Elijah
Four Years Ago
“Jace Carter,” the Superior reads aloud from the front of a log. It’s a small, intricate, wooden box with the boy’s name carved into the front. It holds his destiny. A tall, dark-skinned boy walks to the Superior, and she parts from her podium to hand him the log. Not many things are made of wood anymore; it’s expensive, and trees are few.
A camera in front of them all records the ceremony. It is broadcasted live, but, from home, only parents watch. The camera’s recording is shown on a monitor in front of the seats, and Elijah watches the tall boy open the log. Inside, a hologram of a fern and a small shovel are projected and spin. His lips curl triumphantly. “Rewilder,” the log speaks.
Elijah saw his father’s log a few times. A food preparation worker’s symbol is chef’s knife next to a red bell pepper, and Elijah hopes to see it in his log.
The tall boy is not the first that day to receive his career, and he won’t be the last. He returns to his seat next to the many waiting seventeen-year-olds. A young man with gelled black hair gives the Superior the next log, and she continues calling names.
“Tyler-Anne Castillo.”
“Drone pilot.”
“Jeremy Cates.”
“Distribution worker.”
“Rebecca Cavanaugh.”
“Waste disposer.”
Elijah presses his sweaty palms to the corduroy pants his father made him put on. Elijah helps his father as a substitute sous-chef in his kitchen sometimes. He hopes to take his father’s career path, but his unpredictable calling approaches like a lion stalking prey.
Perhaps a jaguar is more relevant. Elijah looks at his left forearm. A tattoo sits there. Everyone has half of a tattoo. His is a group of jaguars all in a huddle, but instead of facing each other, they claw and try to climb up nothing.
Elijah didn’t think he’d be this nervous, but when the girl to his left stands to be assigned her job, his heart skips a beat, his stomach turns, and his lungs speed up.
“Seamstress.”
She clutches her log and sits down. It’s carved with beautiful designs with her name engraved on the front. JASMINE SPRINGER.
“Elijah Stanton.”
Elijah stands from his chair and balls his fists to cloak apprehension. He pushes up his glasses and walks slowly with his muscles tense and his mind full. The camera watches him, but Elijah’s eyes fall to the log the Superior holds. ELIJAH STANTON.
She holds it out to him, and he takes it with shaky hands. His fingers hesitate on the lid. He shuts his eyes and takes repeated deep breaths. His heart pounds. Elijah pulls the lid up and peeks his eyes open. The hologram pops up. It’s a knife! But not a chef’s knife. There is no pepper. What is this? What is—
“Tormentor.”
It takes a moment for him to gasp. “No,” he whispers. “What?” He looks up at the Superior, but she hides her eyes behind her long hair.
“Alexis Stein.”
Elijah steps backward on unsteady feet but keeps his log in a firm grasp. He glances down at it. ELIJAH STANTON. That’s his name. His name. Then how?
This can’t be happening.
How did this happen?
No.
No, no, no.
He pivots around and attempts to return to his seat. His vision blurs. A girl stands there. Bright and blue-eyed excitement.
He stumbles past her toward his seat. He can feel the judging eyes but continues walking, and his hand parts from the death grip on the log. It lands on the back of his chair. His legs wobble, but they relax. Elijah slumps into the seat and leans into his lap. His glasses slip down, but he doesn’t bother to fix them. He stares at nothing but dark wood barely visible and corduroy. Elijah doesn’t listen to the names or professions assigned anymore. It’s silence to him.
Elijah plows his hands through the hair hanging over his forehead and into his cowlick and down his neck. How could they think he’s fit for a job like that? Is he really like that?
“Are you okay?” Sound returns, and he sits up. His head turns to face the girl to his left. He nervously fixes his glasses and nods slowly. His blue-gray eyes linger on her green ones, but he says nothing. They aren’t supposed to speak during the ceremony. He looks down at the log. ELIJAH STANTON. He checks every letter. That’s him. That’s right. That’s wrong. There has to have been a mistake.
Present Day
Elijah holds a knife. It’s thin and shiny, and the leather-bound handle cools his thoughts and mind. The man in front of him hangs in shackles that crawl through the ceiling. His pants are soaked with urine, and blood pours from his wounds: some cuts, some stabs, some still hold their weapons.
“I didn’t do it, you know,” he whispers.
Elijah glances down, and his eyes catch the designs on the man’s shirt. It was old and tattered before Elijah started cutting, but now, its division sign is divided, and the words that once said Ed Sheeran—whatever that means—now say ‘dish ran’.
The man’s words are an obvious lie. The one they all tell between shrieks and wails. Elijah almost adds the knife he holds to the collection across the man’s torso but decides it’s getting old.
He opens a file sitting on the weapons table to his left. “Jamie Snyder. Seamster, breaking and entering, thievery.” He flips a few pages and grins. “This is my favorite part of the file. Known phobias. Let’s see. Hmm. Arachnophobia?” The man grimaces and looks at the floor of blood and bloodstains. Elijah sets the file bedazzled with red fingerprints back on the table. “You know, I think I have something that you’ll find incredibly fascinating.”
“Please,” he says through teeth like garnets in his mouth. “Don’t.” His eyes are pleading but not pleading enough to return whatever he stole.
Elijah sets his knife down. He pulls a jar from the bottom shelf of his table. Its sides are clear, and the tarantula inside stirs as does the man in chains. “Please!” he yells. “I didn’t do it!”
A lie. Elijah can tell. It’s been four years since his ceremony, and he’s excelled greatly. He twists the punctured cap of the container, and the tarantula crawls up the side. Elijah lets it onto the man’s shoulder, and he screams. Its legs move up onto his neck, but Elijah can’t track its movements any further because the man writhes in his shackles. He tries to shake the spider off, but he can’t. “Stop! Please! Please!” Tears fall faster. Elijah doesn’t know whether it’s from the spider or the pain of moving.
Elijah sits back to watch for a gleeful two minutes. Eventually, exhaustion overpowers fear. He succumbs to the spider and stops resisting. Elijah is let off his break. “I hate you,” the man says.
Elijah shows no disgust to the words, instead, he offers a confused expression. “You know, didn’t we go over talking out of turn?” Elijah grins, slow and menacing.
The man zips his lips shut, and his throat tenses in fear or perhaps from where tarantula fangs delve inside. He must want to beg for mercy, but he knows he can’t. Elijah grabs a knife. A different one. This one is longer with a twisted blade. The man pulls himself up toward the ceiling with his strong but injured biceps and a wince. His shackles jangle, and his arms shake with exhaustion and pain. Elijah stands below him waiting. His eyes slam shut, wrinkled from age, stress, and worry. His arms give out, and his body falls limp with his toes inches from where they long to touch ground again.
Elijah adjusts his grip on his knife. “Ready?” he says.
The man has no reaction.
“Set!”
Elijah presses the knife to the man’s thin body, starved for only a day now. He rests the point in the center of his stomach, above his belly button. The man shakes his head, first slow but faster as tension hangs in the air begging for freedom or death.
“Go.”
Elijah plunges the knife in with a squelch of flesh. Elijah keeps a poker face, but the man chokes. The man’s mouth pours with blood, and his shirt paints itself red again. Elijah pushes the blade further until he hits bone, then yanks it out. Blood squirts, and drops bounce onto the lenses of Elijah’s glasses. Elijah doesn’t notice. The hole, the size of Elijah’s fist, gushes, and the man’s head drops. His eyes fall upon his ound. He whines for a few great moments, then his face falls numb and hangs with a certain calmness between his shoulders.
Elijah holds his fingers in front of the man’s mouth and nose. There’s no breath.
According to Tormentor Guidelines, Elijah isn’t supposed to kill prisoners on purpose unless that is their sentence, but Torment Yards are overflowing with criminals. Elijah used to spare them, but it wasn’t long before he realized this was easier for everyone, even the prisoner. This is mercy.
Elijah collects the tarantula and returns the jar to its place on the shelf. He wipes off his glasses with a wet rag, replaces them, and turns around to face the man again. Elijah grabs the handles that stick out of the man’s body and pulls the blades out. He sets them in a tray on the weapons table to be cleaned. Each knife is removed from the man’s body with gentle silence in the air, with calm fingers and hands, and with tranquility he refused to give to an alive man.
Elijah attends to his other prisoners, some feistier than others. A bell sounds over the Torment Yard’s intercom at eight o’clock, and the girl he torments gives a sigh of relief. Elijah sets his pepper spray down and wipes off his right thumb on a rag. He walks to the door and presses his thumb to a small panel midway up the door, on the right side. It recognizes his thumbprint, and the door swings open. Elijah flips the light switch, leaving his prisoner in darkness, and he walks out into the hall. The door shuts and locks again.
He goes right and immediately turns left into the hallway that connects the two halls with torment chambers like the letter ‘H.’ Other Tormentors fill the halls and walk towards the hall,
