Page 21 of Homebound
“Oh, lordy.” Ruby rolled her eyes. “Our Gemma found herself a pet.”
Ruby promised to get the water, and Gemma hoped today it wasn’t too awful to use for bathing.
After the cellblock emptied out for their yard time, Gemma went to Simon. She tried to finger-feed him again while waiting on Ruby to bring up the water but had no more success than the previous day. He simply didn’t participate in the eating activity, and short of shoving the gruel down his throat, Gemma had limited options.
Today the gruel was thicker than usual, lumpy, and undercooked. Simon seemed to be having a particularly difficult time with it. He refused to swallow no matter how insistently Gemma rubbed his throat. She may have imagined it, but at one time she thought he pushed the food out of his mouth, quite consciously not liking it.
“Simon, you can’t be a baby about it,” she said to him after she wiped his chin for the fifteenth time. “This is real. You have to eat. I know the food’s gross, but you have to work with me here.”
But he refused to work with her, and his skeletal frame was beginning to put Gemma into a state of panic. If he died - when he died - she’d be disconsolate.
She didn’t know if she regarded him as a pet as Ruby had suggested, but the truth hit her on the head just then: she’d become attached to a being who could offer her nothing in return except anguish through his passing.
Angry with herself for picking the wrong males to get attached to, she removed the bowl from under his face. Fine, let him stay hungry. But she’d had it with his stink. The sponge bath was firmly in the plans, and he couldn’t say no to that.
Forcing him to lay down on his cot and not being as gentle with handling him as she could have been, Gemma briskly undressed Simon. A fresh wave of pity rose within her at the sight of his nakedness. She’d anticipated an anorexic display of ribs outlined in each prominent detail, and a sunken stomach that dipped all the way down to his spine, but she hadn’t expected scars. So many scars.
Swallowing thickly, she dipped his old shirt in the water and started at his neck, carefully swiping to clean the grime. He didn’t have facial hair, and his skin was smooth, hairless, and dry. The base of his neck sported a series of small hieroglyphic tattoos done in a bright indigo shade. He was cool to the touch, definitely a few degrees lower in body temperature than Gemma, and she was unsure if it was normal for him, or caused by his illness, or simply a reaction to the permafrost of his cell.
She kept working quickly washing his chest and shoulders, his upper arms and pits, all of it dry and hairless except for random patches of delicate peach-fuzz that looked balding and reminded Gemma of a moth-eaten suede shawl Aunt Herise was so attached to.
But the numerous scars told the story of a life lived in fights. Most were old, pale, almost undetectable. Others were more recent but well healed. The scariest ones looked like surgical incisions, the roughly stapled ones, and they were made in odd places. Her stomach heaved. What had been done to him to bring him here, in this condition?
Enormous whitish eyes staring straight up, Simon never broke out in goosebumps or shivered, yet Gemma was freezing by just looking at him, naked and damp. Moving down to his belly, she took note of his navel, large and concave, sunken deeply into the skin without muscle to stretch it, but bearing testament that Rix were born just like humans, after a gestational period within a mother. She was glad to have learned it from his anatomy. They had at least one thing in common - the belly button. She didn’t know how she’d’ve reacted had he hatched from an egg.
She scrubbed his stomach and flanks, rinsing her improvised washcloth in between the wipings. Done with the stomach, Gemma stalled. Indecision puckered her brow as she studied the area that waited to be cleaned next. His privates.
Or whatever.
Well, there was something, like a wrinkled bit of skin that could pass for… she wasn’t sure it could pass. Confused, she looked out of his cell to re-establish that this was a male cellblock. And there was no question that Simon looked like a male, large-boned and markedly wide in the shoulders, with narrow hips.
Had he beenmutilated? Horrified, Gemma inspected his groin area for telltale scars that would explain the missing equipment, but all she could observe was smooth papery skin over the protruding hip bones, slightly loose around the legs, implying that it had once wrapped around a much larger muscle mass.
No scars.
Shaking her head, Gemma resumed her sponge bath, carefully working with and around the body part that she was having an issue with. It just wasn’t what she’d expected. Not that she had expected much. Meaning, she had had no expectations at all because she hadn’t given any thought about what lay underneath his dirty scrubs.
Discombobulated, she did a quick job of his legs noting that his kneecaps were three times the size of hers and patted him dry. Docile as always, he turned over at her urging. His back bore several long burn scars, something a laser weapon might leave if skimmed over the skin, but they all appeared old and well healed.
His arm dropped limply off the cot and his hand landed to rest on the floor, palm up, fingers curled in repose. All six of them.
When she finished, Gemma quickly dressed him up in fresh scrubs sending mental thanks to Marigold and propped him into his usual sitting position with his back to the wall. To say that Simon was now squeaky-clean would be an exaggeration, but she admired her handiwork anyway, noting how his skin was no longer grimy and sticky to the touch, and the rank smell disappeared from his cell. No more smell was important. And he had socks and boots now covering his feet, as well as a light jacket to go outside.
Hmm, go outside…
Chapter 7
“Do you expect me to sling him around like a discus thrower? This bag of bones ain’t that lightweight, Gemma.”
“No, of course not. I will push the wheelchair inside his cell, all the way to the cot, and all we have to do is transfer him from the cot to the chair. He can’t be that heavy.”
Arlo gave her a withering look. “You wait and see. We’ll throw our backs, and to hell with it. Why are we doing it, again?”
“He deserves to go outside like the rest of the population.”
“The green man over there doesn’t go, and he seems fine.”
A prolonged screech followed by a bout of maniacal laughter emanated from Little Green Man’s cell. The bars of his door rattled like crazy and something flew from there to splash wetly on the corridor floor. No, he was definitely not fine, but whether the lack of outside air had anything to do with his problems, Gemma couldn’t be certain.
