The Knowhere Girl

[27] It's the Great Pumkin, Gwen Stallone

Oh, God, I was so tired. He had kept at it all night. It was the third night in a row I had no sleep. Too little, at any rate. My ribs throbbed.

I thought about grass a lot.

The floor wet it felt below bare feet.

Sometimes it changed into something.

The shadows in a gully, a cave in the great red boulders scattered across the planes and every stand of trees on the Station. I loved the smell of the earth in summer-dry and baked-a combination of dirt, twigs, gumnuts and grass seeds. I even liked the smell of the cattle yards: dust in summer, mud in winter, with creosote from the oiled rails, the chemical odour of the drenches and dips we used to treat the cattle, the sweat, the blood and-always-cow manure.

All I could smell now was sweat, blood, and cockroach shit.

Sometimes I wondered if it ever was real, or just a dream.

One day I had woken up and I could breathe. Was the pain less or was my body just used to it?

I had cautiously pressed a hand to my abdomen and hissed in pain at the slight pressure. The old stitches pickled against my fingers, and I retracted my hand. The doctors on Joker's had payroll had done a good job at keeping from bleeding out. Slowly, I dragged myself into a sitting position, hissing the whole way, but I eventually made it.

I woke up in the same spot and couldn't bring myself to try and move.

Joker had started to get lazy, cocky, was probably a better word for it. He'd stopped closing the cell door a few days ago, knowing I was already too broken.

Debased into nothing but a puppet to play with.

Oranges and lemons, Say the bells of St. Clement's.

It was safe to say I'd gone slightly mad.

You owe me five farthings, Say the bells of St. Martin's.

Madder than a cut snake.

When will you pay me? Say the bells at Old Bailey.

I could feel a terrible dark depression slowly moving into me, not like any depression I'd had before, more like a physical thing, as if some dreadful black fog was settling within me. It was a disturbing, uncomfortable feeling. If I was staring to sink into depression this quickly, what would I be like after another month, or two, or a year? People had always told me how strong I was, and now I had to prove it. I knew that more than any other time in my life I was on my own. Fuck the Batfamily. Fuck Jason. Fuck Batman. Fuck Barbara, Tim, Damian, and Dick. My survival was up to me. I had nothing and no one.

When I grow rich, Say the bells at Shoreditch.

What I did have, I told myself, was my mind (though that was in question, along with my sanity), my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. Those were powerful and important thing.

When will that be? Say the bells of St. Martha.

No, St. Martha wasn't part of the rhyme. But I did wonder what types of problems teenagers had in her days. I figured that things must have been much easier. I mean, all she had to do was pray and her brother, Lazarus, rose from the dead. What kind of miracles do teenagers get these days?

I do not know, Says the great bell at Bow.

This whole nightmare felt like a trap, at the worst. At best, it was some kind of test. I hated tests. Since I'd lost been down here, my whole life was one big fill-in-the-blank. I was ____________________, from ____________________. I felt like ____________________, and if the monsters caught me, I'd be ____________________.