Waterbird
Sometimes she thought about escaping
She tore the strip of whale bone from her corset & tried to pry open the keyhole. The whale bone would be too delicate for the heavy lock, she knows, but they’ve been doing this shit for too long. They’ve developed a strange understanding. She would falter, take bad leads, to build tension, to entertain. But she always got out (and he always got off).
She was his best subject. Could get out of any bind he put her in. Eventually (surely) he would find another way to amuse himself.
She didn’t like to think about what new entertainment he’d come up with, as she untangled knots, rappelled down slippery turrets, & drank mysterious bottles of liquid labeled Drink Me or Suck Me, she figured, it’s probably best to stick w/ the devil you know.
It was what it was. The more he enjoys watching her escape the more money they send home to Mom, Lonnie, and Marina. They needed the money to pay for medical bills & send Marina to that special school for smart kids with smaller classes. She just had to hope they weren’t blowing it all on whatever drug habit/pyramid scheme Mom & Lonnie stumbled into that month.
The whale bone snapped in the heavy lock. Eyeing the cameras, she sensed he might be bored & headed to the bookcase, asshole loves hiding clues in bookcases. She knew he had a weakness for stockings. That was why all her scenarios were Gown Based: Locked Tower, Locked Dungeon, Locked Ballroom, & etc. She took her boots off while she pulled at every third book on the shelf & wiggled her toes in front of the floorboard cameras, he would probably tip her for that.
She could practically hear him fumbling at his fly through the air vents.
Well, we all get our kicks somehow. Running out of steam with the bookcase, she scanned the walls of the room, ah there was a map, & what is that smudge near Hungary? He was one predictable pervert.
She walked over to the wall, and pressed the tip of her tongue against the strange mole shaped country, it lifted off & into her mouth where it dissolved with a hint of strawberry. She braced herself for what was next, ah, it’s that kind of scenario today.
Already it seemed like things were beginning to slide.
Later in her room (cell) she laid on her bed (cot) and looked out the window. It was too high up to see the horizon. If she laid at a certain angle, neck hanging slightly over the edge, she could see the sky. Passing clouds, sometimes Cassiopeia, other times the Seven Sisters. Every few months she saw the moon.
Her stockings had been peeled off & placed in the special stocking wash pile, which she suspected didn’t get washed right away & instead sent off to him for a sniff and a wank. We all get our kicks somehow.
The drugs she had taken today were not so bad, dreamy even. A new batch surely. She seemed better able to handle it than poor Stoagie. Or possibly, she received a smaller dose because she was favored. She still managed to escape, a fit of giggles, some confused dancing, but eventually she found that there was a sequence with the bottles on the bar cart, sound based, rimming water glasses in a perfect chord. Thinking briefly about water, angels, angles, home. Next thing she knew she was carted back to her room, flung on the bed. Where she still sat. Sober now. Tongue pasty.
The small black screen built into the corner of her room (cell) dinged & she cast her eyes to it, witnessing upside down as it blinked with green pixelated numbers the amount of money she had made that day. Then it flashed in red what was sent home, what was left, returning in green, was not much. She could either save it (for what?) or spend it at the commissary on a fun treat. They don’t let people have cigarettes or magazines anymore, it was bad for morale, Stoagie says. Stoagie is her only friend (person she can talk to) because his room (cell) is across the hall & they can shout to each other.
Stoagie has been here a while & knows how things change.
Stoagie has had one too many licks of the dissolving drugs in the escape rooms, poor guy. He was never quite right. He told her (early into her time here) of what he did before. He was a weatherman. Apparently that’s some schmuck that tells the weather on the television, must have been about a million years ago that Stoagie did that because he is super old (according to him) & she had never heard of such a job, weatherman, sounded like something funny in one of those little video clips Marina used to show her back when she lived at home. When she lived at home the weather didn’t change much, it was either hot or very hot. Maybe other places had weathermans. The weather here was interesting, based on the sky. It rained every once in a while, very hard, but then nothing would happen for a long time. There was this one time, she will never forget it, when she saw a bird.
Flew overhead, over the space of her window, blink & you miss it situation. It was geometric shaped, bizarre, and reminded her of the birds in the Geisha Scenario, on the wall paper. She thought of this bird a lot. She described it to Stoagie & he said it was a water bird. Imagine that. A bird made of water.
Stoagie told her sometimes about the natural world. Apparently there are some places where there are trees growing out of the ground, and grass, and rivers, and creatures that live in it. Like the water bird.
They didn’t have anything like that where she came from. Most of her time was spent inside or walking between long, short buildings made of concrete. Really the only feature to observe was the sky, blue & cloudless. Perhaps that was why she enjoyed the window. It was the same sky Marina was looking at, so far away.
Sometimes Marina would show her videos of people walking around in grassy areas, or sitting in trains & watching the world blur past. Green & red & blue. It was strange to her that the world could be like that on its own, without someone designing it.
Marina & Stoagie had both assured her that, at some point, that was just how things grew. When she came here she didn’t get to watch the world go past. She didn’t get to see anything. She was blind-folded.
Sometimes she thought about escaping. Of getting to see something, outside, in Stoagie’s nature he loved so much. To bring home a leaf or flower for Marina, who loved the idea so much.
It was funny, after spending hours all day escaping room after room after room, by the time you get back to your bed (cot) you kind of want to stay put.
On her days off she thought of if her room (cell) was an escape scenario what would be what. Which bricks in the wall could be secret panels, which metal post of her bed would be the one to unscrew, what would he hide in which?
She could think for hours of all the things he had hid in metal bed posts over the past 586 days she had worked here. At this point she could sort of predict what kind of things he would someday put in other metal bed posts.
“Hello Flinch!!!!” A voice from across the hall.
“Hello!” she called back to Stoagie. He sounded frayed.
“My god, another terrible day, wet again.” Stoagie was flopping around his room (cell). She could hear the suction of his wet feet on the hard floor.
“Oh no! Stoagie, not another underwater scenario.”
“He’s trying to get rid of me, he’s bored of me.”
“Bored of you,” she said, panic springing to her finger tips. His cruelty was bad, his love was disturbing, but his apathy, that was dangerous. “How can he be bored?” “I’ve been here forever, he knows me too well.”
“I don’t find you predictable.”
“Thank you.”
She changed the subject, thinking again of the rain, of the water bird. “What’s the weather today, Stoagie?”
“Well,” Stoagie sighed, stomping around. “We will all die soon.”
She rolled her eyes, he said this every time she asked, this is why he was fired from being a weatherman.
“You say that a lot. When will soon catch up to us?” she asked.
“Perhaps when our noses start to bleed in the summer.”
“That used to happen back home,” she replied softly, remembering the last summer she was home. They’d stayed in the basement for two days because of the heat.
Stoagie didn’t reply for a moment. She opened her mouth to speak again, but instead heard sniffles & then a long piercing wail.
“Oh Stoagie,” she said, finally pulling herself off her back, letting the blood rush back into her neck from her head. She stood on the cot and bounced. When her feet left the mattress & her head cleared the door, for a moment she could see out the barred window above her door frame, & into Stoagies barred window, & sometimes, if she got good air, could even glimpse out Stoagie’s too high up window.
If Stoagie hopped with her, & they synchronized their hops they could see each other. Only for a moment.
“Don’t cry Stoagie!” she called as she hopped.
Stoagie wailed again.
She shouldn’t have mentioned the nose bleeds. There were some things Stoagie just didn’t like to talk about. Stoagie was so sure the world was ending.
When he was a weatherman he wanted to predict the day it would be impossible to live, the real last day anyone would be able to wake up & pee & drink some water & eat some food. He went to great lengths to try and figure it out, some kind of math & computer thing, Stoagie explained, that simply was not allowed, but he did anyway. And he told everyone who watches the weatherman & it made people upset so they fired him.
Stoagie was sending money home too, to his wife & children.
Sometimes she feels so bad for Stoagie she forgets to feel bad for herself. *
There is more downtime than one may think here. For example, she was hanging by the wrists over a tank of water. There was not much to do right now, but think. She knew at a certain point her shoulders would start to ache so bad that she would have to take action, she also knew it was possible that her wrist ropes would snap from the bar that held her up & she would end up in the tank. If she ended up in the tank with her wrists free, she’d be fine, if they were tied together it might be hard to untie the weight from her foot.
The problem with this scenario is that it was a wet scenario.
This could mean he was getting bored of her.
She just couldn’t let that happen.
So she was putting off her escape for a few moments. She was letting her skirt slide very slowly down her waist, gravity was doing it, she was letting it happen.
This really isn’t the worst situation she could be in, not this particular scenario, which seemed like some kind of magician assistant thing, the whole shebang. So really she should be grateful.
They were gonna send her to the work factory. But before they do they make you take this little test. She tested into this place, seemed better than the work factory to her, more money, more risk of course, but at least she got to use her head sometimes. At the work factory, she heard, you just stand in one place all day & sort things, or you have to run around all day & deliver things. Often people would just drop dead from exhaustion, or malnourishment, because they don’t feed people enough, & then how would Marina go to the better school, & how would Mom and Lonnie keep the house?
She could not go to the work factory. She had to stay here.
She had to keep him entertained.
She wiggled her hips a little and her skirt fell from her, ballooning out as it drifted into the tank like a full sail. So long skirt, she thought.
Her bottom half was exposed but for her undergarments and her stockings. He sure did love those stockings.
This was going well. But her shoulders were starting to hurt. She looked up at her wrists, how the rope was looped twice around each wrist, and then pulled in a sort of semicircle over the wooden beam. She realized that her own weight is what kept the ropes so taught, it was cleverly tied so that the tension her body created tightened to rope. If she were to step on something and lift her hands up the loops around her wrists would loosen enough where she could slip her hands out.
An unpracticed eye might consider this an error on his part. But it was just part of the game. Things always appeared more dangerous than they were, the key to being good, to being so good that he wants to watch you every day, is to confront the potential for peril, but never be afraid enough that you don’t rise to the challenge. He wants to see a success story, he just wants you to suffer a little first.
This is what Stoagie didn’t understand. Stoagie just thought the point of the room was torture. He considered himself a kind of fool in the court of a king. She didn’t consider herself a fool, not really, she thought she was playing chess.
She took a deep breath and raised her knees up as high as she could while dangling by her wrists. Then lowered them quickly. She did the same motion faster. Then faster. The third time her body jostled enough to displace her wrists, she felt them loosen for a moment. How would she get high enough for her wrists to come free?
Just because he considered the escape possible didn’t mean it actually was. If she swung her body high, it was possible that for a moment she could be weightless enough where her wrists could slip out. The risks were significant though, if she couldn’t escape & got stuck in a swing, that could dislocate her shoulders. Also, if her wrists didn’t loosen she risked the loop of rope slipping off the wooden post, sending her out of range of the dunk tub, onto what appeared as hard concrete. Or, she could slip off the wooden post and fall into the dunk tub with the rope still tangling her wrists which would prevent her from swimming up for air.
She wondered as she always did (at the hardest part of every scenario) if this was her toughest scenario yet. If she would make it out.
If you failed to escape, meaning if you passed out, got knocked out, got injured, & were unable to discover the end, then he would just ship you back to your room. You never see the hallways that lead between your room & the escape rooms. You are blindfolded & escorted in a wheeled cart. Was this going to be her first failed room?
Only one way to find out.
She started to swing, there were, she thought, as her legs swung up, and down, cases that she’d heard of, up, when someone dies, down, during the escape.
In those cases the families are well compensated.
Would they ship her body home, or did he own her even when she was a corpse. Up, what was that? She heard something sharp, something twiggy, on the swing back she looked up, the wood was splintering, she was going to fall in, she just had to hope that in the moments she was falling, weightless, she could get her hands free of the rope. But her momentum was too much, she’d miscalculated, & she knew it a second before it happened. That the wood would snap on the upswing, she would plummet headfirst, into the water, or she would hit her head on the side of the tank, and possibly drown.
She felt the space, the snap, she felt weightless. The gap between two actions, a yawn– where she thought she could see his eyes, looking at her, from everywhere. As she fell, she noted that her angle was not good, that she would probably knock her head into the side of the tank on her way into the water. She tried to straighten her body into a dive, but the weight on her ankles & the rope on her wrists prevented it. Her hands broke the surface of cold water. Her head would be next, against the glass.
Her mind went somewhere interesting in the seconds before–
It sometimes rained here. It was so bad that lightning would flash across the sky, and when that happened the lights would dim. She remembered, while sitting on her bed, with her head hanging off, when the lightning flashed and the lights dimmed that it was strangely quiet for a moment. It was an absence of a sound, a sound that she had forgotten was there.
She remembered in the quiet second, while the lightning lit her cell up differently than the normal lights do, that there was constantly a hum here, a very soft hum. This hum, she realized, was electricity.
That night she watched the black screen in the corner, it too flickered when the lightning struck. All the electricity was connected. She pressed her ear to the screen, it wasn’t the source of the hum. Then she pressed herself along the wall, ear dragging, & the rain increased, impossibly. She could hear Stoagie whimpering across the hall, she could hear the rain slapping the side of the building, she could hear her own heart beating, & then she could hear the hum. The door was the source.
Lightning ran jagged out the window again, & the hum beneath her ear stopped. She reached for the handle, locked in such a way that the metal bar was sturdily horizontal. Only when the people were there to escort her to an escape room did she see the metal bar move down, at a forty five degree angle, indicating that the door could open.
She waited, hand on the metal handle, feeling the hum, feeling the electricity somehow, in her finger tips, lightning flashed again, the lights dimmed, the hum ceased, she pulled down & the handle moved with her.
For the first time in almost two years she opened her own door. She stood there, paralyzed, as the lights came back & the hum returned, holding the door open a crack. She could walk outside, she could escape.
But she couldn’t think of what would happen next. So she had opened her hand, & the door fell shut.
She felt a great weight pulled from her, a shocking change in temperature. She felt herself placed on the floor. Felt her own wet hair wrapped around her neck.
She thought then of the water bird, darting across the sky. A streak, an arrow. Flying. Flown. Flung.
“When’s it gonna rain, Stoagie?”
Since her accident she thought even more of the water bird. Stoagie said it wasn’t a bird made of water, it was a bird that lived on the water. If it was there in the sky, then nearby there would be some water.
She would like to see that.
She had to sit out of work for a week. And ate her meals in her room, laying on her bed. Stoagie had more escapes to do, because she was benched. He came back every day, getting quieter and quieter.
“Flinch,” he called out, one night.
“Yes Stoagie?” she replied.
“I want you to know you are my friend.”
She smiled and put her arms around her own shoulders.
“I’m hugging you Stoagie, you’re my friend too. My best friend.”
Stoagie didn’t come back after his morning escape. She waited for two days. Called for him every few hours.
Stoagie was gone.
She thought of the water bird.
She knows she should try to go home, she should try to get her money. But one couldn’t predict the weather, no matter what Stoagie said.
So when it rained so much she could push the door handle down, she just left. She walked down the hall, toward the commissary. Where there was food there must be deliveries.
She walked through the commissary which was empty, and dark. The chairs pulled up on top of tables, the floor gleaming in the half light of the too high windows. She walked toward the swinging kitchen doors, another forbidden place. The familiar impulse. She scanned the room, bottom to top. On the far side, through a narrow galley of steel counters, there was another door. It would surely be locked.
What other obstacles would stand in her way? She cast her eyes to the corners of the room, she didn’t see any cameras, but that doesn’t mean there are none. But if there were, he would come. He would send someone to capture her, and bring her, roughly, back to her room. Right?
She took a step, superstitiously only walking on the white tiles. But there didn’t seem to be anything in her way. She reached the door, there was an inside lock, she flipped it, she pulled. A breeze, with a smell she did not recognize, not sugary like a fun treat, but sweet. She blinked in the cold sun, surprised by the brightness, surprised by the air.
The door fell shut behind her.
Surely now they would come.
She walked to the end of the concrete path, and stood on the edge of the grass. She bent her legs, and with a careful hand, aware that there must be traps beneath the surface of something so lush, brushed her hand along the tips of the plant. It was like hair, or carpet, but moist with drops of cool water.
She brought her hand to her nose and sniffed, a strangely familiar smell.
She kept going. Every new sight a troublesome encounter.
Everything was too quiet, too beautiful.
This world must have been designed.
She came upon a clump of trees that were greener and thicker than the others. With leaves that were pokey, and small. Surely these were a trap, the way they stood out, the way in her gut she knew that something was strange about the shadows. Would there be something she had to fall into? Would there be snakes beneath the bed of brown needles? Would she slip into a net, get tangled, and have to chew her way out?
She realized with a start she didn’t have to go into the clump of trees. She could walk around it, she could simply avoid the hazard.
She kept on walking, eventually, she began to hear water sounds, quickening her pace, her feet dragging and upsetting the floor, kicking leaves and branches, scraping up her shins beneath her dress (she’d left her stockings in her cell).
Down a hill she could see the river, it looked black in the waning light. With soapy white caps as it bubbled over the rocks. She paused for a moment, crouching to catch her breath. She scanned the banks of the river, seeking the strange geometric wings and legs of the water bird. She grew still, the sound of the river soothing her.
She smiled, the sky gone pink or orange, or some other color she hadn’t seen in years. She couldn’t believe that she’d escaped, she couldn’t believe that she found herself in nature, she never thought she would see such a thing, this river, running over these rocks.
Marina would love this. She would save this as a video and watch it forever. Marina, her smile fell away, what would happen to Marina now that she’d run away. She heard a rustle across the water, and focused her eyes. There it was. Skinny and hidden among leafy brown stalks that drooped into the water. It was so still, it seemed to appear and disappear before her eyes. What a neat trick.
Was it watching her? The way she watched it?
She wished she could tell it that it helped her to escape, she wondered if it could talk, or understand.
She stood slowly, afraid to frighten it. And inched down to the bank.
On her last step (which would take her close to the edge) something stopped her foot, with a hollow thud. She tried again, expecting to see a rock she had missed. But her foot was hovering in the air, seemingly forced to a stop by nothing.
She reached her hands in front of her, the air hardened against her palms. Where there should be nothing was a cold hard surface, she breathed upon it and it fogged, like glass. “No!” she screamed, pounding on the surface, willing it to crumble.
Across the river, the water bird launched into the air and soared into the darkening sky.
Camille Gazoul is a second year fiction writer in West Virginia University's MFA program. Her work tends toward the whimsical and surreal and often explores the dangerous advances of technology in familiar but imagined worlds.
