The Ink

By Antigone

Animal is there, bent double, face to the earth, in the muck, protecting Little Girl from the pain of existence in the belly of the barn and the horrifying abuse at the hands of Farmer. This is where she is finally found, in the subterranean pen, and "saved." Animal is taken in and cared for, but as she can not be Little Girl, with her grunts and squeals and twisted body, she is not truly loved. Animal craves a mother's love. She has not had it since the decomposing head of her own Momma kept her company in the darkness of her pen. This desire to please her new master motivates her search for Little Girl in the Ink. Animal finds her there and sacrifices once again, this time to release Little Girl for new Momma to love, Animal takes her place in the Ink. Will Little Girl be the perfect daughter for new Momma, or will the inheritance of sickness spreading like a wild fire already have burnt Little Girl's mind to ash? Had Animal protected Little Girl, or had Little Girl been peeping all along through her eyes, watching and learning? This book is uncomfortable. It is gruesome. It is brutal in its look at topics that impact human beings, especially those who have or continue to suffer from how they were raised, how much pain we can endure and the magic of the mind to create ways to survive it, and confronting ideas about God, Satan, Sickness and their role in it all. The author, Antigone, has a lineage of atrocity. She understands the need to survive, tasted her mortality like fresh blood on the lips, and can point twisted fingers at the wolves who raised her, the wolves who raised them, and the Great One who spectated. Hopefully, this story elicits fear and suspense, but also thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098321086

Book preview

©2020 All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-09832-107-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09832-108-6

"A worthless person, a wicked man, goes about with crooked speech, winks with his eyes, signals with his feet, points with his finger, with perverted heart devises evil, continually sowing discord; therefore calamity will come upon him suddenly; in a moment he will be broken beyond healing." – Proverbs 6:12-14

the pen

new master

momma slop

butcher block

goddamn bees

umbilical

battlefield

first wife

dew on the pink

crawl space

red-faced doll

finger up

amazing grace cum momma

into the ink

sleeper

lurking in the fringe

fair trade

sweat and lavender

mother’s giggles

perfect

momma’s home

jowls, belly, and hooves

the pen

When they came for Animal, she was very small and weak. Skin taught over bone. Nails, long and filthy, had clawed chasms in her skin where fleas and lice had bitten and sucked from her. Her brains were empty. Deprived of light, her lids had sealed shut, tight and thin over sunken eyes. Her thoughts had ceased. Just the incessant needs drove. The need to live. The need to fill her belly. The need to defecate. All mechanical, instinctual.

Animal had lost her name. Perhaps she had none. Her memory was like a bottle in the ocean, filled with her before moments as Little Girl. As the bottle floats away and gets lost to the eye on the horizon, this little animal’s memories have disappeared into the recesses of her deteriorating mind. Gone so very far away. Now the strangers asked this animal many things. She had nothing to give them in return.

Can you tell us who your mom or dad are?

scratch.

How did you come to be here?

scratch, squeal, scratch.

Do you know your age?

bite, chew, chew.

Where are you from?

Groan.

Urine hissing as it hit the hot earth between her legs. There was no shame in this, no blush or casting down of the eyes. That would take brains. She was Animal. She had no brains.

The food the strangers offered hurt her mouth, but still she bit and chewed, swallowing hard. It created an insatiable need-pain in her belly pit. This sensation alarmed her and she cried out, while still greedily biting and chewing, shoving the hard food from one side of her gums to the other, teeth rotted and missing, tongue darting in and out of the potholes left behind, plucking and sucking the food out; a painful hide and seek. Lips smacked and drool dangled from the corners and it was altogether too painful for these strangers to watch.

Bent and malnourished, Animal curled possessively around the offering, the strangers struggled with their own bodies. There they were in her space, with blankets, this hurtful food, and bright lights. Illuminating her space, making it horrifically real to the strangers- the smell clogging their nostrils, snuffing the air from their lungs. The claw marks on the earthen walls and blood soaked, cold mud beneath their shoes brought all of them to tears. Some fought the urge to wretch. There was very little room in the pen for all of them, so they had no choice but to huddle close to Animal.

Animal was blinded, the light these strangers brought with them overloaded Animal’s senses after years of deprivation. Her eyes, long shut to the world, were being forced open as the floodlight of interlopers came closer. Her pen was filled with the living and the dead and Animal grunted and squealed, shoving hard into the corner, into the clinging blackness where animals were safest. Where the pole rarely reached. Shoving hard until the blessed darkness enveloped her, and she gave herself to it, dropping hard as the needle was pulled from her arm, like a bee tearing its body from the stinger.

When she awoke it was bright and her eyes screamed and burned. She screamed, and it curdled the air around her mouth like milk she had once been given. Chunks of what once was good had rotted itself and that is what she was. Little Girl gone rotten. Animal. Her scream emitted into the air around her hospital bed, the guttural terror of the animal it held in its form. It was then that Animal felt something deep inside being tugged, pulled from its hidey place. It felt like a special thing to cling to. Her heart had slowed to an unreliable thud thump, her organs finally giving in after years of punishment. The shock of surviving the pen, of this new hell, of coming into the light, overwhelmed her broken body. Animal’s body was failing, and she sensed what was happening in that bright light as everyone yelled and huddled close and rushed, sirens wailing.

Busy hands were there to keep her shell alive, but Animal knew that something that was there inside her was more important than the whole of her outsides. It was her soul. She had one, and it was trying to escape. The feel of its pull on her core made her hold onto the stretcher and roar against the brightness surrounding her near corpse, lashing at the hungry light and busy hands, desperate to hold it inside. A woman in white rushed to meet the ambulance and Animal peered out and watched as she leaned over her, holding Animal’s arms down easily, pressing Animal tight against her. It worked. Animal’s soul was trapped inside, pressed in by this woman’s flowery smelly bosom and soft white coat. That was a close one. The soul had been snatched back from running away on Animal. Animal sensed that her shell would somehow survive the hands and light now. Inexplicable waves of relief rushed over the bent Animal, and as they shot her full of sedatives, relief was all that filled her as the light went soft and the bosom rocked her battered head. Relief from the woman in white. Relief for soul hanging on.

Yet, as she drifted, sliding back into the black, she was back there, crawling, sniffing, scratching and pecking in the dark. The sound of something small scurrying about, pushing her to hunt it down blind until the thing stopped scurrying and Animal with no brains could eat. Her belly pit would move, writhe with the new thing, threaten to come back up and out, but no. She needed it.

Then Farmer would come. She squealed with fear and pressed the dark at the corner of her space. She never not squealed. He got mad but seemed to want it that way. Farmer would imitate Animal, poking into the corner with his pole. He would laugh when Animal squealed harder. Cold brown wastewater, smelly water, would come over her in one large splash. Animal would gasp for breath as she squealed and pushed into the corner, clawing at the dirt walls of the pen as though there would ever be a corner far enough away from his reach. Stupid filthy animals. They never learned.

SUEY! HERE SUEY, SUEY PIG! Farmer would scream and call for Animal, making frightful noises and banging his pole on the ground as he dropped into her pen. Animal would answer his call, just as he seemed to want her to. She would crawl out of the corner, crawl to her master. Never seeing, never looking.

Her back was rounded, fit specially for her space, not for Farmer space, so he would pluck at her, shove her to and fro, cluck and laugh at her small deformed figure sloped toward the sour earth. Farmer heaving his weight, his breathing in shaky heavy puffs, his sweat dripping from his jowls to her back. She would no longer squeal. She would let her brain die and it would all go away. Nothing left for Animal but need. The need to live.

new master

Animal reared out of her dark slumber and was jerked back to the mattress by restraints. She had become used to accepting abuse of all forms with no more than a sagged posture and dead eye. That is what animals are accustomed to. So, as she looked at the straps that held her wrists and ankles, she accepted that her new master wanted it this way. Her body ached from its position. Her back had been malformed from the interminable time she spent in her pen. Her space was a box of mud, debris and refuse, a pen built up with wood, with a roof that gave her only a few feet to erect her body. When Farmer came, he could unlock and shove back this roof. And there his Animal would be, cowering, stooped and shaking in her own feces beneath the floor of the barn. This barn sat on the land that had been in Farmer’s family for as long as the land was inhabited.

Animal had spent her time bent double to move around. She preferred this over the crawling she had to do when her back screamed in pain. She tried to stay off her fours, but most often she had to get down, hands sliding into the filth. Farmer gave her scraps and slop every now and again and threw a rough horse blanket into her space when the weather turned bitter. Sometimes hay would come when it was very cold, when Animal felt her life’s breath freezing in her throat. She would glory in the hay and try to keep it clean by not relieving herself on it. But since she had not learned how to read her body’s signs, Animal would soil her wonderful hay immediately. For this she