Middy was waiting. She'd spent her life waiting—waiting to be old enough, to earn enough, to get enough, to get out. She sat like a perpetually hopeful Linus in the Great Pumpkin Patch, waiting for something that would never come, hoping for the arrival of someone who would never appear, leaving her always, just...waiting.
The field was dark, the air warm over her bare arms and legs. She was dressed for work—short skirt, halter top—although she'd carried her four inch heels when she left the pavement and walked barefoot through the grass to this spot. There were no lights out here, no street lights, no city lights. She could only see one faint square glow of a house window and it seemed miles away.
She lifted her face to the sky, scanning the stars, millions of them out there in the darkness, the patterns unfamiliar and undecipherable to her, except for the big dipper and the belt of the one called Orion. She only knew that one because her mother had pointed it out to her once. "Look, Chlamydia, there's the belt of Orion—almost close enough you could reach out and hang onto it, isn't it? I bet he could take you anywhere."
Her mother had been a prostitute, too, always waiting and looking for a way out. She usually, mistakenly, chose a man as a failed escape route, ending up broken and beaten and crawling back on her knees in the end. Women like her... like me, Middy thought... we spend our lives on our knees in front of men.
There had never been anything better for her mother. Why would she think there would be anything better for her? Middy sighed, pulling a blade of grass and splitting it up the middle with a long, red fingernail. Using her mouth, she whistled a tone through her grass harp, as if she could call something new, something different, something other than an endless parade of cocks and cum and cash.
So when the light appeared above her, as suddenly as a spotlight turned on a startled doe, she froze in surprise and fear, but there was an element of expectation, too.
Where have you been? I've been waiting so long!
There was no time to run, to scream, or even to grab her shoes discarded next to her in the long grass. One moment she was staring up, wide-eyed, into the light, and the next, she was strapped, each limb restrained, to a cold metal table.
"Haven't you ever heard of sheets?" Middy shivered, her nipples so hard they hurt. Maybe that was the reason they kept it so cold, she mused, feeling goosebumps rising on her exposed flesh. Her clothes, such as they had been, were gone, and the hooded figures moved around her, not touching, but she knew they were looking, curious, at her body.
"Nice masks," she murmured, blinking at the brightness. More lights above her, so bright they left spots behind her eyelids when she closed them. "You guys do Halloween?"
She felt as if she were floating. Drugged, she decided.
Is that why I feel so calm?
