The clock’s hands went wild then, and by the time I began to stir, the sky outside was getting dark. I stumbled off the couch drowsily, giving a yawn and a stretch that transformed into a look of shock and horror. I turned, made a mad dash across the apartment, only to stop halfway, groaning as the back of my shorts began to bulge out and begin to sag.
“Did I just…?” I started to ask the alien, who may have nodded in return.
The older me sank to her knees in the middle of the floor and sniffled softly, burying her face in her hands. She managed to get back on her feet after awhile, chest still hitching as she headed into her bedroom. The bathroom must have been off of there, because a few minutes later, I heard the shower running.
When I came back out, I was wearing a diaper under my new pair of shorts. I walked over to the table and began to sit down before I apparently caught a glimpse of the clock. I went back to the kitchen, opened the next compartment on the pill box, poured its contents into my hand, started to put them into my mouth… and stopped. Instead, I poured the pills onto the counter, examined each one.
The front door opened and the man came through with a smile. “You wouldn’t believe how lucky we got,” he announced. “A freakin’ miracle.” He walked up behind me, gave me a kiss. “Taking your vitamins, huh? A little late, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer, so he went off to the bedroom. “Cheyenne!” he called a few minutes later, just before coming back out. “Were you out of your diaper?”
I shrugged listlessly, still bent over the counter.
“You know the rules, don’t you? When I put you in a diaper, you’re to stay in it. And now you’ve gone and ruined a pair of your panties, didn’t you?”
I stood suddenly, eyes flaring. “That’s because you’ve been drugging me, haven’t you, you son of a bitch?!” I grabbed the pills and threw them across the apartment at him, though they all fell short. “What have you been giving me?!”
“I haven’t touched your pills,” he stated flatly. “Don’t raise your voice at me.”
“Or what?!” I screamed. “What do you think you can do to me?!”
He reached one hand into the bedroom, pulled something off of the wall or a shelf inside, raised it up in one hand. It was a paddle, wooden, one end shaped like a piece of swiss cheese. “Screw you,” I spat at him.
I’m not sure if the clock sped up again for a moment, or if he really moved that quickly, but the next thing I knew, the man was over in the kitchen, grabbed me around the waist with one arm and dragging me over to one of the chairs at the table, which he pulled out and spun around with his foot, while struggling to keep his grip on me.
He sat, setting me down over his lap, and pulled down the shorts and diaper with one, quick tug, revealing my bright red bottom. He raised the paddle, and the me on his lap suddenly stopped screaming obscenities at him and began begging him to stop. I saw the paddle come down once, saw it smack against my flesh, and then I couldn’t help but cover my eyes.
I heard the paddle fall, over and over, heard it hitting the other me, so loud I could practically feel it on my own skin, heard myself pleading and crying, eventually reduced to just the latter. It seemed to go on forever.
Then I heard it stop as the man’s exasperated voice said, “Cheyenne!” I peeked out through my fingers, saw the wet spot underneath me. “See, this is why I keep having to put you in diapers,” he lectured, shaking his head. “I don’t have to give you any drugs – you do it on your own.”
I was crying too hard to disagree with him. He pushed me off of his lap, left me crumpled on the floor while he went back to the bedroom and cleaned himself up, then turned on the water in the bathroom.
“Come on,” he called. “I’m drawing you a bath.”
But I didn’t move, and after the water turned off, he came out and picked me up, carrying me back to the tub. After the clock started speeding back up, he came out and cleaned the wet spot on the floor, grabbed a couple frozen dinners out of the microwave.
I came out, slowly, by the time he had run them both through the microwave, back in my nightshirt and diaper. He grabbed the smaller of the two dinners, a kiddy one by the looks of it, with its chicken nuggets cut up into the shape of some cartoon character I didn’t recognize, and took it over to the table. I followed him to that seat, let him kiss the top of my head, and sat down with a wince.
He brought his own dinner over and started to eat, while I pushed the food around with my fork. He went on about his job, not noticing or caring that I didn’t seem to even be listening, until he noticed my purse.
“Did you go to the store?” he asked. I shook my head. He shrugged. “I can go tomorrow after work.”
“I know,” I told him. “That’s what you said.”
He nodded dismissively, chewing his food, then spotted something else. “What’s this?” He reached for the other piece of paper I’d looked at.
I jumped up, snatched it away from his prying fingers at the last moment. “It’s nothing,” I snapped at him.
He shrugged, turned his attention back to eating as time sped up once again. We went over to the couch once he was done with his food, and I’d gotten tired of staring at mine, and stayed there until we were getting ready to nod off, and then we headed back to the bedroom.
The clock had run through an hour or two before I came back out, rubbing my eyes. “Forgot again,” I grumbled, shuffling across to the kitchen. I flipped open all the compartments of the pill box, then opened one of the cabinets and pulled down almost a dozen bottles of pills, and started to fill the box.
I stopped on the way back to the bedroom, stared longingly through the window, and then at the front door, and, lastly, down at the piece of paper from my purse, not even bothering to unfold it. Then I went back to the bedroom, and the apartment was still.
The hands of the clock sped up, moving faster and faster, until I could’ve sworn I saw smoke coming from them. I came back out of the bedroom a few more times, just walking around, but it wasn’t until the sun started to come up that I stayed out, going over to the kitchen and getting a glass of water. The man came out of the room as well as I took my pills out of the box and swallowed them, sneaking up behind me to give me an all but ignored kiss.
I pulled a bowl from the cabinet, set it down, then started hunting through the other cupboards, while behind me, the bowl began to melt. I flipped through all the cupboards in a manner of seconds, seemingly oblivious that all of their contents also seemed to be melting.
The real me looked over at the alien in alarm, not particularly comforted when I saw that the clock had finally caught on fire. “Is it over?” I asked him. “What was that supposed to mean? Why am I staying with this guy? Why did you show me this?”
The alien’s hand started to rise, pointing towards the table. The paper! Of course! That’s where the answer was, it had to be! I ran across the apartment, while, having found no cereal, the older me and the man started looking through the rapidly sagging fridge.
By the time I got to the table, its contents had vanished, turning into one huge pool of sludge. I stuck my hand in where the paper had last been, came out with nothing.
I turned frantically to the alien, whose face was beginning to contort strangely. For a moment, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but then I realized he was trying to speak. I dashed into the kitchen, where the cabinets were dripping down onto the counters, started to pull open drawers until I found a knife.
I could tell I didn’t have time to be scared, so I just sucked it up, and drew the already dripping-away knife across the stitches in the alien’s mouth. It still didn’t speak, but it opened its mouth, and I saw that there was something there. The paper.
It was melting as well, and, since the alien was making no move to get it for me, I steeled my nerves, reached in and grabbed it.
It was from a newspaper, I saw, and old – one of the seams was taped where it had been un- and re-folded too many times. My hands were shaking as I opened it, putting a few more rips in it, but none so bad I shouldn’t be able to read it, if the words themselves weren’t trying to vanish.
And there, staring back at me, was Maria. She didn’t look much older than she does now, or it didn’t seem so, before the paper turned to a puddle in my hand. I can’t be entirely certain what the type under it said, but it looked suspiciously look an obituary, a lot like the one my aunt had printed for my uncle, when she hadn’t wanted people to know the cause of his death was suicide.
I looked up at the alien, my heart racing, only to find him gone. The apartment itself was melting away now, in strips, so that it seemed as if I were looking into it from a cage. Or like looking into a cage from the outside. I turned away, closed my eyes, unable to take it anymore.
“Just take me home,” I prayed, to the alien, to Fido, to whoever was behind this whole thing, to anyone that would listen. “Just let me make it back. I’ll make it better, somehow. Just give me a chance.”
“You see?” I asked anxiously, staring into Maria’s eyes, hoping she didn’t think I was completely insane. “I’m so sorry, Maria. Please, please, you have to forgive me; I’ve been so terrible. You have to give me a chance to make it right, somehow.”
She stared at me for a long while before answering. “Yes, you have been,” she said. “You have no idea what I’ve been through. What -you- put me through.”
“I know!” I nodded. “Please, let me make it up to you.”
She shook her head. “No.”
I blinked, stopped dead by that, not having any sort of plan as to what to say in reply, should she answer with that.
“No, I don’t have to forgive you,” she continued. “And I don’t. You’re not sorry.”
That I did know how to respond to. “Yes, I am! I’m a horrible, horrible person, but I understand that now, and…”
“And you’re sorry?” she sneered with a mocking tone. “-No-, you’re -not-. You’re just scared. You’re afraid that if you don’t make things up to me, you’re going to end up like you did in that dream. You don’t give a damn about me. You’re just looking out for yourself, like you always do.”
“That’s not it!” I pleaded, falling to my knees in the snow. “I really do feel bad! I’m going to stand up to Laurell and Ivy, you’ll see, and I’ll make them leave you alone!”
“And then what? Then you’ll be pals with me again, until something better comes along and you sell me out again?”
“I won’t,” I shook my head. “I won’t.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re never going to have the courage to go against Laurell and Ivy. You’re too scared of being alone, and if you disagree with them, you think they’ll toss you out like last week’s garbage, and it isn’t like you have any other friends, do you?”
“They aren’t that bad,” I tried to defend them weakly. “If you just get to know them…”
She didn’t seem to hear me. I may not have even managed to say it out loud. “Well, guess what, Cheyenne? That’s what they’re going to do anyway. One day, they’ll get bored with having their own little freshman lapdog. And then you -will- be alone.” She bent down, closer to my face, and her voice got quiet. “And I still won’t forgive you.”
“Maria…” I was surprised at how broken my voice sounded, until I realized I had started to cry. “Maria, please…”
“Merry Christmas,” she said, standing back up. “Now get off my property, please.”
I stared up at her, tears dripping down my cheeks. She rolled her eyes, slammed the door in my face, and I stared at that for a while. Finally, I struggled to my feet and started to walk home, raising one hand to cover my mouth as I began to cough.