The New Guy or Taxus Baccata

Content Warning: This story contains descriptions of abduction, torture, and mutilation.

“This is Coco the cat. She is the only one here who gets to keep her tongue,” she said as she lowered his freshly severed tongue into a jar of formaldehyde. “Besides me, of course”, she giggled. She always introduced her newest arrival to her cat. She felt the new guy staring at her as she put his jar next to the others. She had contemplated taking their eyes instead of their tongues but decided against it. Not only did they have to hear what happened to her, they had to watch her go through it too. They just didn’t need to be able to talk about it. Just like she didn’t have someone to talk about it.

She noticed how he was still all new to being abducted; he was still lucid and lively and giving her a headache while he rattled his chains. The men always showed the same behaviour on the first few days. She was surprised to notice the difference when she took her first female. The foul words coming out of those almost shocked her. She noticed that Coco didn’t pay attention to the new guy. The cat was used to their stench and the fear fuelled adrenalin they exuded. It was Coco’s custom to curl up between Tim and Mike, the first guys who were brought home. Their jars got a bit slimy and their tongues were already a burnt brown. She didn’t know how to preserve flesh very well back then, though she refined her taxidermy over time, and now she had the perfect ratio of formalin to water; tongues were no plants, after all. The ritual was almost complete. Now all she had to do was sit down and write.

The table was in the midst of them, so no detail of what she did would go unnoticed. She lit the candle on her table, sat down, and took a minute to take in this new dynamic. She had added one pair of eyes to her audience, one pair of ears and one conscious that had only her on his mind. She felt their energy in this circle she had created, she felt their attention, and she took it all in while writing her rapport. The date went to the top right. The place she encountered him to the left. And she always added the ambience of the day; how the sun just hit the trees next to him as she made him go with her. The beauty of it all. How lucky they were that she was able to make something great out of the most unpleasant events. Her pen skipped. She looked up to see if they noticed. See how life was treating her? And still, she smiled. She sighed as she took another pen. This ink was a slightly darker blue. Every one of her readers would notice that she had to change pens mid-sentence. She blew out the candle. Slowly she got up and looked around the circle.

The new one didn’t know what would happen next yet, his eyes were big with something she did not understand. The others knew what was coming, and they gave her a soft smile. Just like she wanted them to do. As she gave them something to drink, she wondered if she would divert from her ritual. Maybe she should give the new guy water even before she would give him his name? Donna gulped. Whenever she didn’t pay attention, Donna would get too greedy. She felt the others hated Donna for that. The new guy watched it all happen. He hated Donna too. She decided that he wouldn’t get water before she named him, how else would he learn he had to smile? It was a busy day. She had to tend to all her plants. And after all that, in the late evening, the naming ceremony would begin. She knew days with a new addition to her audience were more tiresome than others, but leisure days would follow. Dim lit days when she would tend to her plants and her growing audience, giving every living being what they craved: Coco some treats with catnip, the plants some water and sunlight and the humans only needed her presence and water. They were so grateful to be here. They irked her, of course they did.

They irked her now, and every one of them had annoyed her on the day they met. A day made for light-hearted meetings and running errands with a smile, and then they came around the corner. Distressing her. She knew they were just tormenting her out of envy, boredom, and lack of philosophical training. They undermined her because they wanted to be like her, only treating her this way to give their lives meaning. And she would gladly give it to them.

Coco brushed against her legs. Dinnertime. Of course, there wasn’t a way for her to daydream with a cat by her side. Coco meowed her happy meow, she mixed it with a deep purring as a first class sound engineer. She was so happy to see her. Most of the time she fed Coco kibbles, but on the day a new person arrived, Coco knew she would get her wet food. Pavlov was quick and thorough. She noticed how the sun brushed Coco’s fur coat, while her cat just ate her food as quick as she could. As if years gone by without any food instead of hours. She grabbed the catnip treats, so Coco would get her dessert like always. It was a ritual they both loved, and Coco’s cuddles in thanks made her heart melt every time.

She was tired. Baptizing the newcomer had to wait. She had to go out again tomorrow and after that, she would take time to baptize him. She had errands to run, and she hoped no one would throw themselves at her. She didn’t want to take another one home. Not now, not this soon. Her latest addition was a feisty one. At first, he made the noises they all made, pretending to be scared instead of thrilled to be with her. Rattling their shackles, trying to meet her eyes. But eventually, they would all give up and calm down. But not this one. His eyes followed her everywhere, and he made sounds with the stump of a tongue he had. He kicked and rattled with his chains like he had a story to tell, like he had to exist not merely as her audience. He sure as hell didn’t see his worth as a member of her circle of audience, if he did, he would have been quiet like the others.

That night, he didn’t let her sleep. Every time she dozed off, he made a sound that would startle her. And it spread. His behaviour made the others misbehave as well. When she first started out, the room was more or less silent at nights, at most some dramatic snorting sounds could be heard. This night was filled with a cacophony of rattling chains and throat sounds. She didn’t know what to do about it. Worst of all, they collectively stopped watching her. Their eyes used to follow her intensely before the nameless one arrived. Bright, attentive eyes that were focused on her and analyse her every step. Whenever she would look up, she would see a glimpse of awe on their faces. It was what gave her strength. Now they all averted their eyes. Because of her sleepless night, she decided to stay in. They continued their uproar, so she couldn’t focus on the things that needed to be done. The sounds they made were just too awful. They were so intrusive she couldn’t even think about the basic things. Coco curled up next to her. The cat didn’t even seem surprised at the sudden inertia of her owner. Not even when moments became hours. As long as she got her food and a head pat, everything was hunky-dory for Coco.

It took a lot of effort to focus on herself. She had to eat and drink while the six of them took turns making the most unnerving sounds. She had to journal through it too. The noise made her thoughts go stale. Nothing came out onto the paper. So she just sat there, pretending to be unfazed, staring at the blank page in front of her. They wouldn’t notice anyway. They weren’t watching her any more.

Suddenly, she felt the need to get out. She couldn’t handle the noise any more. She needed the quiet and a change of scenery. With the disturbances still ringing in her ears, she took her keys and left. She did not have a plan. Just a full head. She followed the riverside to the park. There was a bench she was heading to, in the shades of this perfect Taxus baccata, it was a spot she used to go to all the time when she was younger. The old Yew tree was her favourite back in the days, when she used to go to parks to study them. Now she had no need for favourites any more, she just needed some peace and quiet. The bench was far enough away from the picnic area, the small playground and the pond full of loud ducks. She could see her destination from afar. It was perfect, she couldn’t wait to sit in silence, to finish a thought. She quickened her pace as she saw a man also approaching the bench. Not just a man. A gentleman, a chatty one by the looks of it. Someone who wouldn’t stop bothering her about the weather, the lovely pond full of ducklings and the thousand-year-old tree shielding them from the sun. A perfect addition to her circle of audience.

She quickened her pace to be the first and hopefully the only one on the bench, but he beat her to it. She decided to keep walking, pretending she had never intended to sit on that rickety bench after all. She was sure he knew she was pretending, and she could feel his eyes in her back. But she couldn’t, she could not afford interaction with a potential annoying person. Not now. It wasn’t the right time to cut another tongue, not when the last one even didn’t have a name yet. She felt the anger rise in her nonetheless. The annoyance. That feeling that she wanted to pop something until its content flowed over her, or to rip something until the blood oozed over her hands. To cut, just to cut in the thick flesh of a moving tongue, a tongue that wouldn’t just lay still in the mouth it belonged to. A tongue that followed her every move. And with the satisfying sliding of her knife, the cuts deepened, cleaving the flesh with each stroke, the tissue desperately trying to find the other side again. To heal and pretend nothing had happened. She would make sure it couldn’t.

No one flinched when she stepped inside her house, nor when she picked up her grafting knife. She felt invisible. She caressed the knife with the silence of an empty room surrounding her. How did they pull it off, she wondered, how did they manage to keep themselves so calm. It looked like they were sleeping. There was this calm rhythm in their breathing; together, in unison, and she hated it. They were more attune with each other than with her. When they were awake, they had more eye for each other than for her. She could feel their bond. This had never been her intention. She had gone through so many struggles to get them here, to keep them alive. Alive for what? Alive to sleep through her days and keep her awake at night? Alive to make so much noise at the times she wanted to think, alive to just ignore her? They excluded her just like the rest of the world did. Ignoring the fact that they purely existed by her grace.

They were the chosen ones, and even they left her out. She checked her ice. Everything was there, all the things she needed to do it over and over again. She felt the dopamine firing in her brain, the delight she felt imagining the cutting, the warmth of the blood, the slipperiness of the ice cooling the wound. She could almost smell the hot grafting knife as she carefully burnt the last remaining spluttering blood vessels. The need felt overwhelming, the need to cut, the need to be seen. The feeling grew stronger, and she took her knife to them. To her circle of audience. She would make them look. Make them see her. She cut them in their arms, in their legs, but whatever she did, they refused to look at her, and she made such a mess with these superficial wounds she decided to stop. It didn’t give her the satisfaction, it didn’t temper her need to cut through several layers of muscle while an open jar of formaldehyde stood next to her. She felt a persistent, throbbing pain in her side below her ribs, the muscles of her back tensed, and she knew she had to cut; cut the world to pieces, cut to make everything stop.

The knife felt cool and balanced in her hand. This is what she needed. She knew she could kill them. Cut their throats. Chop them up because they refused to acknowledge her. With the last bit of restraint she had in her, she put the grafting knife away. She would make them notice her. She would. But she wouldn’t kill them. They were even more useless dead than alive. She would sleep. She would wake up tomorrow and they would notice her. They would want to see her. She would exist. Tomorrow. The energy in the room shifted as soon as she dozed off. It was as if their muscles could carry their limbs again, as if their eyes could see again, and as if the shackles were not there to restrain them, but to make noise.

As soon as she sat up, the quiet came back. When she was awake, there would be this stillness, a silence that made her think that even the dust refrained from falling. Even the dust was ignoring her. Only the purring of Coco would calm her down. In the quiet of the night she searched for her in her usual places, but Coco wasn’t home. Even her cat had deserted her. She tried to sleep again with the duvet over her head and a finger in her ear to block out the noise. She cried instead. She was hiding. Under her duvet. Hiding. Again. She did not exist.

The only people who mattered to her, her circle of audience, ruled her night. They decided her fate. They decided if she was perceived. She didn’t exist at all. They were right to ignore her. She was useless. She was just such a clueless little thing that no one listened to, the words she spoke hung in the air like raindrops on a hazy day, they were there, but they were meaningless, just like her.

She knew how she needed to treat herself, this waste of space that she was and always had been. She knew everything was ready. There was a clean cloth. There was ice. The sharpening of the knife only took a minute. She had done this before. It would be slippery. She had to be quick, certain, and careful at the same time. This had to be done right.

She set up shop in the middle of her circle of audience. Nothing changed. They had their eyes closed. Their heads averted. As she gripped her own tongue with the cloth, pulled it tight and put the knife against it, she thought she noticed a shift. A slight shift. It was not enough. With a clean and decisive stroke, she cut off as much of her tongue as she could. The blood and saliva were exorbitant, but the cloth and the ice would stop that, soon. She wiped her hands and put her tongue in its own container. She started to feel light-headed, the adrenalin started to wear off.

She felt all kinds of sensations. Most surprisingly, she felt alive. She crept to the empty shackles in the circle. She noticed they watched her. Their eyes were fixated on her, their mouths were open to the point of drooling. She saw a despair and hatred in their face she never saw before. She slapped the shackle on her wrist and as she looked around the circle one last time as her gaze began to narrow, her ears began to buzz and with the knowledge that her world was finally noticing her she lost consciousness.