Not For The Faint Of Heart

[TDurden]

Please understand.

Nobody here is defending what Cora did.

Maybe two years aho was the only time anything like this had ever happened. Spring and fall, the county staff has to take a refresher in mouth-to-mouth. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Each group meets in the health room to practice heart massage on the dummy. They partner up, the agency director pumping the chest, the other person kneeling down, pinching the nose shut, and blowing air into the mouth. The fummy is a Breather Betty model, just a torso with a head. No arms or legs. Rubbery blue lips. Eyes molded open, staring. Green eyes. Still, whoever makes these dummies, they glued long eyelashes on her. They glued on a glamour-girl wig, the red hair so smooth you don't feel your fingers combing it until someone else says, "Easy there..."

While she knelt next to the dummy and spread her red painted fingernails against its chest, the agency director, Director Sedlak, said how all Breather Betty dolls are molded from the death mask of a single French girl.

"True story," she told the group of them.

This face on the floor, it's the face of a suicide pulled from the water over a century ago. Those same blue lips. The same staring dull eyes. All Breather Betty dolls are molded from the face of this same young woman who threw herself into the Seine River.

If this girl died because of love or loneliness, we'll never find out. But the police detectives used plaster to cast a mask of her dead face, to help find her name, and decades later a toymaker owned that death mask and used it to cast the face of the first Breather Betty.

Despite the risk that somebody in a school or factory or Army unit might someday lean down and recognize the long-dead body of their sister, mother, daughter, wife, this exact dead girl is kissed by millions of people. For generations, millions of strangers have pressed their mouths over hers, those lips her exact drowned lips. For the rest of history, all over the world people will be trying to save the same dead woman.

This woman who just wanted to die.

The girl who turned herself into an object.

Nobody said that last part. But nobody had to say it.

So, last year, Cora Reynolds was in a group that goes to the health room and takes the Breather Betty out of her blue plastic suitcase. They lay her out on the linoleum tile. Swab her mouth with hydrogen peroxide. It's standard hygiene procedure. Another county policy. Director Sedlak bends to put both her palms on the middle of Betty's chest. On her sternum. Someone kneels close to pinch Betty's nose. The director shoves down on the plastic chest. And the kneeling guy, with his mouth on Betty's rubber mouth, he starts to cough.

He leans back, coughing, sitting on his heels. Then he spits. Splat, there on the health-room linoleum tile, he spits. The mouth guy wipes the back of one hand across his lips and says, "Damn, that stinks."

The people crowded around, Cora Reynolds among them, the rest of the class, they lean closer.

Still squatting there, the mouth guy says, "There's something inside her." He covers his mouth and nose with one cupped hand. His face twisted sideways, away from the rubber mouth but still watching it, he says, "Go ahead. Hit her, again. Hit her hard."

The director, bent over with the heels of both hands on Betty's chest, her fingernails painted dark red, she shoves down.

And a fat bubble swells between Betty's blue rubber lips. Some liquid, some salad dressing, thin and milky white, the bubble swells big. A greasy gray pearl. Then a Ping-Pong ball. A baseball. Until it pops. Spattering the greasy off-white soup everywhere. This thin, watery culture, puffing a cloud of stink into the room.

Until that day, anybody could use the Health Room. Lock the door. Unfold the rollaway cot and take a nap during their lunch hour. If they got a headache. Or cramps. The first-aid kit, that's where they'd find it. All the bandages and aspirin. You didn't need anybody's permission. All that's in there is the rollaway cot, a little cabinet with a metal sink for hand-washing, a switch on the wall for the light. The blue plastic suitcase that Breather Betty comes in, it has no lock.

The group, they roll the dummer onto her side, and from the corner of her soft rubber mouth, first a drip, drip, drip, then a thin stream of creamy gruel runs out. Some of the watery mess washes down her pink rubber cheek. Some of it webs between her lips and plastic teeth. Most of it pools on the linoleum tile.

This dummy, now a French person. A girl who drowned. A victim of herself.

Everyone standing there, breathing behind a cupped hand or a handkerchief. Blinking back the smell that makes their eyes water. Their throats slide up and down inside their neck skin as they swallow and swallor to their scrambled eggs and bacon and coffee and oatmeal with the skim milk and peach yogurt and English muffins and cottage cheese down, deep in their gut.

The mouth guy grabs the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and throws his head back. Dumping a double swig into his mouth, he puffs his cheecks. He stares at the ceiling, eyes closed, mouth open, gargling the peroxide. Then he snaps forward to spit his mouthful into the little metal sink.

The room, everybody breathing the laundry-bleach smell of the peroxide, underneath that the toilet smell from the Breather Betty's lungs. The director, she says for somebody to grab a sex-crime investigation kit. The swabs and slides and gloves.

Cora Reynolds, she was among that group, standing so close that she tracked some of the slippery much all the way back to her desk. It's after that day County Facilities put a lock on the door and gave Cora the key. Since then, you get cramps and you put your name on a list, with the date and time, before you get that key. You get a headache, and you ask Cora for two aspirin.

The team at the state labs, when they got the swabs and they ran the slides and cultures, they asked: Was this a joke?

Yeah, the lab team said, the ooze was sperm. Some of it maybe six months old. Dating back to the last mouth-to-mouth class session. But, hey, there was so much of it. Besides, running it for DNA, the generic signifiers showed this was the work of twelve, maybe fifteen different men.

The county guys on this end, they said, Yeah. A bad joke. Now forget it.

This is just what human beings do-turn objects into people, people into objects.

Nobody's saying it's the county team that screwed up. Screwed up big-time.

[Gigabitch]

Wow, Ben, that was seriously gross, but I can totally handle that kind of writing. Is there anything worse? Come on, top that.....

[Love[Sick]]

That last part made me rethink the safety of swimming with a team of 12 or more guys. -gulps- And I thought the chlorine made it safe. [The first story]

[TDurden]

That's just the first two pages of the story, I'm working on the rest. I'll post the next few pages as soon as I copy them over, should be sometime tonight

[Love[Sick]]

I spotted a few grammatical errors.

Picky, picky aren't you? I can look past the grammatical errors (with a bit of force). It's just past/present/future tenses that get me.

[Gigabitch]

He's going to be publishing his book, by the way. I don't think people would enjoy grammatical errors. It shows amateurism.

::sigh:: That's what editors are for, silly. I hope you end up doing something creative with your life and not editing someone else's work. How sad would that be?

[Gigabitch]

Yup. They're pretty.

[Gigabitch]

You're pretty, yourself.

[Gigabitch]

I'm so confused... are you trying to spice up TD's underfed thread?

[misombra]

|The X-rays show the truth, some¬thing long and thin, bent double inside his bladder. This long, thin V inside him, it's collecting all the minerals in his piss. It's getting bigger and rougher, coated with crystals of calci¬um, it's bumping around, ripping up the soft lining of his bladder, blocking his piss from getting out. His kidneys are backed up. What little that leaks out his dick is red with blood.|

i got here and became very nauseous.

[Gigabitch]

Then do NOT read the last one. Do not.

[TDurden]

For the record, none of the story excerpts I'm posting are my own. This all Chuck Palahniuk's work

[TDurden]

I'm transcribing it, so it's likely my fault

[TDurden]

The Breather Betty dummy, it's no surprise Cora took it home. Rinsed out its lungs, somehow. Washed and set its red glmaour-girl hair. Cora bought a new dress for its armless, legless torso. A string of fake pearls for around its neck. Anthing that helpless, Cora could never just toss it in the garbage. She put lipstick on its blue lips. Mascara on its long eyelashes. Blush. Perfume-a lot of perfume, to cover the smell. Some nice clip-on earrings. It would amaze nobody to find out she spent every night sitting on the sofa in her apartment, watching the television and chatting at it.

Just Cora and Betty. Chatting in French.

Still, nobody's calling Cora Reynolds a crackpot. Maybe just a soft touch.

County policy says they should've bagged the old dummy in black plastic and heaved it onto a top shelf in the evidence room. Forgetting her there. Betty, not Cora. Abandoned. Fermenting. Ignored with the numbered bags of dope and coke. The vials of crack and heroin balloons. All the guns and knives waiting to appear in some courtroom. All the seized baggies and balloons shrinking, getting smaller and smaller, until there's just enough left for a felony conviction. All those objects, used.

But, no, they broke the rules. They let Cora take the old dummy home.

Nobody wanted her to grow old alone.

Cora. She was the kind of person, she couldn't buy just one stuffed animal. Part of her job description was to buy a stuffed toy for each kid who came in to give her a statement. Each kid taken into custody by court. Any kid pulled for neglect and placed in a foster home. At the toy store, Cora would take on little plush monkey out of a bin full of animals...but it would look so alone in her shopping cart. So she'd choose a furry giraffe to keep it company. Then a stuffed elephant. A hippo. An owl. At some point, there would be more animals in her shopping cart than in the display bin. And the animals left behind each had an eye missing, an ear frayed, a seam split open. Stuffing poked out. These were the animals no one would want.

Nobody gelt how Cora's heart dropped off a cliff at that moment. That long fall form the tip-top of the world's tallest rollercoaster, that feeling left Cora just skin. Just a skin tube with a tight hole at each end. An object.

Those little tigers smudged with dirt, trailing loose threads. The stuffed reindeers crushed flat. They filled her apartment, those torn pandas and stained little owls and Breather Betty. Just a different type of evidence room.

It's what human beings do...

But poor, poor Cora. Now she's trying to cut off people's tongues. To infect them with parasites. Obstruct justice. She's stealing public property. Nobody's talking about misappropriation of office supplies: pens, staplers, copy paper.

It's Cora who orders the office supplies. She collects everyone's time card on Friday. She hands out the paychecks on Tuesday. Submits all the expense reports to Accounting for reimbursement. Answers the phone: "Child and Family Case Services." She gets a cake and sends a car around the department when it's somebody's birthday. That's her job.

Nobody had a problem with Cora Reynolds before the little girl and boy arrived from Russia. Really, the problem was, Cora never sees a little kid, a freckle-faced, pigtailed little girl, unless somebody's ****ed her.

Every rapscallion little boy, every scamp in bib overalls with a slingshot stuck in his back pocket, Cora's only meeting him because he's been forced to suck cock. Every kid's gap-toothed smile, here it's a mask. Every grass-stained knee, a clue. Every bruise, an indicator. Every wink or squeal or giggle, there's a blank to check for it on the victim-intake form. It's Cora job, keeping track of those interview forms. Keeping track of the kids, each case file, any ongoing investigation. Until what happened, Cora Reynolds was the best office manager ever.

Still, what happens here is just damage control. You can't un**** a kid. Once you bang a kid, there's no getting that genii out of the bottle. That kid's pretty much wrecked for good.

No, most kids come in here quiet. Stetch-marked. Already middle-aged. Not smiling.

Kids come here, and the first step is the evaluation interview with an anatomically detailed doll. This is different from an anatomically correct doll, but plenty of folks get them confused. Cora did. Got them confused.

Your typical anatomically detailed doll is made of cloth, sewn like a stuffed. It has strands of yarn for hair. The big difference between it and Raggedy Ann is the details: A floppy stuffed penis and balls. Or a lacy cloth vagina. A drawstring pulled tight in back to make a puckered anus. Two buttons sewn to the chest for nipples. These dolls are something the intake kids can use to play-act. To demonstrate what Mommy or Daddy or Mommy's new boyfriend did.

The kids stick their fingers in the dolls. Drag the dolls by their yarn hair. Hold the dolls by the neck and shake them until their stuffed heads flop. They hit and lick and bite and suck the dolls, it's Cora's job to sew the nipples back on. Cora will find two new marbles when the little felt scrotum gets yanked too hard.

Everything done to the kids gets done to those dolls.

Nobody just stumbles into this line of work.

Threads come loose from too many molested children molesting the dolls. Too many diddled little boys suck that same pink felt penis. Too many little girls ahve forced a finger, two fingers, three fingers into that same satin-lined vagina. Ripping it at the top and bottom. Little hernias of cotton batting were bulging out. Under their clothes, the dolls were smudged and dirty. Sticky and smelling bad. The fabric was rubbed into pills and snagged with scars where threads were gone.

This little rag doll girl and boy the whole world gets to abuse.

[TDurden]

I got like ten pages left to go. I plan on having it all up by mid day, I really want to see how many people freak