The Rope

didn’t even have the will to do that anymore.

Then she was just sitting cross-legged on the sand staring at the desiccated-looking nightshade garden, the canteen of poisoned water, and the paper bag.

Three doors and behind each the tiger. There was no lady for such as Anna. She knew the datura could kill her, but she didn’t know if she was supposed to eat it or inject it or smoke it or what. The paper bag held an unknown. The easiest seemed to be the canteen. If she drank all of it, maybe it would be enough.

She waited for her sister to order her to “stay alive.”

From a long ways away she could hear her. “So. Fine,” her sister called, barely audible in the distance. “A bit of monster garbage. Poor you. The monster wins.”

That rather pissed Anna off.

No. That really, really pissed Anna off.

“I will fucking show you,” she muttered and thought she heard her sister’s fading voice saying, “That’s my girl.” Fury swept away most of the self-pity. It burned out with the heat and rapidity of a car fire, leaving fatigue, helplessness, and confusion in its wake. How would she fucking show anybody? A hundred and two pounds of naked city girl with a sore shoulder and a broken pate, what could she do? Unless, when the monster showed up with his number twelve X-Acto knife—or whatever it was he’d used to carve his judgment —he was a malnourished pygmy with rickets, she wasn’t likely to overpower him even if she wasn’t drugged out of her mind.

Maybe she’d get lucky, like the girl kept in the stone pit in the basement in Silence of the Lambs, and the bastard would have a yappy little dog she could hold hostage. From what she’d seen, Lake Powell wasn’t a hotbed of yappy little dogs, more the big sorts that can clear a coffee table with one swish of a mighty tail.

Blinking back the last residue of tears with the thought that she needed all her hydration, she looked around her sandbox. Not even any rocks for bashing in the heads of predators. Self-pity was creeping back when the cat saved her. She remembered Sophie, a five-pound cat she had when she moved to New York after college. Sophie was so sweet until someone tried to make her do something she did not wish to do. Then she became a five-pound buzz saw, all fangs and claws and moving at the speed of sound.

Sophie. Gilda Johanson. Gilda was attacked two floors down in the apartment building where Anna and Zach lived. She was in her sixties, had emphysema and high blood pressure. She snarled and snapped at everybody. A burglar had come in and decided to rape Gilda while he was there. Relating how she had driven the man off was one of the few times Anna had heard Gilda laugh—or rather chortle.

“I don’t has many things. This stomme bastaard he want to take what I got. Then he pull out to zijn smerige kleine penis and wave it around,” she said when she met Anna and Zach on the landing as they were carting their laundry upstairs.

“Did you knock some manners into him?” Zach asked.

“What I got to knock with?” she demanded indignantly. “I start to piss and do bowels and I spit and act crazy and throw the piss and bowels at him and scream and the piece of de hond braakt, he can’t get out my house fast enough.”

Cat and gross defenses, Anna had those. Though they were ridiculous—maybe because they were ridiculous—she was comforted by remembering them. Her sense of helplessness eased a little. Not trusting her recently dislocated shoulder to take any weight, she struggled up and walked on her knees to the canteen, the paper sack, and the deadly nightshade. Plopping down beside them, she picked up the canteen first. It was full, topped off during the night. She unrolled the crimped neck of the paper bag. Two squares wrapped in waxed paper. To her, the two squares wrapped in waxed paper and stowed in a sack spoke of food. To the monster, it might mean anything, tarantulas in an odd box, rat guts on toast. Who knew what monsters thought was nourishing.

Along with the paper-wrapped squares were two cups of the kind of pudding that comes in little six-packs. No spoon, no napkins. Laying one of the packages on her thigh so it covered WHORE, she carefully folded back the corners of the waxed paper.

It looked to be a regular sandwich, the kind eaten by schoolchildren all over America, peanut butter and jelly oozing out from two slices of bread with the crusts cut carefully off. Molly used to make Anna PB&Js to take to school in her lunch box. The box was black and had Zorro on it sticking his sword into a fat guy in military blue. Anna’d thought it was really keen until she was thirteen and found out both the box and “keen” were suddenly not at all groovy.

Waxed paper, that was odd. Nobody used waxed paper anymore. Only monsters who trimmed the crust away and served massive doses of sugar to their captives to fatten them up for slaughter.

Molly never cut off the crusts. She said they were the best part. Anna wished she had the crusts to this sandwich. Harder to put weird shit in the crusts. Meticulously peeling the top slice of bread back, she looked for anything suspicious, her mind clicking through images from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. No eyeball, no obvious expectoration, dead cockroaches, or rat feces.

Closing the sandwich, her eyes, and her mind, Anna took a bite. Hunger roared, taste buds sang, saliva ran, stomach quivered with anticipation. For that instant Anna was transported from terror and agony to a glorious hedonistic plane. In short, it was the finest bite of food she had ever experienced.

Gourmet gave over to gobbler. She devoured the rest in three bites and was eyeing the second wax-paper- wrapped square in the bottom of the sack. Was it also a sandwich? The monster was into mind games. Maybe the one on top had been the bait and this second was the switch, the one with the razor blades in it.

She took a pudding instead. It had at least been factory sealed. Running her fingers over the smooth plastic tub and the foil top, she felt for pinpricks. In college, one of her roommates enamored with Psych 101, had used a hypodermic to inject blue food coloring into an unopened milk carton to see if anybody would drink blue milk. Nobody would.

No pinpricks; nothing had been injected into the pudding.

Anna pulled off the foil top. Chocolate. Again saliva flowed from some mysterious moisture source the rest of her body didn’t have access to. She licked the underside of the foil, then squeezed the little plastic cup, gushing the pudding into her mouth and over her tongue, and went again to the place where all was good and even better this time because all was chocolate. The last remnants she scraped out with her index finger and sucked into her mouth.

The monster hadn’t left her a spoon. Probably afraid she’d tap him to death with it if she got a chance. Which she would. Anna’d never been much on hate, but she hated this guy. Mentally ill or not, she hated him so much that to think of him filled her with an intense anger she could feel to the tip of her braid. Surely this kind of hate would cause one of them to spontaneously combust. Probably her.

Taking deep slow breaths, she blew some of the toxic emotions out of her body and brain. A semblance of calm restored, she folded the lunch sack closed. At the moment she didn’t want to know what was in the other package. Supper maybe, should she live that long. The canteen beckoned, and she knew she would have to drink sooner or later. Later was better.

Food had revived her to an extent that surprised her. A sense of optimism came with a full stomach and a shot of sucrose. The downside was now she had to go to the bathroom.

In New York she’d lived in many one-bedroom and studio apartments, some not as spacious as the bottom of her jar. Living small had taught her the necessity of living neat. The thought of fouling where she would be eating, maybe, and sleeping, druggily, was abhorrent, but life apparently was going to go on at least for a while.

Getting awkwardly to her feet, she chose to put her privy to one side of the datura garden. In the old days Chinese farmers used night soil to fertilize their fields. The scraggly plants couldn’t be getting much in the way of nutrients from the sand. Hoping the datura would be grateful for her donation, she carefully dug a hole a foot or so deep.

The business of living attended to, she began scooping sand in to cover it up in good cat fashion. Her fingers tangled in a web in the dirt, and hope flickered: Hemp to weave a rope? Old fishing nets to macrame into a ladder? Even if she could have done those things, there was no way to get it hooked to the outside world.

A bit of line with which to garrote a monster?

That was a cheering thought. She tightened her fingers and dragged out the nest of fibers she’d pawed up.

Brown and fine. It looked like human hair. Anna shook her hand free in sudden panic and fell back onto her