Garden of Dreams by Melissa Siebert

signature, violet shading to olive to greenish yellow, like the colour codes on a map for different elevations.
    The goonda returned just as Eli was buttoning the last button on his pathan shirt. He came closer and ruffled his hair, hard. ‘I’d like to shave all of this off, pretty-boy,’ he said. ‘Though Auntie-ji seems to like it.’
    At Auntie Lakshmi’s door, Anand knocked and then turned to leave. ‘You’re on your own,’ he said, shoving him.
    Auntie-ji yelled ‘enter’ in her high-pitched voice, and greeted him from the daybed. She lay on her back, in a silky lavender robe, barefoot, with a damp pink facecloth folded on her forehead. Dusk had arrived, and candles flickered around the room, like a shrine, or a mortuary.
    ‘
Chutiya
,’ she said, ‘come make Auntie-ji feel better.’
    ‘Where were you?’
    ‘Never mind,
chut
, where have you been?’ Auntie-ji said, removing the facecloth, lifting herself up on one elbow as one breast slipped out, quickly retrieved. ‘Come closer, I want to see you. Anand tells me you were naughty and had to stay in your room.’
    Eli said nothing.
    ‘Come here.’ Auntie beckoned him with her plump little hands.
    He walked nearer and she grabbed his wrists, rotating his arms and pushing up his shirtsleeves.
    ‘Tut-tut-tut, that monkey Anand! What has he done to you?’
    As much as he wanted to incriminate him, Eli was silent. In Auntie’s absence, Anand had unleashed every sadist impulse, roughing him up, making him piss in a bowl, giving him very little food, and nasty food at that; the rotis looked as if they’d been chewed by rats.
    ‘I go away, and things go to the dogs, isn’t it?’ Auntie reclined again and reapplied the facecloth to her brow. ‘This is making me feel very, very terrible.’
    Eli looked at her body, corpse-still, and wondered what he could do to please her. Remembering the last time he’d seen her, he said, ‘I could take your picture?’
    ‘What, like this? What a silly idea! What are you thinking, boy? I am not decent.’ She didn’t move.
    ‘What about the photos I took? Of all the girls.’
    ‘What about them?’
    ‘Can I see them?’
    ‘Not now,
chutiya
, Auntie is feeling too poorly. Later we will look at the photos … because now,’ she said, irritably, ‘you are going to give me a massage. You can start with my feet.’
    Eli looked at her feet, twitching at the end of the daybed, small and naked and scaly with scarlet nails and several silver toe rings. He wished he had a rope to tie them together. Then he would drag this woman across the floor and shove her out the window, letting her scream and cry and beg for her life. He would show no mercy.
    ‘Which foot first?’ he asked instead.
    As he took the proffered foot, the left one, Eli stuck his tongue out. Auntie wouldn’t see him, shrouded in the facecloth, just as well. He started rubbing from the toes, thinking how weird feet looked if you really looked at them, especially these feet. Stubby little toes, warped and rough, but his hands were tough from all the guitar playing and could handle them, prodding around the joints and the webs in between, making Auntie scream a little.
    Where did you go?
He wanted to ask again but knew he’d never get a true answer. Who did this woman know outside of the kotha? Did she have a life beyond these walls? He guessed she had gone ‘shopping’, looking for other children to kidnap and bring to her prison. How did she decide which ones to take?
    You’re going to let me go, bitch
, he said silently in his mind, an incantation,
let me go, let me go
. He rubbed harder and harder and harder until he could really feel her bones. Wished he could break them.
    Snarling, ripping off the facecloth and flinging it to the floor, she sat up and asked him if he knew nothing. Hadn’t he ever massaged a woman’s feet before?
No, never, my mom has feet like a rhinoceros
, he thought but wouldn’t say.
No girl has ever asked me to touch her