SALT.

Salt.

You could taste it if you lick the air. It hits your tongue and brings you back to your senses. The walls of this room are colored in white. So white that a fly sitting on them creeps me out. I am locked in here for a long time now. Long enough for far more days than I care to count. My beard falls on my chest, and the hairs on my head have disappeared from pulling. I am often naked, for I know not a soul would dare to enter this room. No furniture, just a chair, a table, and a cot to lie on. Who wants anything more, at least not me.

My only connection to the outside world is this window. It is covered in grills that run both horizontal and vertical. Its midnight I guess(I can never be sure) and I like to stick my tongue out of this window to taste the salt in the air, for the food here is tasteless. The walls are tasteless, the floor is tasteless.

A few years ago, I was struggling to make ends meet. Locked up in my apartment, hunched over my typewriter, putting words on my thesis. I wanted to be left alone. A slight noise was enough to throw me off my work. My creativity demanded silence, and now I am all alone all the time, but I can’t concentrate. The flow has stopped. I can’t think straight. Words come all jumbled up, sentences make no sense. Yesterday I wrote a poem. It is good. I like how it sounds. Alas!, nobody to show it to.

Outside the window, I see a house. A bit peculiar. I can’t make out the color of it. It is far away in the distance. I have often caught myself staring at it for hours and hours. I have abandoned writing, and the careful scanning of the house has become my favorite pass time. A brick wall, a balcony, a terrace with decorative plants here and there, and a girl. I do not know for sure, but I like to imagine the person to be a girl, the girl on the terrace, precedently a teenager. I chuckle at this thought. My eyesight is dying, but my imagination has just taken birth.

The ventilation is poor in this room. Just a window that has become my only companion, my messiah. It is a connection of my lonely, caged self to the outside world. If not for this window I would have certainly perished in this prison, crushed under the weight of the voices inside my head. In the morning they would have found my flesh and bones crunched under my big head.

They have denied me the razor again. I do not blame them. I am a dangerous, mentally disturbed psychopath and I do not have any control over my urges(to quote Dr. Verne, the psychiatrist). They fear that I would run the blade against my throat again like the first time I did, or worse I would try to kill the caretakers. Little do they know that their fears are unnecessary for I am in no mood to kill neither them nor myself. You know, why would I like to die when I have just taken birth. I have just tasted the elixir of this sacred life. What a fool would I be to stop myself from quenching the thirst of my barren soul.

The girl on the terrace. She is thinner than all the other girls I have ever had, and I like that. No, not hourglass ones and certainly not like those curvy, slutty Hollywood-whores. You know the anorexic ones, the figureless ones. The ones that are easy to embrace. The ones that melt so effortlessly into your body, feel like a part of you. The ones that complete you, make you feel a little less pathetic. You get the idea. I imagine her to be a brunette. Her tresses, falling over her hunched sharp shoulder blades. Her lips are red with the rose-sherbet stored beneath them resembling rose petals resting on her face. Her face is pale, revealing tiny blood-red dots covering her nose and the adjacent area around it. She has a pointy chin. And just like a cherry on the cake, she has a mole at the end of it. The exquisite creature she is! I have got to stop, it is getting warm in here.

I wonder, what is the taste of her body? Salty on her dermis and sweet on her lips, I believe. A few years back, it would not have taken me much time to find out. Some days of stalking and precision strike, when the time was ripe. I hated it when they shouted for help. What were they expecting? “I am harmless, just let me taste your skin, and I will leave.” I’d plead but to no avail. The incoherence between their body and their behavior was startling. Their body lured me to take a piece of it, but their behavior completely unamenable.

I have often caught her staring at me. I feel threatened when they do that. It makes me fearful and more passionate. One day she just stopped watering the plants and began looking in my direction. I did not budge and stood my ground, for I am the dominant one. I could feel the blood rushing down my head to my loins, heating up my masculinity. She is the one I want now. Caged in this room, I am a wounded lion, licking my own blood. Coincidentally, it is salty as well.

I wonder what does she do inside that house. I imagine her naked beside me. Our bodies rubbing against each other. Her unformed breasts pressing against my hairy chest. Nothing more pleasurable in this world than the fondling of the girl you deeply desire. Sweat meets saliva and she can’t help but ooze out oohs! and aahs!. Her moans melt into my ears and travel through my spine to my toes. I’d I have to be careful with her. Though the fragility of her frame gives me a tactical advantage, you know I could put her down effortlessly and have her my way but where is the fun in that. I like the ones that fight back, and make me do some labor. It helps me to be myself in the true sense. Though I believe myself to be a tender person the same can’t be said for the beast I have slaved(or who has enslaved me, the same thing though). I can’t help but witness her being mauled to orgasm by the beast within me as her toes would curl up to the point the bones in them would begin to hurt. Simple man, simple dreams. She wants me too, I know. Just wait, soon she will be in my arms. In a few days, they’d set me free, and then I will come for her. Wait, my dear for the longer the wait the sweeter the romance.

*

“Open the door.” The guards put in the key and pushed the metal door wide open. A handsome man in a tweed suit with an attaché entered the room.

“What time is it Dr.”

“15 past midnight.”

“Do you remember doc? the last time you were here, I told you about a girl.”

“Yeah, the girl on the terrace.”

“Yes, doc. she visited me.”

“Here?”

“Yes, doc. She said she watched me for years and wanted to make love to me.”

“So, did you?”

“Sure doc, who am I to decline the offer?”

“How old was she?”

“I don’t know doc. And why do you care how old she was. She came to me, I did not force her or anything.”

“Do you sleep alright?”

“She doesn’t let me doc, I’m tired of her frequent visits. I was thinking about tying her down on this bed. That way I could sleep peacefully.”

“Medicines? Don’t they help?”

“I collect them all for a week and chew them at one. It makes me sick but it helps me.”

“Why didn’t they kill me doc? Are they scared that I will be reborn?”

“They can’t Barry. You are sick.”

“Sick my shit! You know what doc. I know why they don’t kill me ‘cause they need me, doc. They think my brain has some loose wires. They barge inside, tie me like an animal, and put me inside those big machines. What are they finding there doc? Some defects? I say they scan their brains too and see if we really have any difference. We are all same doc. It is just that I do not pretend like all others.”

“I don’t follow Barry?”

“You do doc, most certainly you do. I am not sick, doc, I am the force of nature. It is you who is sick. The degrees you have accumulated have narrowed down your vision. Can’t you see, we are animals. Just because everyone has draped themselves in tweed suits they think they can dictate their whims on others. Why don’t you let me free? You scum of this modern society.”

“Didn’t you feel sorry for the girl you kidnapped and raped?” his palms sweat.

“I did doc. I felt sorry for her just as much as a lion feels sorry for his prey as he sets his eyes on it. I felt sorry just as much as the lion feels when he savors its hunt. I am the lion here doc and I am just as much sorry as a lion is for being a lion.”

“Had you been born in some less developed country, you would have been miles under the earth now,” he said trying to hold the attaché tightly as it slipped from his sweaty palms.

“Why did you arrest me from the airport then? I was going to flee to a lesser developed country as you put it doc.”

“We were saving those kids you were going to molest had you not have been arrested.”

“I don’t know doc. I guess it's time you leave. Our conversations are futile. You can’t seem to shed your mask and I am not going to be dictated by this world. Don’t you see nature is with me? You won’t keep me here forever doc. Not forever. But before you leave doc, whatever you said about me being miles under the ground in some less developed country that was a bit unprofessional of you. I have never seen you this angry ever before. I see an animal in you, doc, a ferocious one.”

I had had enough. I took out the pistol I always carried and shot him in the stomach. The walls of the room echoed with the sound of the bullet as it tore apart Barry. He fell on his back. His hands clasped around his torn belly. The walls stained in red gave them a picturesque view.

“I knew it doc. You pretend like everybody else. I knew you couldn’t keep it within you for long. It needed some provocation and just like that you disrobed your modesty and revealed your beast. I pity you, doc. We are the same doc at least I don’t have to carry a mask all the time.” he choked on his blood as it traveled from his stomach to his throat.

The guards behind me shell-shocked at what they had just witnessed. They snatched away the pistol from me. Strangled me from behind, cuffed me and the jury sentenced me to fifteen years.

For the first few years, I tried to be an obedient prisoner. But it all changed the night Barry visited me. His entrails hanged out of his belly. Blood dripped from his wound and ran through his legs to the floor. “We are the same doc. We are the same.” It made me lose my head again and with the razor blade clutched tightly in my palm I jumped on his throat. A stream of blood spurted out of his wide-open throat as I gradually faded into oblivion.

*

When I woke up, I was in a hospital. My throat was draped in layers of cotton and I tied to the bed like a wild beast. When I recovered they ran a few tests on me. Dr. Verne supervised them. Made me write a few stories, asked me what I saw in blurred pictures and my favorite, put me inside MRI machines, and ran a lot of scans. Overall, they treated me like Barry. I pretended to be like them again, went back to reading, aced all the psychological tests. Everything that could reflect psychologically-stable in my reports. Although Verne never showed me, I knew what he had written in my report for they didn’t release me after the completion of my sentence. Cowards!

Destined to die in this white-walled prison, I had lost all hope until the day Verne died. They assigned me to a shrink quite young, ready to make his mark as soon as possible. You know, easy to fool kind ones. Don’t forget I was a shrink once. Put the mask on again, let's play. This time for the girl waiting for me. After all the force of nature is with me(Barry you bastard.)

I am going to be free today. Free at last. The court has signed the orders. It was a close shave though(will tell you some other time).

*

A deep blue linen shirt, a pair of polished boots, and my favorite tweed suit rest on my bed. I smell the shirt, freshly laundered. The linen abrases my hide, pricking and tickling my nipples. I am a lion in human clothing again. After signing millions of papers happily, I pace out of my den. The suit sits on me well(though I will have to let go of it soon.) I look into the horizon, the air smells of rust. Far away in the distance, I see my destiny, and as if on a cue my palms rub against each other until they begin to hurt. I say “Let the hunt begin.”