V-Wars

He could barely even tell that it was a woman’s arm.



He was sure that it wasn’t attached to anything. It was held in place by the weight of the metal lid.



Fayne did not want to touch it. He wanted to run screaming from it. Even now he could feel the scream bubbling in the back of his throat.



And yet he had to touch it.



Not the arm. The lid.



He gripped it with one trembling hand and raised it. The lid was huge, heavy, but it moved under his touch as if it weighed nothing.



As soon as he shifted it the arm fell forward and down, landing with an empty sound at his feet. Fayne yelped and almost dropped the lid. Almost.



He stared at the arm for a long moment, and then raised his eyes as he leaned forward to look into the dumpster. There, amid the torn trash bags and soiled diapers and empty pizza boxes, was the rest of the woman.



She was not …



Whole.



And she was not alone.



Three white faces stared up at him from inside the dumpster. He did not recognize any of them, and in a mad moment, he felt as if that was the greatest tragedy of all. That they were dead, ripped apart, drained of their life and their blood … but they were strangers to him. Somehow he knew that he’d never known their names. Not before. Not now.



They were meat.



They were blood.



They were nothing. Garbage to be thrown away.



Fayne realized that on some level he believed that. Or, some part of him did.



It made it worse.



It was a sin. An unbearable one.



The last one, the one that broke him.



The bubbling scream rose to a full boil and he whirled away, vomiting a shriek into the fetid air of the alley.



After that, it all became so fractured.



He remembered running. Naked and wild.



He remembered other screams as people fled from him.



The blare of car horns, the screech of brakes. The bang and crunch of cars rear-ending each other to keep from running him down.



The shouts.



The yells from police.



He ran from them. He ran at them.



For some of the time he simply stood in the middle of the street and screamed at God, cursing His name, begging Him to explain how and why.



And what.



Then he remembered the hands on him.



And his own hands. Moving. Hitting. Shoving.



More screams, again not his own. Screams of anger and pain.



And then pain as the police came at him from all sides with their clubs and their pepper spray and their Tasers.



As he fell, Michael Fayne knew that it was not their violence that subdued him. He allowed them to beat him.



He needed them to do that.



He hoped they would beat him to death.



"EPIPHANY" PT.1



Yvonne Navarro



— 1 —



The desert is a beautiful and dangerous place.



When people say this, they refer to the heat and talk about the rattlesnakes and the scorpions and the vicious spines of the cacti that spread unchecked across its surface. Ultimately they know nothing about what can really happen out in the great emptiness, while the morning air is still frigid from the previous night and there are other creatures that seek to steal warmth and whatever form of sustenance from anything, or anyone, they can.



Mooney Lopez knows that the true danger of the desert walks on two legs and hunts not for food, but for the joy of causing pain and misery.



— 2 —



“I had hoped that the visit to the big city would clear your spirit and help you come back to yourself.” Mother Gaso says. “That is why I agreed to give you money from your college fund to send you.”



Mooney sits on the threadbare couch in the trailer’s dim living room and says nothing. It is July in Sells, Arizona and the heavy old woman has the window air conditioner on high and the curtains drawn together. Mooney feels chilled and wishes she could go outside and lie in the sun. She’s been back from New York for a week and hasn’t felt well since. Aloud she says, “Come back to myself?”



Mother Gaso nods. “Forget.” Her deeply wrinkled face is round and impassive below her long, iron-colored hair. “The past is gone. You must move forward.”



Mooney does not raise her voice, but her hands ball into fists on her lap. Nothing has changed, either in herself or here on the reservation. The Tohono O’odham are still poor, she is still an orphan with a crappy future and who no one in her extended family wants to be responsible for, her guardian still waits for her to magically fall into the traditional ways of her so-called people …



And she was still raped in the desert by Mexican illegals a month and a half before Mother Gaso let her go on the New York trip.



“Come back to myself,” she repeats. She makes her hands relax, then realizes she is gritting her teeth. “Why would I want to? That means I have accomplished nothing, have gone nowhere.” Her eyes burn but she will not cry. Maybe later, but not now, not here. “I just wanted a distraction, something else to think about for a while.” She sucks in air. “It didn’t work.”



“You must go back to before the men violated you,” Mother Gaso tells her firmly. “Then move forward.”



Mooney stands. “Seriously, old woman? Just forget about it …” She snaps her fingers in the air. “Like that.” Her mouth twists. “Pretend it never happened, pretend everyone in town doesn’t know and treat me like I’m something dirty.” Three steps is enough to take her across the tiny space and she yanks open the door, enjoying for one blissful moment the swell of heated air that blasts inside. “I’m getting out of here. It’s as cold as a damned refrigerator.” Before Mother Gaso can protest, she marches outside and lets the door slam behind her.



It’s a hundred and ten degrees in the shade and the sun is cooking the already scorched earth. The landscape is nothing but dust and weeds in varying shades of tan and dying green . For all its brutal appearance, the desert’s hot breeze warms her skin and loosens the joints that had stiffened in the trailer’s over-processed air. Mooney stretches then picks up a good-sized flat rock, using it to warm her fingers more quickly. It is hot enough to bake something on but it just feels good against her skin, and she rubs it over her knees and elbows with a sigh of pleasure. She wants to close her eyes, but if she does, she knows what she’ll see.



There are three of them. They are sweaty and filthy from days of walking in the heat and nights of sleeping on the cold ground. Her guardian has ordered her to gather mesquite pods for flour, so Mooney has taken a heavy canvas sack and gone into the desert just before the sun heaves itself above the mountains, hoping to finish before the day’s temperature rises. She is listening to her MP3 player and not paying attention to anything but where she is stepping when her head jerks up and she realizes she is surrounded. There is no one but her attackers to hear her scream, and the rest, as Mother Gaso insists, is the part that should be left behind.



Hours later two Border Patrol officers find her and load her into their car. Mooney wishes she could forget, that she could just get past it and “move forward,” but the gossipy townspeople who see them help her into the doctor’s office won’t let her.



— 3 —



Two weeks later, Mooney knows she is a vampire.



“Slut.”



She is on her way to the Circle K Store off Main Street. It’s two in the afternoon and there are plenty of people around, and even if they won’t socialize with her, just their presence is enough to make her feel as safe as is possible given what happened. That complacency is shattered by the sudden, venomous tone of someone who walks past her on the sidewalk.



Mooney blinks and the forward step she is taking almost turns into a stumble. “What?”



“I’m pretty sure you heard me.” The speaker is a teenager a couple of years younger than herself, a girl Mooney has seen around town but never talked to. Mooney doesn’t know her name or anything about her, but the other girl apparently thinks she knows plenty about Mooney. Despite the triple-digit temperatures, the teen is dressed like so many people on the reservation, in jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt on which is pinned a tag from the local burger joint that says her name is Ponka. Mooney refuses to follow the ridiculous convention and has opted for cool, knee-length khaki shorts and a T-shirt with a dinosaur on it.



“Slut,” the other young woman repeats, as though the first time wasn’t enough to burn it into Mooney’s brain. Her tormentor is with another girl who is the same age and two older boys; the boys leer at Mooney and look her up and down. The ugly speculation in their gazes makes her face flush with humiliation.



“I could get me some of that,” the shorter of the two boys jeers. His skin is dark from being in the sun and his shoulder-length black hair is greasy. Mooney tries to remind herself that there are plenty of good people in this town; this guy, however, is not one of them, nor are his friends. “I hear you give it away to the Mexicans. It must be free for us, too. Right?”



Mooney stands, frozen, unable to speak and not knowing what to say if she could. They all laugh nastily and the other boy, who is the biggest of the group, grins and steps toward her. “C’mere, baby.”



Before Mooney can react, he seizes her by the wrist and pulls her to his chest, then his other hand grabs her at the thickest part of her braid so that he can jerk her neck forward and control her head. Her face crashes against his neck and she gasps; he smells of sweat and dirt and the desert, just like —



Mooney opens her mouth and sinks her teeth into his flesh.



He screams like a scalded cat and flings her away, slams his hand over the wound.



“You’re bleeding,” shrieks Ponka. She and the other girl gape at each other and then at Mooney. Their faces look like real-time renditions of Munch’s famous painting, The Scream. “Oh my God, she bit you!”



The first boy looks like he wants to say something but changes his mind. Instead he and the girls gather around their injured friend, then fixate again on Mooney with undisguised loathing. Mooney steps forward but she doesn’t hear herself hissing until they all back away from her. A moment later they’re running like terrified jackrabbits and she’s standing there, watching them go, and wondering what the hell just happened.