A Short Story titled "Patience"

Someone once told me that a soldier in the Philippines had a daily ritual of ridiculing a caged monkey while the man made his rounds. Eventually, the monkey escaped his prison and attacked the soldier with brutal fury, collapsing most of the man’s face.

This recollection brought me comfort as clammy hands traced across my biceps, up to my shoulders and then back down my arms to my bound, bleeding wrists.

He retracted his hand once he felt the warm liquid and looked at my dark blood that now stained his fingertips as if making me bleed was a phenomenal success. I realize now that it probably was.

He smiled slowly. I was a fighter, and he told me later in drunken moments that he loved sucking away hope, courage and spirit. He loved the conquest. He loved the challenge. That was probably why he kept me for so long.

“Suck my fingers,” he demanded and shoved his crimson digits toward my tightened mouth. I clamped my lips shut, determined not to let him win, while hot tears slowly traced a path down my cheeks and to my chin. I remember thinking that they were going to plop on the ground but they clung to my skin as if they knew that I needed their discretion.

Perhaps I could bite off his fingers in his moment of undermined perversion. He read my thoughts. His demeanor darkened fiercely and his eyes glowered a warning that let me know what would happen if I did not obey. I am no fool. I wanted to live.

I pressed my eyes together to suppress any further tears and breathed steadily through my nose to swallow whatever screams were threatening to break out.

Screams were useless here. Submission was my only chance of staying alive. I opened my gray eyes and evened out my face as I looked at him and into his dark bird eyes. Cold, greedy, evil, and childish.

My mouth opened and accepted his dirty probing fingers. He hooked them this way and that, stretching out my lips and cheeks, smearing blood onto my face, shoving his fingers deep into my throat to test my gag reflex.

“You’re not ready yet,” he grunted cruelly. “But,” he promised, “you will be.”

I was safe for that night. I watched him walk up the rotten wood stairs from the old cellar and into the main part of the house.

Day one was over. It hardly seemed possible that I was chained to a wall, my blouse ripped open, my body stained with dirt and sweat. I learned to really relish nights like those where either he felt I wasn’t ready for whatever he had in mind or he was too tired. I would learn that those kinds of nights were rare. I was so grateful for the nights where he would walk up those steps, the rotted wood bending at his weight, and the floorboards above creaking as he slowly walked up and away from me.

Day one passed. Days turned to weeks. Weeks. Months. Years. How can one keep track?

My wrists and legs remained bound always. They bled regularly and scabbed over. Sometimes when he left the house, I would endure the agony of ripping freshly scabbed wounds open by trying to pull my hands through the handcuffs. Yet, he always returned when my fervor was reaching its peak, and he’d smile at the fresh blood as if proud of himself. He was positive that one day my resolve would break and he would fully conquer me.

What he didn’t realize was I knew that would be the day he would kill me.

He underestimated my resolve and my will to live.

Days passed. I could tell you about his probing fingers, his dry cat tongue, or his flaccid cock … all of those things putting themselves into unwelcome places. I could tell you about his hands wrapping around my neck as if to strangle me and then finally releasing me when I was blue in the face. I could tell you about being his toy, about him becoming enraged when he could not break me. I could tell you about a particular night when he branded me with a curling iron. A fire to put out the fire, he’d said. Like that made sense.

The one-year anniversary of my abduction arrived but I had no way of knowing that. I didn’t have a calendar so when he’d announced shyly the day before that we needed to celebrate, conveniently not mentioning the reason for a festivity, I puked in my mouth at the very thought of what his notion of “celebration” meant.

I heard him in the morning, rustling around in what must’ve been the kitchen overhead, whistling happily. I could smell the wonderful, alluring scent of cocoa. I was almost at the point where I’d be willing to die for just one cup of hot cocoa.

A few hours later he descended the stairs and I steeled myself for the worst.

He walked stiffly, proudly carrying before him a crudely frosted cake.

Was it poisoned? Did he think me stupid?

I’d been eating nothing but stale bread and peanut butter for a full fucking year. The cake smelled scorched but I’d never felt the ravenous need to rip into something like I felt toward this horrible and charred cake. I had to remain strong. Surely, it was poisoned.

What do I do? I didn’t know what was in it and I didn’t work this hard and endure this much to die from my own freaking undisciplined stupidity.

He walked closer and with each step, he grew prouder … I could tell because he puffed his chest out like he was an old victorious king carrying a decapitated head on a plate.

The freaking thing looked pathetic. One side was shrunken in and he’d tried to compensate for the mistake with extra frosting. Honestly, I didn’t care how it looked. All my thoughts went to how I could refuse eating a slice without offending him.

I played the only card I had. “What’s that for?”

I kept my voice at a soft monotone. He looked hurt that I didn’t know but recovered quickly. He turned to head back upstairs, entirely unsure of the gesture he’d put forth.

“No,” I said hastily hoping to avoid any anger. “Please stay. I just wanted to know what it was for.”

He froze uncertainly and turned to face me, his eyes bright with new pride. He thrust the cake under my nose as if I should orgasm at the smell of butter cream and cocoa. He will never know that I almost did. Orgasm, that is.

He presented this ugly, lopsided, retarded cake to me as if it were a Van Gogh baked masterpiece or some shit. I breathed in the smell and smiled with false gratitude. I was still unsure how to proceed with this baked thing.

“You shouldn’t have,” I muttered through smiling, flexed teeth.

He grinned. A stupid little boy needing a pat on the back. It then hit me that perhaps I should know what this day was but I was drawing a blank. Asking what it was for was asking to shed light on my confusion, especially with things that I probably should’ve remembered but didn’t.

I looked at the cake and saw “Happy 1st Anniversary” written on it in black letters. I held back the onslaught of tears that threatened me. Had it really been a full year? I wanted to scream and crack my head against the wall out of frustration. Instead, I decided to continue living.

“You remembered!” I exclaimed and then clapped my bound hands together in mock applause. Would he notice that I wasn’t into this whole anniversary celebration? No. He wouldn’t.

I did yield in eating that cake. In fact, I wolfed it down and inwardly advised myself that things out of my control will still happen. Death was not calling for me that night.

As those days turned to weeks, I began to doubt my own strength and seriously considered the alternative of being killed. It’s funny how you contemplate your death once you discern that it might be lurking on the horizon like a thick fog that simply will not lift. It’s strange that you actually begin to weigh out which death would be more beneficial.

I took the road less traveled.

Death is death. I wasn’t ready to die. Instead, I continued to silently fight thus pegging my hopes on the idea that he might screw up his own operation. I couldn’t understand what motive he had of taking me. Was it just criminal behavior or was there something behind it? There didn’t seem to be a reason, and that notion was not only what carried me, but also kept me scared. Men with nothing to lose are dangerous.

I must’ve pleased him. Every year, on May 10th, he would bake a cake and deliver it to me proudly. Every year, I warily ate his burned cocoa cake with the enthusiasm of a starving dog pouncing on a meaty bone. Every year, I indulged his pride and each 10th day of May that passed, I lost a little bit more of myself.

Five cakes came and went.

Watching this man was like watching two separate people. Sometimes he was so sweet, shy and insecure, like a baby duck uncertain of his newfound self-reliance. But there was a very evil side to this man, the kind of side that made him do very evil things, just so he could control something. See, what I’d learned was that I wasn’t a person to him. I was an object. But I was something that still had spirit, something that could hate and disapprove. I was something that could judge him. I was someone that did judge him.

Despite being unbalanced, he was quite intelligent. For those five long years, he’d never once unchained me. He would bathe me himself, cutting off my clothes and dipping a giant sponge into an old plastic storage vat filled with warm water and soap. If I had to go the bathroom I had enough slack on the chain to move about in a four-foot radius. There was an old squeaky cot that I slept upon and another plastic vat next to it that I used as a toilet. He would dump it out every day but it didn’t matter how much he washed it out, or laundered my sheets. My small confined area reeked horribly.

I suppose I just got used to the smell after the first year. After awhile I didn’t really notice it at all.

He would bring me tampons when my time of the month hit, and during the first few months of captivity, I’d hoped that he would be disgusted by my period and stay away for those 7 days. But no, he would not be denied his power over me. Sometimes he even watched while I inserted a tampon.

I grew used to being watched. To having no privacy. I grew used to being as affable as possible, of learning his moods and what might set him off, of reading his face. I also learned that occasionally I had to fight him, to disagree with him, just to make him angry. Just to remind him that I was not going to submerge into submission; I was not going to let him break me. I needed to remind him that he could not kill me because he had not succeeded in gaining complete control of me. I still had my will and that will was to fight him.

When the sixth cake came, I ate it without grace or decorum. I shoved the cake in my mouth and licked the frosting from my fingers despite not having had been washed by him in days. I just didn’t give a shit anymore. Food is food and you need it to live. I needed to keep living.

He never fed me well. Never once did he bring me a steak or some chicken or even some meatballs. It was always stale bread, peanut butter, crackers and sometimes some tough cuts of meat that had been kept way past their “sell by” date. To drink, there was always water. Never soda. Never milk. My body was emaciating in front of me but the only thing I could do was keep eating what was provided and continue my life.

The sixth year brought him distress, thus bringing misery to me as well. Apparently he was having financial problems and he couldn’t dig out of it. I began to have hope that the IRS would show up to repossess his house and they would find me – filthy, disgusting, animalistic me – chained to a fucking wall in a smutty cellar. I had plenty of fantasies in the sixth year, imagining being discovered or even escaping. Perhaps this would be the year that he made a monumental mistake.

There were plenty of moments that I couldn’t capitalize on. My wrists had grown so thin that I coated them in peanut butter and managed to get one arm free before he found me working the other arm loose. That was the night that he beat me senseless.

One evening, as he sat in the corner gulping cheap bourbon straight from the bottle, I wanted to ask him why he’d taken me. I couldn’t get the words out. I realized then that I didn’t really want to know. I couldn’t know why because if I did, if I understood the level of his madness, then I really would lose my resolve. My spirit would break at the seeming hopelessness of the situation.

Instead, as he sat slightly rocking with inebriation, I told him stories of my childhood that I knew he wouldn’t really remember. My goal was to get him to feel close to me so when he woke up in the morning he wouldn’t quite know why. I was hoping that I could appeal to the part of his mind that was more Dr. Jekyll than Mr. Hyde. The part of him that was still a little boy, needing approval and love, as opposed to that part of him that could cruelly turn on me, rape me and beat me.


He fell asleep listening to how my father loved to take me to baseball games and about our backyard barbecues. In his unconscious stupor, I tried to break free but after the peanut butter incident, he’d tightened my handcuffs. I tried to use things near me to toss out and encapsulate the keys. My arms ached from tossing things; my mind ached from trying to figure out some way to escape. The morning came, but I was none the wiser. The windows had been boarded over since my first day there. Six years without a sunrise or sunset.

The seventh cake came. Then the eighth. When the ninth year finally arrived and he again came down those stairs with a cake that he’d actually managed to bake well, I made a pact to myself. If I made it to see the tenth cake, I would exhaust all my energy to escape or just let him break me.

The ninth year was slow to pass. I used my time wisely, observing everything he did and looking for ways to enact my escape, but he seemed flawless as a kidnapper.

However even the best laid plans are subject to fate. Oddly enough, in early May approaching the tenth year, I realized that my arms held a slight green tinge and that they hurt from the inside. A day or two passed and their green hue intensified. So did the pain.

I sat on the floor, my back against my cot, arms palm-up in my lap and just stared at the color that was slowly creeping up my arms. Gangrene. I fucking had gangrene. I knew he would most likely not take the risk of bringing me to the hospital.

I started to cry at the significance of the moment. Almost ten years in captivity and I would die from a goddamn infection. I yelped like a wounded dog and then kneeled angrily and faced the hard-packed dirt floor. I had no weapons, nothing to deliver myself from evil, so I took one long breath and then cracked my forehead against the hard ground. The pain was of no consequence. My past was paved with pain. This was more of a release.

He must’ve heard my yelp, or maybe I was that hardheaded that he’d heard the thumps. He ran downstairs, almost tripping himself in his haste, and gripped my hair in one fist and yanked.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He was angry.

I stuck out my chin and my eyes intensified with rage. “I am ending my life.”

When you’re pissed, there is no limit to how far adrenaline alone can take you. I was more so pissed at the idea of succumbing to an infection than living with him.

His face mirrored several emotions. He didn’t get it. His eyes scanned me and then fell upon my outstretched arms. He started quickly at the sight of the green tinge and then sat down. I could see the conflict going on in his head as he tried to figure out the best way to handle the situation.

To my surprise, he took the keys from his pocket. His shaky hand gave away his nervousness and I knew then that if there was a God, He was screaming at me to take this one miraculous moment. The key slipped into the lock. I remained obedient because I wanted his guard to drop beyond his comfort level.

At that point he was still unsure on how to proceed. I then did something that was not only unexpected but began the sequence of events that would make my miracle come to fruition.

I hugged him. And then as much as it repulsed me, I planted my dirty chapped lips on his to solidify his thoughts that confinement was not necessary with me anymore.

It was not yet time. He was expecting me to be outraged. He was expecting a possible attack. I kissed his lips briefly and rubbed my sore wrists as if to advise him that the situation had not solved the gangrene.

I waited days. I even screwed him willingly so he would be star-struck by the notion that I would truly be in love with him. I said those words falsely to make him smile with the silliness of love.

My first shower by myself was heaven. He sat on the toilet to ensure I wouldn’t try to climb out the window, but the warm stream of water and the musky smell of Irish Spring soap was enough to bring tears to my eyes. A few more days, I told myself.

He brought a doctor to me. I kept mum, not because I didn’t want to escape but because I wanted to be his punisher in the end. The doctor rattled off the causes of gangrene, including diabetes and frostbite, but it was no secret to me that the wounds that I’d suffered from the handcuffs and his periodic beatings had simply become infected. Thankfully, the gangrene was in the beginning stages and treatable. He prescribed penicillin to fight the infection but warned that sometimes the contamination could accelerate. I popped the penicillin religiously and began to notice that the pain was lessening.

I could see his trust now. He’d been biting his fingernails when the doctor was there, but I didn’t utter one single word about my captivity. The doctor left, leaving his card behind in case there were complications. He began to look at me with trust and even though it disgusted me, I kept up the charade until I knew that my moment had arrived.

It was torture to wait. I wanted to crack him in the face.

He still didn’t trust me enough to use knives or any sharp objects. He didn’t leave any razors around or glass bottles. He wasn’t stupid. He was cautious in his hopes that I may have actually forgiven him.

He never could cook. So when I entered his kitchen and discovered it was loaded with equipment, I knew my moment had finally arrived.
I opened the refrigerator door and inspected his produce. Tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, bacon and eggs. I grinned. I’d just been handed a “Get Out of Hell Free” card.

“I want to cook you breakfast,” I smiled happily and began ushering the vegetables from the fridge. I put the bacon to sit in the cast iron skillet and asked if I could chop the veggies. I saw the uncertain look cross his face.

I smiled again. “OK, you chop, I’ll advise you from the side.”

He stood up unsteadily and unlocked the knife drawer. My eyes glittered like the sterling silver of the blade. He placed the onion on the block and coarsely chopped them and put them to the side. He butchered that poor tomato but I kept up my smile and egged him on. He scooted the tomatoes and onions into another skillet and added mushrooms.

“Now drizzle them with a bit of oil so they don’t stick to the bottom,” I taught him.

He did it obediently and looked at me proudly. The vegetables sautéed nicely, so when they were softened, I reduced the flame and asked him if he had some cheese.

“I will scramble the eggs, and you shred the cheese,” I said confidently. He bent into the fridge to grab a block of cheese, leaving himself entirely vulnerable.

He turned to me, holding the cheese block in one hand and the shredder in other. His smiled stretched across his entire face and his eyes never truly registered the hot iron skillet, vegetables still inside, barreling at his head.

It cracked open like a watermelon.

He still grinded around on the floor but I don’t think it was because his brain registered what happened but just because his brain still worked. This made me realize he could still feel pain.

I circled him like a starving vulture. I thought about putting him through the same torture that he’d put me through but it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be as poignant.

I plugged in the curling iron. Lord only knows where he got it. I waited until it was so hot that any water drops I flicked on it spit out angrily.

I cut off his pants. He groaned, knowing what I would do but not being able to utter anything because apparently I’d shattered his jaw. I pressed it to his ass and watched as he writhed away from me.

I did many more things to him but in the end, I swung that cast iron skillet against his head with the baseball swing that my dad had taught me when I was young.

Step into it. Use your hips for power. Never let your eyes move from the ball.

The police. I’d have to call them but first I sat myself on his table, legs dangling off, settled my face into my palms and grinned. Revenge never felt sweeter.

His phone rang but I didn’t answer it. I took a fork, speared a mushroom off the floor and took a bite. Then another. And another. Mushrooms never tasted better.