicks her with what looks like added force into the base of the jelly jar. I cringe, hardly daring to watch, knowing there’s nothing I can do.
Finally, turning back to me, Julia stares down with a look of pity and sadness, something I haven’t seen in a while from her. Certainly not today. Looking up at the cute, earnest face of this sixteen-year-old, it’s almost impossible to believe she just brutally tortured and murdered an innocent young woman not ten minutes ago. And yet the liquid, crusted evidence of it lies caked on her lip and knuckle.
“I’m so sorry you had to see all that, Jack. I’m so sorry… that… you’ve had to live with animals like them… taking advantage of what we have,” she sighed, her hand extending toward me, her warm fingers wrapping around my cold, shivering body. “But look at it this way: now that you don’t have to worry about them anymore, we can spend… ALL our time together,” she says softly, batting her eyelashes somewhat seductively at me and brushing a thick, dark lock out of her eyes as she brings the fist holding me up to eye level. “Now, I’m sorry about this, but I kind of need to get cleaned up, just so no one sees what I had to do… and I don’t want to leave you alone already, so…”
“It’s fine, Julia,” I manage to croak out somehow. The girl herself seems startled at my speaking.
“No, no… no… it’s not, Jack,” she stammers passionately. “We’ve promised ourselves to each other. You deserve better than what I’ve put you through. And I’m going to make it up to you. Right… now…” she smiles, her other hand lowering toward her waist. Cautiously, I peer over the edge of her palm and watch as her hand fumbles with the waistband before tugging it and the thread rim of her panties forward, allowing me a view into the dark nether region behind.
“Love you, baby,” she whispers, planting a quick kiss on my face, and lowering her hand toward her waist. Tipping her palm, she allows me to tumble down just as she lets the soft panties snap back into place, entangling me back into her pubic hair and swollen flesh as she begins walking away from the desk.