The Hybrid Project

Chapter 6

WARNING: Suicide thoughts

May’s POV

The next morning, I came downstairs and in the middle of the kitchen stood the big tub that we used to bathe in every Christmas and Easter.

I didn’t understand why someone had hauled it in from the shed on a seemingly “normal” day. The kettles were all on at once, and the kitchen was thick with steam.

“Get in!”

I jumped, last night’s strange encounter with Calvin still fresh in my mind, and had my nerves feel like they were on the outside of my body.

I still wasn’t sure what had happened, but my skin crawled. Like bugs were walking all over me, yet I couldn’t get rid of them. Even now, my heart couldn’t decide where in my chest it should reside, nor could my stomach untie itself.

I was in literal pain and felt like throwing up...

Eve stood in front of it and pointed to the tub, leaving no room for anything else.

I began to undress--- until I suddenly became very, extremely, seriously aware of the rope around my wrist. I followed the line to where it was tied to Calvin’s massive hand.

I didn’t look up!

But I was painfully aware that he was standing right behind me...

I wasn’t sure what his eyes looked like, but my body knew. I could feel that burn - the fire that trickled up my arms and left a cold chill in its wake.

He was looking at me like that again...

The same way he’d looked at me last night.

And I felt sick!

I didn’t understand what this was, but it felt so, so wrong!

I didn’t ask – of course I didn’t! – but the knot came loose, and for the first time since that fateful night, I was not bound. Because I would never be free until there were a million miles between me and these people. Not until they’d lost every physical, emotional, and mental hold they had over me...

I glanced down at the red mark around my wrist. It was by far the least painful injury I’d ever gotten, and the least noticeable.

But somehow felt the most significant...

“I’m staying,” Calvin said, his voice flat and even. “I don’t want her to try something stupid while washing.”

I froze!

My body turned numb and cold...

“You think this i***t can fool me?” Eve snapped, sounding insulted at the implication.

Calvin didn’t reply.

But I saw his gaze move from me to her, and something there made even my Birth Giver think twice about opposing him.

She huffed loudly, muttering under her breath about being “worked to the bone”. And then grabbed my arm so hard I stumbled back and nearly crashed into the steel oversized bucket.

“Get undressed and get in!” Eve ordered with a sharp, shrilled voice, as if I was deaf as well. She aggressively pointed to the tub, and her disappointed gaze made me feel an inch tall.

The rules carved into my bones compelled me to obey. To not make things difficult and do as they wanted. My hands came up on their own, shaking and trembling, and started to undo the buttons of my rags.

But suddenly, I hesitated.

My eyes moved to where his boots were sitting only a few inches away from me. My shoulders were already exposed, small and bony, but something in his posture changed.

I knew then...

I did NOT want to be naked in front of him!

“Stop being difficult!”

Eve suddenly snapped, forcing me to face her again. Her hand was already raised, ready to slap some “sense” into me. I braced for it, my body going rigid.

Then she stopped.

Behind us, Calvin was already out of his chair, and I sucked in a silent breath. I could feel him breathing down my neck. His hand resting protectively on my naked shoulder, feeling like ice...

“We don’t damage the merchandise!”

I swallowed thickly.

Merchandise!

That was all I was.

A commodity to sell off to the highest bidder...

Eve huffed and went on to complain about “difficult girls" and "God's punishment", before she then waddled off to the other end of the kitchen and pulled out a bar of yellow lye soap and a brush with stiff bristles, the kind she used on the porch boards.

Behind me I felt Calvin move. His mouth appeared right behind my ear, his warm breath brushing against my skin and forcing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. His hand lowered between us, and I felt him push something hard and warm against my lower back.

“Do as you’re told, or I’ll shove my c**k so far up your ass you won’t be able to sit for days!”

I sucked in a breath.

My stomach lurched, and I felt sick.

I quickly nodded and got all the way undressed. I felt him grin against my skin, his breath uneven and shallow.

"Good girl, Mary..."

He moved, and I got into the very hot water as fast as my short legs could carry me, hoping that if I curled into a small ball, I'd become invisible and my brother would leave me alone.

He moved back to the chair.

And Eve stepped in...

I had been washed before, but not very often. And when I did, it was a bucket of cold water, a rag, and a fast, rough scrub on a Saturday.

But this was different.

Eve scrubbed with her lips pressed tight, and her sleeves pushed to the elbow. She did it the way she did everything: thoroughly, and without any love.

Along my arms.

Across my shoulders.

Down the back of my neck, hard enough that I gasped. The soap got in every crack on my hands, where the calluses had hardened, and the dirt of the barn had ground itself in so deep I’d thought it was part of me.

She scrubbed until my skin burned...

She scrubbed until it was red.

And then redder...

And then raw. But when I flinched, she hissed: “Hold still! Do you want Dr. Wren thinking I'd sell a dirty girl?”

I didn't flinch again...

I think she was enjoying it. I can’t prove that, but there was a set to her mouth, and a rhythm in her wrist, that reminded me a lot of the way she was with Eli. And I knew that Eve Mayhew had been waiting a very long time to get back at me for everything she had been "suffering" these last few days.

She washed my hair three times with a harsh, stinging soap, and combed it with a fine-toothed comb until my scalp stung. Then she tipped my head back, and pried my mouth open with her thumb, and looked at my teeth.

Like a woman checking a mare.

“Pity about that one,” she said, tapping the cracked tooth at the front. She sounded almost sorry. “We could have fetched a higher price if it had a pretty smile.”

I looked up at her.

At the thin, sour, careful face above me.

And I waited.

I really did...

For something...

A flicker of the woman who might once, in some forgotten year, have held me with something other than contempt.

There was nothing.

She dried me with a rough cloth. I stood there in the middle of the kitchen with my skin on fire, and I understood that she was never going to look at me as anything but a cost...

I watched the clock on the wall again. I could tell certain times, like when breakfast and dinner had to be ready. Watching it now, I felt the slow, sinking certainty that every tick of the clock was one tick closer to my doom. For closing my window of escape.

And I was running out of time...

I looked out the window at the rising sun and, with my whole, entire being, cried for Captain Dawn to come for me. To make me as brave as her and give me strength to fight for my freedom.

But nothing came...

And wrapped in that fading light, I realized something odd: fear was a strange thing...

I’d always been afraid.

I knew its taste as well as I knew cold oats and dry crusts. But it had never been like this. It didn’t come in waves, or at the sound of a footstep.

It lived in me.

It sat in my chest like a cold stone and breathed when I breathed. And by the end of that week, I couldn’t tell where it stopped, and I began.

That was when I realized that there was a fourth kind of quiet.

I’d never put it on my list, but I realized that now. I'd been seeing it as I lay awake at night, waiting for exhaustion to take over.

It wasn’t a plan...

It was a door, standing open in the dark at the end of a long corridor. And on the other side of it was nothing at all!

No clinic.

No brothers.

No John and Eve...

Nobody!

And for one long, awful moment I let myself look at it.

I let it tell me how easy it would be.

How tired I was.

How a person only had so much "stand up" in her...

It was a very soft kind of quiet.

That was what frightened me.

Because if I walked out that door, I wouldn't be doing anything else ever again.

I would be ending it all...