Fierce Bitches (Crime Factory Single Shot) by Jedidiah Ayres Page A

clandestinely, or sent one of the other women to administer medicine and clean his bandages. While he could not yet eat, they chewed his food for him and poured it down his throat with whiskey, tequila and rum smuggled out of the cantina. As his strength returned, and his visions became less frequent, he would make twilight ventures around the shanty, rummaging in the refuse, testing his strength and discovering the new and foreign workings of his own body. His limp would never leave him, but once he learned not to fight it, and use his recovered club as an aid, he found his mobility over a flat surface hardly to have changed at all.              
        Speech was another matter. His voice would never sound human again, but as he spun the club in his hand, it occurred to him. He didn’t have much left to say to anyone.
    *
    On the day of the new arrivals, Ramon received no visit. Everyone was required for entertaining. He foraged for himself, keeping out of sight, but circling as close to the shanty as he dared, tracking the days’ progress by sound– isolated exclamations gradually increasing in frequency, and congregating into new vibrations of life issuing from the cantina. Throughout the night music, fighting and cheering dispersed into fainter echoes of a larger group splintering into multiple subsets and pairings until once again stillness ruled, disturbed only by the occasional and accidental ripples of equal and opposite reaction.
        The next morning he was attended to by Mama Rita, at fifty the oldest and fattest of the women, still heavily made-up, and smelling of last night’s carnality. Ramon accepted un-chewed bread and sucked on it while Rita collected his empty water jar and replaced it with a full one. She informed him in a hushed and nervous voice of the previous days’ arrivals. Four gringos and two new girls–one black, one Slav. The new girls were very pretty and the new men were very cruel. She chanced a look into his eyes and he saw her fear clearly, but she would not give him any more details.
        A week passed without a visit from Consuela, and Rita grew more agitated every time she attended him. When he tried to say her name, Rita only shook her head and bit her lip. On the seventh day, Ramon wrote Consuela’s name in the dirt, but Rita pretended she could not read it.
        That night, he went down among them to the shack where Consuela lived. He listened for her voice, but heard only the occasional grunt of a customer. Ramon stayed outside the hut until the gringo left, barely able to walk. Ramon watched him stumble toward the cantina and rattle the locked door before lying down to sleep beneath the metal picnic table.
        Painfully, Ramon raised himself from his crouched vigil and cautiously entered Consuela’s cabin.
        Inside it was dark and the air hung heavy, oppressive with animal scents. Sweat, urine and excrement provided the atmospheric base with traces of blood, bile and semen occupying the higher strata. Ramon heard someone move and saw what he took to be the shape of a human being curling protectively around itself in the far corner. As he approached he heard a ragged and muffled keening emitting from the woman he still could not identify. The pitiful sound led him across the dirt floor. When he reached her, he knelt in the foul mud and searched, with his hands, for her shoulders.
        He found them, naked and unyielding, and sat down, pulling her into him. He tilted her into his chest, but her arms remained resolutely locked around her knees. He put his nose on the top of her head and breathed in deeply. The aroma was hideous, but he breathed deeper as if he could somehow process the pollution and breath purer air back to her, polish her scent till it shone like before. Deep, intense breaths through his nose, holding each breath like precious object, stained and misused. He turned the very air over in his nostrils, on the back of his tongue