Captive

A. F. Cronin

March 2006

So. The dinner went well. She was dressed conservatively in a high collared shirt and long skirt with flat-heeled shoes. She wore her hair up in a bunch clip thing. She looked neat and nice and wasn’t giving any hints to what lay beneath. The food was satisfactory, the beer was cold, the restaurant was busy but not over-crowded or too noisy and, although there was not an abundance of witty dialogue or profound conversation between the two of us, when I asked Bitch-hag if she wanted to go home with me she gave me as sultry a look as her outfit allowed and, with a sort of gravely purr-voice, invited me to go to her place -- standard boring date stuff. Blah, blah, blah.

We drove to her house-- in separate cars, of course. I don’t even know the street name or the exact neighborhood she lives in. I just followed the creepy little taillights of her volkswagon beetle as we worked our way away from downtown through a maze of dark and windy streets. I was playing the music loud and singing along with the Wallflowers as I drove. I felt the conquering hero; the mighty hunter. I had bagged my prey and was soon to reap the just rewards of my efforts, and I was singing my thanks and praises to the gods of the hunt. Obviously, I’d had a few too many beers.

Bitch-hag pulled into her driveway, and I parked on the street. I stood a few feet behind her as she worked the keys into the locks on the door. I remember now, there were three separate locks. That should have clued me into her unstable emotional state, but, struggling to decipher the exact shape and firmness of her hips, butt, and thighs through the ever-changing contour of her silky knee-length skirt, I missed that one. I missed all the others too, come to think of it. She pushed the door open and stepped inside, stood and held onto the door with her left hand, welcomed me in with a softly outstretched right hand and, straight faced and silent, watched me as I entered her humble home. I, as any first time visitor would do, assessed the place.

It’s a worn and peeling 1950’s ranch-style bungalow with a gothic haunted-house feel. The grass is long, the plantings unkempt and overgrown and the trees are old, venerable, and leafy. It sits on a hill in a featureless suburban hell--the perfect setting for the horror story that is now my life. If you take my suffocating cinder block dungeon out of the equation, it’s a nice little house on the inside, tastefully decorated in a sort of overstuffed-chairs-with-heavy-drapes-Edwardian-clutter-with-a-billion-little- pictures-and-knick-knacks sort of style.

She is into her bed, by the way. I have never seen such a complex arrangement of pillows and blankets and throws and mosquito netting and stuff on or around a bed. It took her ten minutes just to get it all cleared and packed away so we’d have a place to lie down. Then -- surprise, surprise -- she went to the bathroom to "get ready."

The damn dolls should have tipped me off immediately, but they didn’t. A dozen or so porcelain abominations in frilly little 19th Century dresses with real hair and eyelashes stand watch over Bitch-hag as she sleeps from a shelf above her dresser. Their glossy glass eyeballs vacantly stare at their own freakish reflection in an enormous gilt mirror on the wall opposite their perch–Chuckie’s kissin’cousins--weird in the extreme. I was not thrilled at the proposition of performing before their motionless glass eyeballs in the imminent sex session, but I figured that porcelain dolls only laugh maniacally and chop people up in the movies, so I put them out of my mind.

I refocused my attentions on more pressing matters –specifically on what she was going to be wearing when she came out of the bathroom and on my trying to find a comfortable pose on the bed that was both seductive and anticipatory while remaining nonchalant. These considerations are why my alcohol and hormone muddled brain failed to recognize the myriad and obvious signs of a dangerously out-of-balance individual. Thus I left myself open to subsequent ambush, capture, and imprisonment.

Did I tell you I was bitter yet? I am. I am not happy at being unceremoniously driven into this basement cubicle with a cattle prod by a shrieking woman in a flimsy white nightgown. Women do not look good when they do this! It is not sexy! Their faces become...really bad, like...I can’t even go there. Poor Pip.

All I said was that she was all right. I think that was the exact phrase. We’d just finished the first round of sex and, my not having done it in a few weeks, it hadn’t taken me an extraordinary amount of time to finish. It was not my best performance by a long shot, but she was not Jenna Jamison either. And although I was sort of fast, I would have been ready for round 2 in a half hour or so (sometimes a little longer-- but not much). So I rolled off of her and, to fill the awkward silence and reassure her that she was still the object of my unsatisfied ardor, I said, "You were all right. Not great but we can try it again."

I think she took this the wrong way.

Have you ever been in a really sunny room and pulled a blind over the window and shut out all the light? That’s the best way to describe what happened to her eyes when I uttered my post -coital appraisal. Even though the room was only lit by a couple of candles on her bureau, I could see a cold, dispassionate darkness descend over her corneas. She got up from the bed and, with her back to me, pulled her flimsy white night gown over her head. She looked really good when she did that, by the way. Something about her back with her arms up in the air and that flimsy fabric sliding down over her butt in the candlelight was very sexy. Very. I said "Nice," but she didn’t respond to my compliment.

Instead she walked to the dresser and, beneath the freakish lineup of porcelain girl-women, she pulled open the top drawer.

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