Your Wrongs

When Dan was painfully shocked awake, He didn’t know where he was or how he got there. He was still in the boxers and tank top he wore to bed, and his head was covered in a cloth sack that allowed in no light, if any were around, and barely allowed him to breathe. He sat on a cold metal chair with his hands and feet bound, pulled behind him.

Dan tested his bindings, trying his best to break free, but had no luck.

Some pockets of laughter could be heard in the high-pitched soundscape of what sounded like a horde of angry women chattering, unseen to Dan.

“Hello!” He called out as assertive as he could in his predicament. “I don’t know what is going on, but you won’t get away with this!”

Most of the chatter quieted to whispers and more turned to laughter as if they had just realized he was awake. His skin crawled with the feeling of the many eyes focused on him in his half-naked state. Never had he felt so vulnerable.

“Let me go now and…” He convulsed and shouted in pain as another shock suddenly and violently came to the back of his neck, cutting off his bargaining plea. More laughter and gasps came as he lost control of his muscles and wet his seat, his urine spilling onto his seat and dripping the floor around him.

He desperately gasped for air, but the cloth only allowed so much. His sense of vulnerability started to fade as his anger rose, and just as his muscles started to tense up in protest, another shock came, this time to the abdomen. He tried to shout, but another shock came. It became a cycle: Dan would get shocked and then gasp for air, a minute or two would pass, and then another went to a random part of his body. He heard laughter and joy around him. It was a game they played until he had no fight left in him and barely enough strength to move.

Dan sat blind in a puddle of his own urine and feces, limp and weak, as he was mocked and ridiculed. He didn’t know why or what he had done to deserve his punishment. Only 32, Dan was a law-abiding citizen who treated everyone with courtesy and respect, as he was raised to. He just got a job after being laid off at the start of the year and has been working two part-time jobs since, so he had been in a good mood lately and looked forward to proposing to his girlfriend, Brittany, Britt for short, and delivering the news and spending time with his family for the coming holidays.

“Enough!” shouted a mature, feminine voice that came from a place above him—a familiar one.

 The voices of the sadistic audience were silenced as her voice echoed through the room, “Take your seats, ladies. Court is adjourned. I think he should be more than ready to speak. And we don’t want to kill him…” she chuckled along with the audience.

“Yet,” a woman whispered in his ear with a giggle, then pulled the sack off of his head.

He tried to open his eyes, but the spotlights that shone directly on him made it difficult after the period of darkness under the sack.

“Daniel Livingston, You have put the lives of the women before and more in jeopardy; what say you?” she announced, in a dramatic, outdated manner of speaking. She was performing.

He slowly opened his eyes, squinting passed the light glare. He was on stage in a theater. The stalls seemed to be made up entirely of masked women. The woman standing next to him wore a dark cloak, hiding her hands and what they might hold, and a white porcelain mask with big almond-shaped eye openings surrounded by dashes of painted-on eyelashes and purple puckered lips. She glared at him through the mask, and he flinched as she lifted a prod from under her cloak and gave it a quick surge to intimidate him.

He looked up to where the voice had called out from. She sat in a box off to the right, wearing a gold glittering mask and dramatic old-fashioned dress that looked like she either pulled it straight out of the closet of Marie Antoinette or a madam in an old Western brothel.

“Say to what? You’ve made a mistake. Let me go!” he spoke as loud as he could. It was still difficult to move any muscle, including the ones needed to shout. He could barely lift his head as the rest of his body sagged to the side, surprisingly not knocking over the chair. “What is this?” he muttered. The theater was silent enough to hear a pen drop,

“You good-for-nothing scum. You are a waste of life and oxygen!” she snapped, “Time for reflection!”. She raised her hand, and Dan received a quick jolt from his attendant on stage. “First!” she called out, and a spotlight flashed onto a mic on stage as one of the women seated rose and walked onto the stage to it. All eyes followed her, including Dan’s.

She wore a plain silver mask that covered the top half of her face and a sleek black dress that opened from her right shoulder to under her left arm with frilly fabric around the collar that puffed a few inches out. She took off her mask. Dan recognized her. “Carla? What is going on?” he asked. Carla was a supervisor at one of his part-time jobs. They exchanged jokes, and she even flirted with him on occasion. There was never a bad experience between them.

The audience hissed at him, and he cringed at the crackling prod next to him. Carla, composed, pulled out a note card and handkerchief from her clutch, cleared her throat, and started bawling as she read from the card and blotted her eyes with the handkerchief.

“After what you caused, I asked myself, ‘How am I supposed to go to work and do all of my normal daily activities?’ you made everything exponentially harder for me.” she paused, and sobs could be heard from the crowd.

“You tell him,” someone shouted, followed by various scattered agreements from others.

Clara continued, “And… I just want my mom… but you took her from me!” The audience jeered and cursed him. Dan was confused. He didn’t know what Carla was talking about, and he had never met her mother. Her family lived hundreds of miles away in Pennsylvania.

“Silence!” Their leader on high shouted down, rising to her feet, “Do you have anything to say to her, Daniel?” she sniffled and wiped her eyes.

“Should I?” he asked, “I have no idea what she is talking about.”

“Daniel Marshall Livingston! You apologize to this young woman right now!”

“For what?” He protested the loudest he could, earning him another shock.

She sighed. “Do it.” But not to Dan.

His handler pulled a dagger out from under her cloak and handed it to Carla as she walked over to Dan. He started to breathe heavily as she put the dagger up to his throat before she was interrupted. “Not yet!” the madam shouted. Carla let out a frustrated grunt, then gave Dan a shallow slash on the forearm and walked off stage to applause from the audience. The cut hardly bled, and compared to the hours of abuse he suffered, it was just a minor annoyance.

Carla got to her seat, and the woman next to her stood, hugged her, and walked onto the stage. She had a poorly done, uneven haircut that looked like it came from a blind barber. She was short and portly, and her mask was an explosion of colors and anything that would stick. She stopped at the mic and removed her mask. It was his fraternal Aunt, Sydney.

“Auntie? What the hell?” Dan asked.

“SHUT UP!” she shouted, then launched her shoe, hitting him in the head. She turned to the mic—no handkerchief, note card, or tears, just pure rage. “Because you took my… no, our sense of security away, I left my husband! A good man! I could no longer look at or talk to a man, let alone sleep next to one. I can’t trust them anymore! FUCK YOU!” The crowd shouted and cheered as Aunt Sydney stomped over toward Dan.

“Apologize!” The madam shouted as Aunt Sydney yanked the dagger out of the attendant’s hand and gave him a deeper cut above the last one. Dan Shouted in pain, “Why are you doing this?!”

Aunt Sydney punched him, knocking over his chair, and spat on him. She had to be held back by his guard, who was about half a foot taller until she calmed down. “I need a cookie,” she said as she started to of stage and to her seat.

Dan was returned upright to receive more cuts and nonsensical and incoherent accusations as woman after woman got on stage. Linda, his neighbor, just ranted about random things for about six minutes and cut his calf. Mrs. Jones, his 5th-grade teacher, asked why he wanted her dead and cut his cheek. Erika, his ex, blamed him for why she cut off all the men in her family- and all her hair- and gave him a slice on the chest. Clair, a former co-worker, said he wanted her to be assaulted and sliced him on the lower abdomen—a close call. One woman, whom he recognized but forgot her name, even after she introduced herself, sang a song about how bad a person she thought he was. It sounded awful.

There were women he hadn’t seen since high school or college, some he recognized but had never spoken to, women he played pickleball with sometimes, exes, and even family. Maybe one of them had any reason to despise him as much as they did.

Dan started apologizing before long, as the pain started to become too overwhelming, and he had fainted, giving time for multiple ‘Intermissions.’ Most of the cuts were shallow, so they didn’t bleed much, but they covered his entire body. His apologies didn’t change anything. He’d be ordered to apologize, and when he did, the madam would respond dismissively, mainly that he should have thought about it before doing what he did, which he still didn’t know.

When they exhausted all the women in the audience, two women were left. The madam and his punisher. By then, his head was blank—void of all feelings and emotions. His body reacted to the pain, but it didn’t register in his head. So it hardly registered when the madam took off her mask and revealed herself to be his own mother. He expected as much when she called him by his full name and spoke to him so familiarly, but he didn’t want to believe it.

The woman next to her surprised him more. Brittany, the woman he loved, pulled off her mask. Even with her scornful eyes and the torture she inflicted on him, he still thought she looked beautiful, but every woman and his mother were there to torment him. He had refused to consider it and had hoped when the woman in the audience stopped rising, but in his bizarre circumstance, why would she be an exception?

He endured the cuts, the slaps, the spit, the insults, and the audience’s cheers for his abusers and shouts for his punishment. He sat in his chair with his head bowed forward and his slashed tank top hanging off of him by a thread. He was sure he’d die there and had accepted it. But one sentence from Britt broke through the numbness and stabbed him in the heart more than his own mother orchestrating the event.

“This morning, I got an abortion,” she said with such frankness as if it were some mundane activity like she had just completed a chore.

It took all his strength just to angle his head high enough to look her in the eye. There was no regret or remorse in her expression or a hint of the woman he loved and had recently started looking for a ring to propose to.

She plunged the dagger, already stricken with his blood, into his gut and twisted it. With his tearful eyes bulging and blood spilling from his mouth and stomach, he managed to utter one word in his final moments, “Why?”

His mother walked over, untied his arms and feet, pulled out a slip of paper from her breast, and placed it in his hand. It was a ballot. His ballot.

She took the dagger out of his stomach and immediately brought him into her embarrassed. She dramatically mourned his final moments as if she had just involuntarily put down an out-of-control dog that attacked everyone it saw. “My son! My Boy! What went wrong?” she cried out as loudly and dramatically as she could. And when the curtains of the stage came to a close, she dropped him. The show was over, and her role was completed.