Originally published via Armageddon Prose:
An Armageddon Prose original short story:
A digital display on the wall read 7.16.043.27 in neon green, which changed by a lone incremental digit every now and again.
Nancy, having spent considerable time staring at it for want of any other stimulation in between milkings — “months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror,” as it were — supposed that might be the date, only unintelligible to her.
Leather straps, or what felt an awful lot like leather — applied gently enough though they were — smarted against Nancy’s lily-white skin.
She hadn’t felt the sun — or, perhaps more appropriately phrased, a sun — for what felt like years.
But what’s a “year” spent in the stars?
Words of terrestrial antiquity no longer carried real meaning beyond the metaphorical.
The disorientation dizzied the mind.
At any rate, such musings on the meanings of words borrowed from her homeland, now so far distant — “sun,” “year” — were abruptly cut short by a familiar sensation in her chest.
Nancy’s apparent new raison d’être, as it were.
A customer — “Is that what he is?”— had arrived, a slimy thing with copious visceral fat, six eyes and as many arms who seemed to read her thoughts even though she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t imagining things.
“Or is it even a he?”
With hands bound above her head, suspended from the ceiling Nancy could only cross herself mentally and silently recite canon in preparation for the ritual.
“Hail, Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.”
That hour of death, sweet reprieve, welcome though it might have been, never came.
The customer, or whatever it might be called, pressed the neon-green button nearby with one of its free right hands and the suction cup went to work prying out the goods from Nancy’s mammary glands.
Whhhhr, slog, slog.
Pale-yellow liquid flowed through a mazelike tangle of clear tubes into a goblet placed underneath a dispenser.
It was all so impossibly grotesque and exotic.
“Shoe on the other foot,” Nancy speculated, “Wouldn’t we put these things in cages for our entertainment, or in a lab for study, or to harvest their organs or whatever, or suck their glands dry, if we had the chance?”
The same dilemma, Nancy recalled from her Catholic grammar school days, during a lesson on the inexorable march westward in the service of Manifest Destiny, her classmate, Edna, had posed to Sister Fagan: “Wouldn’t the Indians have killed all the white man and stolen their women if they could have too?”
“Had Africans invented steel and siege warfare and sea navigation and the Europeans not, after all, are we to assume they wouldn’t have invaded and murdered and enslaved all the whites they could find out of some sense of altruism?”
Such poignant questions stuck Nancy as decent, and she recalled the jealousy she felt that she had never thought of it.
Nonetheless, what appeared a legitimate inquiry to young Nancy’s mind didn’t strike the same wistful chord with Sister Fagan, who beat Edna rapaciously with her ruler — her preferred tool of terror — so as to never suffer a likeminded question again.
In a way, though, the ruler gave Edna her answer.
Anyhow, escape as she might for a moment into the blurry past, that was all ancient history; Nancy could scarcely imagine her childhood classroom if she squinted.
Meanwhile, amid her lamentations of a life long lost, the cup had reached its fill, and the creature delicately folded back some odd oily gland or grill of something protruding from its face and introduced Nancy’s breastmilk to its fish-like gullet with gusto.
Shrjjshsh, the creature messily slogged Nancy’s fresh produce, down the hatch.
Why they couldn’t simply synthesize human breastmilk — a galactic delicacy that Nancy supposed had made her a rare commodity and ensured her continued existence so long as she bore fruit from her nipples — she had no idea.
No one bothered to explain things to her.
But why would they?
Administration of the milk economy was not her job; hanging from the ceiling of the officer’s quarters — Were they “officers”? Who knew? — of Cargo Ship #6920274, bound for God-knew-where, exposed breasts dangling at eye-level for the creatures to eyeball, waiting to be squeezed for their juice like ripe oranges, was her job.
Some of the more animalistic ones dispensed with the civilizing glasses and drank straight from Nancy’s exposed teet with some kind of toothless nozzle where a mouth on a less distasteful creature might have been, the one under their slimy gills — a far too intimate experience that forced Nancy each time to close her eyes tight and desperately try to flee the visceral sensations to some sanctuary in her mind.
Over time, identifying objects of gratitude, a deeply held belief in the virtue of which had been fostered by her lifelong faith, had become increasingly difficult. Yet she pressed on anyway, commanded by her conscience and The Lord to persevere in the face of oppression.
At the very least, Nancy appreciated the sometimes hours-long reprieves between milkings — days, even, perhaps. It was impossible to tell, except by the cryptic neon display clock that may or may not have meant anything, which had now rolled over to 7.16.043.28.
And, it had occurred to her, perhaps her productive breasts had saved her; as far as she knew, there wasn’t a single male human left in the galaxy — certainly none suspended from the ceiling here Cargo Ship #6920274, serving the most intimate of appetizers against their will.
Pondering the worst of the possible consequences if she ever ran dry — death would have been the least harrowing, probably — Nancy shuddered and recited another Hail Mary.
Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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