Page 2 of Maksim

You know what men want.

Except I don’t know what these men want. Not really, not beyond the obvious. I don’t know anything, and that scares me worse than the guns they carry.

Even squinting, I can only make out a man’s silhouette as he climbs into the cargo space, the light behind him too bright for my sensitive eyes. His hand lifts to cover his nose as he coughs.

“Jesus Christ, how long have you had this load?”

The driver cackles at the new man’s repulsion for us. We’re nothing to him. Less than nothing to him. Our filth is somehow more of a burden for him than it is for us.

“About a day and a half. Only three stops left.”

The new man shakes his head. Slowly, my eyes adjust. I can see his thick eyebrows and the blue of his shirt.

“Up,” he growls. I don’t know if he’s talking to me, but I stand, my spine rigid.

The Russian woman stands as well, and as he steps up to each of us, I have to look away. He has an evil in his eyes that I didn’t hear in his voice, and now I can say with certainty that I don’t want to be chosen. I want to live in this cargo space until I die.

He grasps my jaw, roughly jerking my head up to look at him, and my breath stutters, but I don’t cry out like I want to. I can feel how wide my eyes are and imagine how weak I must look to him, how vulnerable. I wonder how much he likes it.

He looks down at my dress, the dress, and he must not see the magic it did for me because his lip curls, and he lets go of my jaw, moving on to the Russian girl.

I slowly lower to the floor, not making a sound in case it reminds him I exist, and when he makes his choice, I hate myself for being so relieved it isn’t me.

Hours pass.

I don’t know how many. Time is impossible to measure in the thinning space, but by the time the door opens again, it’s dark outside. Last time the door opened to reveal the night sky, it let in a cool breeze, so I cross my arms in anticipation. No breeze comes. It’s just as hot as it was before.

Something is different this time. I can sense it without pinpointing exactly what it is, and I think the others can too.

We’re on edge. There’s only one stop after this, so the time for wondering who will be next is over. It’s all our turn now. The four of us make up the last pick of the litter, the unwanted ones, and I can only imagine this isn’t a good place to be.

When the sliding door is fully opened, the driver stands with his hand hovering in the air. Two other shadows are perched on either side of him, and when a flashlight he’s holding clicks on, the little I see of the men disappears as I duck my head. The beam glides over us, blinding our sensitive eyes one by one.

“Out.”

Tension squeezes my shoulder blades, but I don’t move. I won’t be the first to obey the command, not when I don’t know what’s waiting for us.

The driver growls before banging the flashlight against the side of the truck, startling every one of us who've become accustomed to the silence. “Out.” He’s louder this time. More insistent, and it occurs to me that I don’t know the number of women in here who speak English, if any. I also don’t know how long until the driver becomes violent.

The smell of urine gets stronger as a girl starts to cry, and I throw a glance that way, not knowing what I hope to convey but wishing I had said something sooner. That we would’ve acted like we were in this together instead of hoping ill fate to fall on each other to spare ourselves.

I stand, straightening the dress for reasons I’m unsure of, then slowly make my way out of the truck. The driver grows impatient with me, his hand waving in another universal hurry up gesture.

As I climb off the truck, I lock eyes with a man I wish I hadn’t, making that mistake the second time today. He smiles ever so slightly, but it isn’t a kind smile. There’s no warmth, no welcoming.

The driver yanks me by my arm, throwing me between the two men, then he roughly pulls on the two girls who’ve chosen to follow me. He has to go inside the cargo space to retrieve the other girl, and I busy myself taking in my surroundings as a distractor from the screams.

I can feel eyes on me, but I don’t look the man’s way. Instead, I look out at … dirt. More dirt than I’ve ever seen in my life. It stretches more kilometres than I can count, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say it led to the edge of the Earth. The strange theories about the Earth being flat must have come from people who live here.

Where are we? Mars?

I search for trees, for water, for any signs of life, but there’s nothing. There looks to be hills in the distance, but even those look barren, no green in sight. It makes sense, I guess, when I think of how weird the air feels. I’ve never been outside of Albania, but I’ve heard the air is more humid there than most places. This is the opposite. There isn’t any moisture here to spare for the plants, let alone for the air.

“In a line,” Driver snaps after shoving the last girl onto the dirt.

“Do they all speak English?” the man who smiled at me asks. I can still feel his eyes on me. Instead of looking at his face, I stare at his bright red shoes, moving when Driver shoves me into another girl to manually form the line himself. I don’t know if I should pretend I don’t speak English or not, I just get the sense that I shouldn’t stand out. Not to these men.

“Hablo Anglés?” he asks, clapping his hands in front of the woman he brought out of the truck. He not only butchered the pronunciation of that sentence, but he is also speaking Spanish to a Filipina woman. I’ve never seen a man this ignorant.

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