Bedlam by Charlene Elsby

Author:Charlene Elsby [Elsby, Charlene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781954899469
Google: SknXzwEACAAJ
Amazon: B0C4VRJPT2
Publisher: Apocalypse Party
Published: 2023-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Record scratch, here we go again. Stuck under the weight of some dude whose mass I discounted, telling myself that survival depends more on intelligence than bulk. But the thing about intelligence is that it doesn’t work of itself as a physical force, like you can’t (without the skill of telekinesis, which I’d been working on since I was a small child but had yet been able to master) push a man off you and get out the door with intelligence alone. All you can do is think about it.

Of course, I tried to do it physically, but that, I quickly decided, would not work in my best interest. It seemed to get him off a little, my pushing and scratching him. There are some who might not like that, who might rethink the whole endeavour if you threaten to leave enough scratches on them, but this guy. It was like he knew he wouldn’t be going to a wedding or other formal social events for months. Like he knew there was time to let it heal, no matter what I did. Like he was down.

So fine, I thought. Play dead. Don’t move. Go limp. You have to adapt to the situation at hand. If he wants it easy, fight back. If he wants a fight, let him fuck a corpse. But at some point, you have to realize those are your only options and how to get by, being someone with only those kinds of options.

I thought about the mattress and how our combined weights would affect its springs. How a large-ish man pressing down on someone pretending to be a corpse might cause more distress than normal fucking. It’s the same count of two people engaged, with the same mass, but I don’t know. Maybe the distribution of it, the lack of motion around the mattress, would cause it wear and tear in the wrong places. I pictured myself trying to sell the mattress down the road, how a young couple comes to pick it up from me, looks at the damage done by the outline of a body that’s been pressed too hard into its springs. I say, “Oh yeah, sorry about the rape lines,” like I didn’t think to put it in the description online. They scowl but give me the $50 and start hauling it away. After all, they’re already here.

I thought about the chance that I’d get HIV from him, the only STI the public school taught us to fear. You have to use condoms, they said, and here they are, because of AIDS. They made us play a game where you walk around the room shaking hands with people to simulate an active sex life and then at the end of it, it turns out one of them has AIDS and gave it to everyone they shook hands with, who gave it to everyone else, etc. One girl had a condom and saved half the room. I told myself that drug therapies being

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