gleaming metal boxes are my private heaven…

he moved his fingers closer to my thigh as my fingers tried pulling his frame closer to mine…icy fingers left goose bumps as they slid up my left leg, my skin alternatively being scorched and then repeatedly dunked in ice cold water. he has been teasing me like this since he sat down on my bed…his fingers lace with arsenic under the flimsy hospital gown that hides my frame.

they had moved me into my own room since the last time he had visited me, after my mother had insisted that i be isolated from the other crazies, because ‘her daughter obviously was not one of them’…and patodia had gently laughed in her face, making my father square his massive shoulders threateningly. i felt like an abandoned toddler at a lonely park, my caretakers all fighting amongst themselves for custody…i did what i did at the age of five…i wandered off through the hallways.

panicked, they had all scattered through the different halls…nurses, doctors, aides and my frantic siblings…they all were like rats trying to find the moving cheese. patodia found me in the end…in the stairwell near the morgue. i had been watching the cadavers being covered and uncovered for the past three hours…families learning that death had snatched away their loved and unloved ones. human emotion is a fickle thing, we pretend to ‘feel’ something when we are being watched…but turn the lights and cameras off and the truth slowly flickers out. i watched a woman’s derange smile, her teeth glistening a bright white in the gloom as she gleefully watched the aides peel off the covers of an old man. i imagined disgusting things…things that would make someone smile so blissfully…being done to that woman. i imagined her on the floor begging to be forgiven, his hard fingers slamming her head against the floor repeatedly. i imagined her sobbing softly as he heaved himself over her limp body, thrusting repeatedly into her bleeding cunt. i imagines her naked on the floor, bruised and battered…watching the belt whiz down. i imagined me…

when patodia touched me, i screamed out loud…i had seem him approach me, but i had never expected him to actually touch my body. it was an electric shock…an instant reaction, unabashed he had smiled, pointed to the morgue and placed his index finger of his right hand on his lips…like i was a child. i wanted to yell…i wanted to scream…i wanted him to rip me apart. i stood there dumb and…as he held my hand and lead me to the elevator, i answered the question he had posed to me the night before.

‘because i deserve it…because i am dirty, because i must be punished’

he looked at my lowered eyes, shock so blatant and unmasked on his chiseled face…for a second his mask had fallen out of place. he was a man, a jumbled up mass of clay, blood and latent ideas…he was human and vulnerable…he shivered as he reached the elevators…his hands slid slowly to the control panel. he had know what i know now…he had fed his need maliciously taking from those he tried to help…his need in turn has shaped him.

he was in the same place as me. he struggled to replace the shattered mask…but i had seen his hesitation. i knew that he would never ask me that unanswerable question of ‘why’ again…his mask in some effect covered his flittering eyes….and the double doors to the elevator closed with a audible sigh. he and i were on the same ground…dirty and needy…we both knew where this madness would lead, but we kept silent…our bodies sliding closer in the gleaming metal box.