Aimee Bender - Willful Creatures

He brought the cage up to the front, paid with his credit card, and got some free airline points.

In the car, the little man’s cage bounced lightly on the passenger seat, held by the seat belt.

The big man set up the little man in his bedroom, on the nightstand, and lifted the latch of the cage open. That’s the first time the little man looked away from the small TV. He blinked, which was hard to see, and then asked for some dinner in a high shrill voice. The big man brought the little man a drop of whiskey inside the indented crosshatch of a screw, and a thread of chicken with the skin still on. He had no utensils, so he told the little man to feel free to eat with his hands, which made the little man irritable. The little man explained that before he’d been caught he’d been a very successful and refined technology consultant who’d been to Paris and Milan multiple times, and that he liked to eat with utensils thank you very much. The big man laughed and laughed, he thought this little man he’d bought was so funny. The little man told him in a clear crisp voice that dollhouse stores were open on weekends and he needed a bed, please, with an actual pillow, please, and a lamp and some books with actual pages if at all possible. Please. The big man chuckled some more and nodded.

The little man sat on his sofa. He stayed up late that first night, laughing his high shrill laugh at the late-night shows, which annoyed the big man to no end. He tried to sleep and could not, a wink. At four a.m., exhausted, the big man put some antihistamine in the little man’s water-drip tube, so the little man finally got drowsy. The big man accidentally put too much in, because getting the right proportions was no easy feat of mathematical skill, which was not the big man’s strong suit anyway, and the little man stayed groggy for three days, slugging around his cage, leaving tiny drool marks on the couch. The big man went to work and thought of the little man with longing all day, and at five o’clock he dashed home, so excited he was to see his little man, but he kept finding the fellow in a state of murk. When the antihistamine finally wore off, the little man awoke with crystal-clear sinuses, and by then had a fully furnished room around him, complete with chandelier and several very short books, including Cinderella in Spanish, and his very own pet ant in a cage.

The two men got along for about two weeks. The little man was very good with numbers and helped the big man with his bank statements. But between bills, the little man also liked to talk about his life back home and how he’d been captured on his way to work, in a bakery of all places, by the little-men bounty hunters, and how much he, the little man, missed his wife and children. The big man had no wife and no children, and he didn’t like hearing that part. “You’re mine now,” he told the little man. “I paid good money for you.”

“But I have responsibilities,” said the little man to his owner, eyes dewy in the light.

“You said you’d take me back,” said the little man.

“I said no such thing,” said the big man, but he couldn’t remember if he really had or not. He had never been very good with names or recall.

After about the third week, after learning the personalities of the little man’s children and grandparents and aunts and uncles, after hearing about the tenth meal in Paris and how le waiter said the little man had such good pronunciation, after a description of singing tenor arias with a mandolin on the train to Tuscany, the big man took to torturing the little man. When the little man’s back was turned, the big man snuck a needle-thin droplet of household cleanser into his water and watched the little man hallucinate all night long, tossing and turning, retching small pink piles into the corners of the cage. His little body was so small it was hard to imagine it hurt that much. How much pain could really be felt in a space that tiny? The big man slept heavily, assured that his pet was just exaggerating for show.

The big man started taking sick days at work.

He enjoyed throwing the little man in the air and catching him. The little man protested in many ways. First he said he didn’t like that in a firm fatherly voice, then he screamed and cried. The man didn’t respond so the little man used reason, which worked briefly, saying: “Look, I’m a man too, I’m just a little man. This is very painful for me. Even if you don’t like me,” said the little man, “it still hurts.” The big man listened for a second, but he had come to love flicking his little man, who wasn’t talking as much anymore about the art of the baguette, and the little man, starting to bruise and scar on his body, finally shut his mouth completely. His head ached and he no longer trusted the water.

He considered his escape. But how? The doorknob is the Empire State Building. The backyard is an African veldt.

The big man watched TV with the little man. During the show with the sexy women, he slipped the little man down his pants and just left him there. The little man poked at the big man’s penis which grew next to him like Jack’s beanstalk in person, smelling so musty and earthy it made the little man embarrassed of his own small penis tucked away in his consultant pants. He knocked his fist into it, and the beanstalk grew taller and, disturbed, the big man reached down his pants and flung the little man across the room. The little man hit a table leg. Woke up in his cage, head throbbing. He hadn’t even minded much being in the underwear of the big man, because for the first time since he’d been caught, he’d felt the smallest glimmer of power.

“Don’t you try that again,” warned the big man, head taking up the north wall of the cage entirely.

“Please,” said the little man, whose eyes were no longer dewy but flat. “Sir. Have some pity.”

The big man wrapped the little man up in masking tape, all over his body, so his feet couldn’t kick and there were only little holes for his mouth and his eyes. Then he put him in the refrigerator for an hour. When he came back the little man had fainted and the big man put him in the toaster oven, at very very low, for another ten minutes. Preheated. The little man revived after a day or two.

“Please,” he said to the big man, word broken.

The big man didn’t like the word please. He didn’t like politesse and he didn’t like people. Work had been dull and no one had noticed his new coat. He got himself a ticket to Paris with all the miles he’d accumulated on his credit card, but soon realized he could not speak a word of the language and was too afraid of accidentally eating veal brains to go. He did not want to ask the little man to translate for him as he did not want to hear the little man’s voice with an accent. The thought of it made him so angry. The ticket expired, unreturned. On the plane, a young woman stretched out on her seat and slept since no one showed up in the seat next to hers. At work, he asked out an attractive woman he had liked for years, and she ran away from him to tell her coworkers immediately. She never even said no; it was so obvious to her, she didn’t even have to say it.

“Take off your clothes,” he told the little man that afternoon.

The little man winced and the big man held up a bottle of shower cleanser as a threat. The little man stripped slowly, folded his clothing, and stood before the big man, his skin pale, his chest a matted grass of hair, his penis hiding, his lips trembling so slightly that only the most careful eye would notice.

“Do something,” said the big man.

The little man sat on the sofa. “What,” he said.

“Get hard,” said the big man. “Show me what you look like.”

The little man’s head was still sore from hitting the table leg; his brain had felt fuzzy and indistinct ever since he’d spent the hour in the refrigerator and then time in the toaster oven. He put his hand on his penis and there was a heavy sad flicker of pleasure and behind the absolute dullness of his mind, his body rose up to the order.