Cracked Porcelain (2 page)

The young girl stood before the towering Mardo, mentally toiling with the awkward silence that had formed between them. He spun his finger in a circle in front of his chest. “So, let’s get a look at you. You look so bundled up!”

With her arms
clenched tight and her hands resting on her thighs, she rigidly did a quick turnaround for Mardo. His eyes lit up. Even hidden under the heavy sweat shirt he could tell this young girl was a doll. He could also tell, though, that she was treading in a pool of a lingering, nagging fear. He reached out with his tree trunk of an arm. “There’s no reason to be scared here, love. This is the safest place on this planet for you and I’m the safest man in the world you could be sharing this moment with. I assure you of that. Come, there’s too much noise and light here. These mongrel heathens of mine know no manners in the face of new family.” He stepped forward and wrapped his arm around her, escorting her away.

They went deeper into the compound, walking down a long corridor lit by flickering ceiling lights which dangled lazily, partially unhinged from their housings. The cones of light swayed, licking at the floor below as they walked underneath them. Maximillia was just a nestling practically cowering  under Mardo’s thick, muscled wing as they walked along. He dwarfed her both in height and width, but she didn’t resist at all.

As he spoke he’d look down at her from time to time. “It’s my job to make sure you’re put at ease. See, this world produces boys and girls like you. They disregard us and cast us out. We become invisible, uncared for, shunned and found in contempt. What else can we do but band together?” Still having not uttered a peep, she kept a polite smile, unsure of if her choices for the evening were wise. With an open mind, though, she listened to Mardo’s pitch. “You’re probably wondering what we have to offer you here.” She was beginning to wonder this when he stopped, swung around in front of her and put firm hands on her shoulders, glaring down on her. “Love. We offer only love. A love that society has denied us.”

Then, just as quickly, he threw his arm back around her and they reached the end of the corridor where a door awaited, protected by two armed Bruisers, one of which who sprung to action and opened
it.

Mardo and Maximillia walked through and the door was shut behind them. The tender youth found herself in a rather expansive chamber deep within the compound. Mardo had carved out a makeshift personal quarters which was far more extravagant than
what any of the other members of the gang enjoyed. A long dining table had been placed amongst discarded industrial machinery, with a full dinner arrangement sprawled out across it. A mouth-watering array of dishes sat patiently, waiting to be consumed.

“Hungry?” Mardo asked.

She shook her head. “No, sir.”

He guffawed. “Sir? You come from good stock.”

Maximillia noticed the blatantly covetous grin on his face and was both curiously repulsed and enticed by it.

“So you won’t eat and you look as nervous as a cornered gnorat, but you’ve got manners. That’s a rare combination amongst our ranks. You are a rare flower. Can I call you that, Maximillia? Flower?”

Secretly she liked the idea of this mountainous man giving her a nickname. A rebellious smirk crept across her lips as she nodded. She was a sheepishly adorable piece of candy that Mardo clearly wanted to gobble down.

Mardo bellowed. “Well, then, if you won’t eat, maybe you’ll let me take you somewhere where you and I can sit down, relax and can talk with a bit more privacy about what I’ve done to deserve your fine company. This is still business between you and I, right?”

He spoke with a salesman’s charming wit and confidence, throwing his arm around Maximillia and whisking her away from the crude dining room, through another wall of semi-transparent drapes, and into a spacious den tucked away in a cleverly hidden nook within the complex. The section of the factory had been outfitted with the accoutrements that one would need to create a cozy, post-modern living space nestled warmly within the warbled web of winding pipes that clung tight to the blandly painted walls. She was visibly impressed.

Mardo snatched up two wine glasses sitting innocently on a tool chest and filled them with a blue liquid from a tall, unlabeled bottle. Maximillia’s curiosity was piqued when he offered her one of the glasses.

“What is it?”

The silver-haired brute downed the contents of his glass in one shot before returning a boastful grin. “It’s good.”

She smiled and drank from the glass. The pungent flavor tickled her tongue and went down smooth. Mardo plopped down on a massive couch at the far side of the room which
could’ve doubled as a bed. He slapped the cushion beside him and Maximillia quickly set her empty glass down and sat beside Mardo.

“You didn’t come here for drinks or food. I see a bit of desperation in your eyes.” Like some wizened sage, a somber aura swelled about him. Maximillia was entranced because he was right. “I can recognize that desperation because I used to see it in my own eyes when I looked in the mirror. That was the day that I learned how cruel and unfair the world can be. That’s a revelation that you’ve recently come to, isn’t it?”

She nodded, eyes locked onto his.

“What was it that made you realize this? What happened to you?”

Emotion overtook Maximillia and her face cracked, her eyes welling up. She lowered her head and put her hands in her lap. With timely shrewdness, Mardo nodded, caressing the side of her head with his meaty paw. “Family. Your father?”

She shook her head through incessant sniffles.

“Mother.”

She nodded.

He analyzed her carefully. “I would’ve said that she refused to let you go, but I think it’s more that she refused to stay. She left you, didn’t she?”

Maximillia’s sniffles turned to a violently trembling sob.

“I’ll tell you a secret. So did mine.”

She looked up at him, eyes red and raw as he nodded with measured emphasis.

“I cried, too, but then I realized she was liberating me. She wouldn’t be there to lie those lies about the world to me anymore. The world is cruel and the lie of blood is the cruelest of all: that your blood and kin are always going to be there for you simply because they’re your blood. They have no obligation. That’s when I learned that the choice of the bonds you make are more powerful than blood. We can’t choose our parents. We have no choice with that, but we have a choice in who we decide to populate our world with. I was just one person when I found the first members of my new family. We formed a circle and then we found other lost souls such as ourselves and our ranks grew.”

Maximillia kept his gaze, captivated by his every word as he continued. “We became a family, a true family in every sense of the word. We shared everything and loved each other unconditionally, the way the world told us our families were supposed to but didn’t. We’re free here. We’re a family. That’s why you came. You want what all of us wanted before we found each other. What you want you can have. We’ll give it freely, and that’s love. Love and unconditional acceptance.”

The naive waif listened intently. Unbeknownst to her, Mardo had mastered the art of the speech after having spoken it hundreds of times. At this point he delivered it with effortless efficacy.

“I can offer this gift to you, Flower,” he said, near to closing the deal. “...but I can only offer it once. There can’t be any indecision. You decide, but the choice is yours.”

She looked down at her knees, her mind swirling with a hundred possibilities.

“You can stay or you can go, but you can’t do both,” he reminded.

The possibilities for Maximillia narrowed, falling away as her focus grew more emboldened. Finally, her eyes rose, fearlessly resolute. “I want to stay.”

Mardo smiled, rising off the couch and refilling their glasses. “Then, we should celebrate.”

He handed Maximillia her glass as he sipped from his own and sat down beside her. They spoke for hours and her meek, soft-spoken veneer slowly melted away. He complimented her almost constantly, his eyes boring into hers with an angelic potency. For that stretch of time she felt like the all-important center of the universe.

The two of them had exhausted several jugs of the blue, tangy liquor over the course of their prolonged exchange. The once aggressive throbbing of the music outside had become a gentle, soothing cradlesong that dissolved into the background. Mardo spoke with clinical precision, dissecting Maximillia’s history cunningly, creating a mental profile based on the answers to the questions he asked and how she visibly responded to the various comments he made in passing. She wasn’t an impenetrable, stone-faced puzzle box.
The truth was quite the contrary: Maximillia was criminally predictable, a hopelessly naive quarry for Mardo’s consummate hunter.

“So, is this it?” she asked. “Am I a part of your club?”

He laughed at the nature of her question. Nervously, she laughed too. “This is a family, my dear Flower,” Mardo remarked, brushing several errant strands of her dark hair aside, revealing the dark pools of her eyes. “To answer your question there is one final step that we all must make before joining the family. A small token which is given to us by you. It’s a promise symbolized by a gift.”

“A gift? Like, something I’d have to buy and wrap?”

Mardo chuckled again. Maximillia’s shy rawness made her even more delectable. “No, this gift is one you can already choose to give. It costs no money but is more valuable than anything that can be bought.”

“What is it?
”

“A gift of the flesh,” he said with a grave somberness. Her brows raised and her eyes widened. “Spoken promises mean nothing. They can be broken, but when you give up something through an act of devotion,
that
has meaning.”

“Did you give a gift?” she asked.

Mardo held up his hand and revealed a mangled burn mark on his palm. “I was the first. I chose to give pain to show the family the level of my devotion. The first members begged that I not, but it was my choice. I didn’t ask that they do the same. They gave their own gifts and they were enough. So, the tradition has been that the men give a gift of pain and the women give a gift of love. Both require giving something and losing something. Are you prepared to give a gift of love to this family to secure your place?”

She thought about it for several long moments before giving him a firm, measured nod.
With that, he rose from the couch and walked over to a countertop built into the wall. He picked up a small device that sat innocently amongst other sundry items; a thin set of compact binoculars composed of a transparent material. The eye pieces glowed a soft, brilliant aquamarine.

Mardo sat back down, holding the eyepiece up to her. “You’ve been living your life with blinders on, as we all did. Look through these lenses and see the light.”

“Just look through them?”

He nodded. Maximillia took the eyepiece and held it to her face, resting it on the bridge of her nose, and glared through it. The blue light shone into her eyes and soon a kaleidoscopic display revealed itself to her. She could hear the harmonic rhythm of her heartbeat
and everything else fell away: A dripping water faucet turned into a slow-motion ballet where the sound of each drop hitting the metal sink seemed to stretch on for minutes; her irises dilated and her breathing slowed; her arms grew weak, falling to the cushions beside her and dropping the eyepiece as her body lost all tenseness and slumped back into a boneless heap against the couch.

She stared up at the ceiling, hearing only her breathing and seeing only a flittering cascade of sparks dancing across the convex stage of her eyes. The peculiar light had interacted with the blue liquid she’d spent hours sipping at creating a most diabolic reaction. The compound resulted in a catalytic process that tricked the brain into releasing a particularly potent series of naturally-produced hallucinogenic neurochemicals. On the street, this was called a Gatekeeper. The results were blatantly clear as Maximillia’s limp form lied there, a faint, conquered smile revealing her anesthetized elation. Her eyes, while open, were glassy and distant, blinking weakly every other second.

Mardo allowed her to settle into her intoxicated state before leaning over her. “Flower, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” she said, quietly euphoric.

“You understand every word I’m saying, correct?”

She nodded.

“Some would say you’ve been drugged, but to initiate into this family we all volunteered to see the light and we did. What you’re feeling right now isn’t inebriation but liberation.”

Again, she nodded in passive agreement, clearly in no state to give a lengthy, carefully constructed response. Delicately, Mardo brushed the hair from her face, admiring her sinless beauty; her virginal, unmarked youth was something to behold. “I want you to stand and see the world with your new eyes, Flower. Can you do that for me?”

Maximillia nodded once more as Mardo helped her rise from the couch. He pulled her baggy sweatshirt from her shoulders and peeled it off. “Let me take this, so you can get comfortable. I want to see my beautiful Flower.”

She didn’t resist, only helping him to help her remove it with muted obedience. He tossed the sweatshirt to the far side of the couch and sat back, taking in the sight of her. She was a diminutive waif, her features not fully matured. Her hips hadn’t flexed to their final width and her bust was still little more than two swollen lumps bulging from beneath her slim-fit
long-sleeved shirt. Cast in a pair of black, form-fitting exercise sweats, Maximillia’s legs were long and slim like the rest of her, yet her rear-end showed an unusual plumpness when compared to the rest of her body which lacked voluptuousness.