Paul Cleave - The Cleaner

“Do you know what I think we should do with rapists?” she asks.

I shake my head. I stop when she jams the gun barrel back into my mouth. It grates against my teeth and is cold on my tongue.

I try to ask her not to do anything, but the gun gags me.

I instantly break into a sweat as I feel the blade run a tight circle around the base of my penis. Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ. I look up at the sky, but neither of them are coming to help me.

I tighten my fists and pull at the handcuffs, but they won’t break, and the damn tree won’t fall over. I tilt my head up and I don’t know whether to be relieved that I can’t see what she’s doing. I want to buck my hips and start kicking at her, but at the moment it’s one hell of a bad idea.

I try to scream, but the damn gun is pushing at the back of my throat and I want to be sick. My scream is a gurgling, gagging sound, accompanied by the sound of my teeth chattering against the barrel. The skin all over my body is shriveling away from her, and I feel so damn cold even though I’m sweating. Tears are springing from my eyes and they tickle the side of my face. The pressure on the knife becomes harder, but I can’t do anything about it. This is crazy. I’m the one who decides who lives and dies. I try to push my ass further into the ground but it won’t go.

Images of having my penis torn away flick through my mind in split-second images like those on an old movie projector. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to get those images to move backward, bringing my penis back, having the knife taken away, the handcuffs released. I can feel a load of vomit rising from my stomach and pushing at the back of my heart. My entire body is shaking and my feet are beginning to cramp. I can’t figure out how anybody could be so cruel.

The temperature keeps dropping and I don’t know whether I wish I was dead. The problem is I don’t want to die. I have so much to offer. I don’t want to be dead and I don’t want her to do this to me, but dying will be easier to live with than having my penis hacked from my body.

I sob as more tears blur my vision. I try to plead with whimpering sounds, with my wet eyes, but she ignores me.

Then suddenly she pulls the knife away.

I blink away my tears. Tears of pain are now tears of relief. She’ll let me go and then she’ll die for this. She’ll die slowly and painfully, though I can’t even begin to consider how. I try to thank her, try to thank God, but she still has the damn gun stuffed into my mouth.

She reaches into her handbag and pulls something out. Suddenly I realize things are about to get worse.

I remember once, when I was a teenager, I’d been playing cricket at school. I was never good at sports, but if you didn’t play them, you got thrust into classes like basic art or sewing for faggots. Cricket wasn’t fun, but it still beat baking and knitting. One day-and this day haunts my memory-a cricket ball was thumped hard in my direction. I was unable to coordinate my hands in time so my crotch fielded the ball, saving four runs. I fell into a blubbering pile of agony and play stopped for more than twenty minutes until they could roll me onto a stretcher and carry me from the field to the jeers and laughter of my schoolmates. My testicles bruised and swelled up. Had it been a cartoon, they would have been glowing as if they had been smashed by Wile E. Coyote’s Acme hammer. I had to take four days off school, and though I couldn’t speak, I could certainly vomit. The laughter directed at me over the following months was constant. The boys were bad, but the girls were worse. They teased me constantly and called me Numb Nuts. The girls never forgot about it. Five more years of school, and they never forgot.

I dealt with it, though. I learned that you can put up with anything. Right now, nearly twenty years later, I would give anything for that pain, because I’m sure it would be less than what I’m about to go through. Every pore in my body has a drop of sweat being pushed through it.

In this little park in the early dawn, all time has stopped. I can hear voices whispering to me what is about to come. Pain is the loudest; the voice of anger is a close second. Trailing those two is the voice of regret. They aren’t the only ones. There’s even the small voice telling me that this is what happens with you not living to work, and that I should have stayed at home and continued reading the files.

Melissa’s toy is a pair of pliers, which force even more tears from my eyes as she positions them around my left testicle. The gun in my mouth means there can be no conversation, no negotiation. I beg with my eyes, but she doesn’t care. I try to sway my body left and right, up and down, but she increases the grip enough to kill that urge. It feels like she’s just strapped a block of ice onto it. I’m paralyzed, as if my spinal cord has just been severed.

She smiles at me.

And closes the pliers.

A guttural scream makes it halfway up my throat and then expands, lodging itself there so I can’t breathe. Don’t want to. She’s just crushed my testicle as easily as someone crushes a grape between their thumb and finger-and, like the grape, the insides spill out. My stomach and thighs cramp up. My lungs swell and refuse to offer me air. My scream forces its way north, escaping into the air. Above me, birds are flying from trees, too damn scared to land. From my groin a throbbing heat replaces the ice-cold feeling of a moment ago, a heat that surely cannot be found in any other place than the very core of hell. It boils up through my body, radiating from the epicenter between the pair of pliers.

I still have my erection.

The explosion of heat uses fingers with claws to reach into my soul and tear it open. It shreds every cell in my body and sucks them dry. I can do nothing but scream and cry and curse every living soul as the claws dig deeper. I try to get away from it, try to separate myself from this entity, but it has me in its grip and won’t let go. All the pain in this crazy, motherfucking universe has bonded with me and it likes what it finds.

I stop screaming because I’m no longer able. I can hear dogs in the distance, howling and barking and crying. My jaw locks up. My throat is sore and I feel like I’ve swallowed a soldering iron. I start to black out, but I can’t make it there, instead coming back on the waves of pain as they crash against my consciousness. My body is paralyzed except for my head, which moves side to side, the silent screaming still burning my throat and eyes.

Then I see her. She kneels there, this devil who calls herself Melissa, this creature from Hades who has done this to me. She readjusts the pliers, not on the opposite testicle, but on the same one. Every movement she makes down there vibrates up my nerves and right into my mind. She grips it across the width and squeezes, as if trying to push it back into shape.

I scream and scream and scream as if my life depends on it, whereas the only thing I want to do is die. I try to clear my head, try to make it go blank. This is hell and I have been brought here. Fire crawls over my lap, my skin sizzles from this heat: it’s blistering, but I can’t see any flames. Melissa pushes the gun further into my mouth. The trigger guard etches my front tooth, but I hardly feel it. I beg her silently to pull the trigger.

She doesn’t.

My testicle is only a fraction away from becoming two-dimensional. I can feel fluid dripping down my thighs, can almost hear it turning to steam. The aching is so intense, the pain so deep, that I can’t believe I’m still alive. Melissa is asking me something, but I can’t understand her words. All I can hear is this constant ringing, a ringing louder and deeper in my skull than that from the music at the club.