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Orphanage. He grew up at the orphanage. My brain goes out of order.
“I bit Top Boy’s hand, the one in which he held the knife, and didn’t let go until his flesh came off.” A grin curls up the corners of his mouth, a deadly glint in his eye. The expression of an animalistic satisfaction that I’m not equipped to understand. “He dragged me to the laundry room along with the other supervisors, telling me of all the ways they’d have fun with me.” His eyes flick down to the scar I’m still tracing with my fingers. “Two of them held me down, my back against a washing machine. One held my shirt up, and Top Boy went to work with a flat iron.”
The silence hangs heavy like the smell of burnt flesh between us. I close my eyes tightly and open them again.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” he says, more calmly than anyone reminiscing about the first time they were tortured, “how the brain evokes images.”
“And smells,” I say quietly. “My mom burned herself on purpose with the flat iron once, too. Her palm. It was when she swore to my father that she hadn’t cheated on him with his best friend.” Then, keeping my focus on him, “Those supervisors, were they also–”
“Orphans? No. They were boys from a posh boarding school, there to learn responsibility and care. Of course, as children are cruel, they ended up honing their torturing and raping skills.”
All my muscles tighten as I try not to shudder.
“How young were you when they took you in? Into the orphanage, I mean.”
“I was born there,” he says, his voice rippling with long-lost time. “To a fourteen-year-old girl who worked at the chapel as cleaning help.” A pause, barely noticeable before he says, “It would seem the chapel priest was my father, but that theory was never proven. The caregivers’ statements that she was often in the confessional for prostituting herself for extra money in the streets is what spurred the rumors. Still, no one ever dared question Father Basil, since he was a gray old man. Not to mention no one thought he could even get it up anymore.
“They kept my mother at the orphanage during her pregnancy. Her identity has only been kept in the records as ‘Daisy’ until she had me, I guess to make sure her trail would be lost. Nobody wanted Father Basil’s reputation tainted. Two months after my birth, they turned her loose because allegedly they could afford to raise me, but not her. She’d relinquished the right to protection when she’d opened her legs for dick–at least that’s what Sister Garlic used to say whenever she talked to me about her, mostly as punishment, before she locked me in the laundry room. We called her that because of how her breath smelled.”
He moves my hand up to the next scar as his voice drops another register, making the story hypnotic.
“The next thing Sister Garlic would do after she closed that door was send in the boarding school boys. The supervisors. Top Boy was usually the first to enter with a huge grin. He made a hell of a long process of heating up the iron.” His palm spreads over the back of my hand as he presses it to his abs, dragging it along scar after scar and hovering longer over the ones crisscrossing his pectorals like the slashes of an evil lash.
“I was eleven when, on a Sunday, I noticed one of the younger nuns glancing from me to Father Basil. I was used to people staring by that time, but this was different. Clusters formed after mass, whispering about how strikingly similar our features were. Especially the nose, the lips, the jaw.” He takes my other hand, now spreading both of my palms over his chest. My fingers curl into him, hoping that my touch can do something to ease his pain. I can feel it behind his scars, even if the skin healed a long time ago.
“I still remember the fury gathering behind my eyeballs. I knew it was true. Deep down, some ancient instinct had screamed inside me since the day I’d set foot into the chapel. The confusion had been devastating, and maybe that’s why anger ended up blinding me. The intuition about my origins had been like a dull ache that had been plaguing me forever. When you finally know, that dull ache of uncertainty feels like cruelty. It filled me with blinding hate. I was never one for self-pity, not even as a toddler, but now I knew people would just keep doing bad things to me if I didn’t take matters into my own hands. I knew they’d end up killing me because I somehow amped up their inclination to brutality.”
He lets my hands slip from under his and explore the rest of his body, returning over and over to the scars crisscrossing his chest.
“So I stormed back into the church and went straight for the priest. The adrenaline rush gave me more strength than would have been normal for an eleven-year-old, and I tackled him to the ground. At first, he just blinked up, and, for a moment, I wondered about the resemblance the young nun had seen because I didn’t see it. The blue of his irises was washed out, his eyebrows gray, his skin patchy and sagged. Everything about him was pale and faded. I still remember my lip curling over my teeth as I said to him he was as ugly as his sins. My voice didn’t even sound like mine when I started raining punches down on him, screaming. For minutes, no one dared intervene, not even the boarding school boys. It was the young nun’s voice that stopped me, her voice shaky yet soft, soothing.
“But Sister Garlic would have none of that. Noticing that I was coming back from the high of violence, resting back on my heels, she sent two of the older boys to grab me. They locked me in the laundry room and cuffed my hands to a pipe. I spent the night there. When the door opened the next morning, Top Boy’s grin was so large it looked fucking unnatural.” Another pause as I drink in the sight of those savage scars. Zayne looks down at my fingers as I trace them softly over the leathery flesh. “It lasted the whole week. They took their sweet time with every single one.”
A shudder runs through me, so violent it feels like a shockwave from hell. The devilish energy of his memories. I can see those boys hovering over him with abnormally large grins, I can hear the flesh searing, I can feel the cuffs biting into his skin, hear them rattling against the pipe whenever he tugged on them. But what I don’t hear is...
“You didn’t scream,” I whisper.
Time ceases to exist, and we’re both there together, in his past.
“I wouldn’t give them that satisfaction.”
“It’s why they kept hurting you for so long. It’s what they wanted.”
He nods. “It was Top Boy or me. One had to break the other. He grew angrier by the day, realizing he couldn’t do it even if he had the higher ground. He was in a position of power. Sister Garlic didn’t make things any easier by putting him under pressure, but they only had one hour a day to torture me, and I could grit my teeth through it, even if it felt like an eternity each time. They had classes outside of that timeframe, and, in the evening, they went back to their boarding school for rich and spoiled rotten boys.” A malicious shadow falls over his eyes. “At night, hanging from that pipe, I imagined him tossing and turning in bed, tortured by his own failure like a worm on a hook.”
“How did you manage to put up with all the pain?”
“You dissociate eventually. When it’s too much for your body, the brain coats its receptors against it. Or you just get used to it the way you do to everything else in life. Our ancestors lived far harsher lives, grew used to chronic pain and other, far more terrible things.”
“Is that what happened to you? You got used to the pain?”
“I became the pain.”
I shudder at the tone of his voice, at all of the unspoken tragedy behind it.
A powerful desire to do him good washes over me, a desire to paint a layer of pleasure over the hurt he endured. I grab his hips and press my lips to the scar by his belly button. Closing my eyes, I peel my lips off only to trail kisses up the length of his scar and move on to the next. My body arches into his, but he stops me with his hands on my shoulders.
“Sirenna, please.”
