I lifted my hood and at first I heard what could have been the same sleepy rush I’d heard inside conch shells. Ocean and surf. But then, it got more complicated… I couldn’t quite understand what I was hearing until it was obvious that someone was crying. A woman’s voice, husky and low, grew in volume. Sobbing, struggling for breath between her tears, it was as if she’d been trapped behind a glass wall. I listened harder. Came closer. Another woman with a higher voice, she was also crying. Hers was a suffering, dungeon captive’s song, and when the sound of hers rose with the others, a torturous chorus emerged. If that weren’t enough, soon, there came the tears of a little girl. She couldn’t have been older than ten. As I continued to listen, it only got worse. There were two little girls now. Or three? Five? As I tried to parse out each, they grew more numerous until there were too many to count, joining together in a demonic fugue. I found myself leaning. Falling forward. This until a hand on my neck yanked me back, and I found myself on my ass. I then looked up and saw Lexi, her chest heaving as she stood above me.
“C-c-careful,” she said.
The mass was receding rapidly now. First, it shrank to the size of a trampoline. A few seconds after that, a car tire. Soon enough, a dinner plate. And, in its final stage, it became nearly indistinguishable from a pushpin on the wall, which is how it remained. The cold was gone now. Or at least lessened. Lexi shook out her hands and feet.
“The file,” she said, not wasting a second. She ran toward the small, wooden table next to the cabinet.
I was still dazed from what I’d seen and heard, but I tried to keep my mind sharp as we set our eyes upon what Mr. Kraft had been looking at before he went out on his jog.
“Hurry up, you guys,” we heard Gus say as he neared the doorway.
Lexi put her finger to the file to track the words. She read better that way, I knew. Sometimes, I’d see her in class whispering words to herself as she tracked them, and she was doing the same thing now. After she’d reached a certain point, however, she stopped, in her eye in a look of confusion. I leaned in and began to read, skimming over the contents to see why. When I finally did, I almost didn’t believe it.
LEXI NAVARRO
Her name glared up at me like it had been written in fire. Printed a quarter of the way down the page, it was positioned in a sort of information ledger, similar to the sheet you’d see in a doctor’s office or with someone collecting stats for the national census. Strewn throughout were preliminary facts about Lexi that spanned from her physical attributes, weight, height, eye color, and health history, to family members, sexual orientation, and academic performance.
“Lexi…”
“Turn the page,” she said.
I nodded. The next section contained an entire write-up on what could only be defined as Lexi’s personality. It was written in a formal and antique script. Almost out of a different era. The language was bizarre. I saw words I didn’t understand in the context in which they were being used. Sentences like, “Given her acute disdain for hysteria, I reason she’ll adjudicate subject 72’s hyper-frensitivity.” Another read, “Her partial blindness, as it is and will be, has resulted in emotional solemnity, making L.V. a plenary antidote to subject 13’s moral vacancy.”
Lexi maintained a severe sort of calm. “Keep going.”
The next page was the most disturbing of all, for it featured pictures of Lexi. Pictures of Lexi at school. Pictures of Lexi at home. Pictures, I noticed before turning my head, of Lexi nude and half-nude, changing in her bedroom. Lexi with her eyepatch on. Lexi with her eyepatch off. Lexi walking to school and Lexi climbing into the Shepherd. Lexi at dinner with her mother and Lexi crying on her bed. There were so many photos I began to feel sick looking at them. Some in particular, those taken in her bed and bathroom, were invasive. Menacing.
Unable to look any longer, I turned to the next section, which consisted of endless, maddeningly meticulous notes on Lexi’s lifestyle and habits. These were observations only someone watching her on a near-constant basis could know. How she ate. What cigarettes she smoked. What made her laugh or drove her into anger or brought her to tears. There was something about her ability to solve complex problems. And another section about her empathy toward animals, and yet another about her absent father. This entire document was a work of harrowing obsession. Whoever had compiled it viewed Lexi as more of a taxonomical species than an individual. Lexi was being picked apart, and pieces of her were being pinned to corkboard like insects in an entomologist’s lab.
As we continued to look, her face grew paler and paler. By the time we got to the last page, I felt so piteous I couldn’t carry on. Lexi closed her mouth and retracted her hand as I closed the file. On the front of the folder, we then noticed, was a stamp of red ink.
FIT FOR COLLECTION
Gus hissed at us from the entryway. His eyes were large and furious. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
The urgency in his voice made us scramble. We flipped the folder back to page one, shut off the light, and closed the door softly on our way out. Rushing through the back, we emerged into the yard; rain slammed into our ponchos until they clung to our bodies. We ran toward the van without looking back. Without knowing what was behind us.
For more information about the author, Samuel Sattin, visit his web page at samuelsattin.com.
