In the Cold of the Cage
Part 43 of my story! Read the index and content warnings here. !!warning!! if you have ever been body-shamed or made fun of for how your body looks or don't like people being mean to children or the implication of tinies being forced to do Questionable Things this will be a difficult chapter to read. Readmore'd from the start due to spoilers.
From the moment Joe woke up with a splitting headache, an aching neck, and a bleeding ear, he knew exactly where he was. The bars of the cage gave it away immediately, but even without those he would have been able to guess where he was from the faded wallpaper and the sagging doorway at the end of the room, one which led to a hallway full of barking dogs. Dog fighting and tiny snatching went hand in hand, Joe knew from experience, and this was undoubtedly a snatcher’s lair.
Joe looked around and saw that a small group of twenty other miniatures joined him in the cage, all of whom kept a healthy distance from him. Most of them were men, all of them were shaggy and bedraggled, and the moment Joe made eye contact with any single one of them they looked away and shuffled nervously at the sight of his missing ear.
He pressed a hand to it, then his sleeve, and a mix of emotions stormed inside of him. There was anger, sadness, betrayal, alienation, but notably absent from the mix was surprise. No, Joe had seen this coming from miles away, and now that it had happened, he had no better option but to take it in stride.
The man who sat in the far corner of the cage with his face hidden below a tent of greasy hair wouldn't be so kind to Joe as he was being to himself.
“Well, well, look at you.” Said the only tiny willing to talk to him. “Do I need to say I told you so?”
The raspy voice was barely audible over the sound of a horse fly batting at the bare lightbulb above them. Joe didn’t need to turn around to face it. He already knew who it was. He did so nevertheless out of courtesy.
“Gutters? What are you doing here?” He asked.
Now Joe was surprised. His head was tilted almost completely sideways, as much out of confusion as it was out of pain.
“Oh, y’know. Went out to have a good time the other night, only for some lousy, rotten sell-out to turn around and stab me in the back.” Gutters explained. “That’s life. You get used to it.”
Joe was utterly lost for words.
“The better question is what are you doing here?” Gutters continued, though Joe could tell from the evil twinkle in his eyes that the greasy bastard had already found him out ages ago.
This was supposed to be it. This was supposed to be the part where shame gripped him and squeezed every last ounce of life out of him until he was an empty husk. The part where he screamed, cried, threw up, and crawled through the desert repenting for good measure. Yet as he looked upon Gutters and all his smug satisfaction, Joe found, much to his own bewilderment, that even at his most earless and his least free he simply didn’t care what this man had to say about his life anymore.
Gutters could think whatever he wanted of Joe now. He had nothing left to lose. No amount of praise or derision would bring Joe’s ear back, and it wouldn't change the core of who Joe was.
Joe cleared his throat.
“Well, as you can see I’m finally ready to settle down.” Joe began. “I’m here on the hunt for a giant boyfriend who will lock me away in a gilded cage, with a pretty bow tied around my neck in exchange for my freedom after sacrificing my dignity at the altar of petdom!”
Joe’s voice was sickly-sweet with sarcasm, and he watched in delight as Gutters’ face twisted into a snarl. Shakily the old man rose to his feet with the aid of the bars.
“You know what I can’t stand in life?” He began, jabbing a pointed finger in Joe’s direction. “Guys like you. It’s guys like you who disrespect guys like me, the ones with real trauma. You walk around with your missing ears, sniffing the giants’ crotches, sucking up to them, and you don’t give a shit.” Gutters tossed his arms. “You don’t give a shit about the shit they do to us.”
“Like what?” Asked Joe, and he truly hoped that Gutters would answer – for years he had wondered what it was that Gutters was so hung up about.
Finally, Joe got his wish. He watched as Gutters slowly bent down and began to roll up his dusty, grey pant leg. Around his ankle was a circular scar, like the one Lorraine had. Rising up again, Gutters said,
“Y’know how I got the name Gutters, Joe? It’s what they called me in the circus. My dear borrower mother handed me over to them in exchange for a brick of chocolate.”
For a brief moment Gutters grew animated, and spread his arms wide as though he were a circus ringmaster introducing an act.
“Gutters is what they named me!” He cried. “GUTTERS! THE! CLOOOWN!” Gutters’ voice grew so loud it drew concerned looks from the other people in the cage.
When Gutters froze, the whole room froze with him. Then he went limp again.
“They told me to jump, I jumped." Gutters continued. "They told me to dance, I danced. They told me to sit still while they sprayed me down with a fire hose, and you get one guess what I did, Joe. I had no freedom. No agency. And now…” Joe drew back as Gutters shuffled in his direction. “Here you are. Romanticizing my suffering. Thinking it’s cute and fun and sexy.”
Gutters stopped. He tried once again to point a finger at Joe but it fell listlessly to his side.
“...’cause guys like you have no respect for guys like me. You haven’t been through real trauma.”
Joe gave Gutters a blank stare. It was as though they were living in two different universes. He was dangerously tempted to tell Gutters about his own trauma he had suffered at the hands of the giants, about his life without a father, about the torment of the watchmaker’s, about his own brush with the circus and the panel of doctors and Herman's betrayal and the jar. About how absolutely, how totally he had trusted a giant and how swiftly that giant had shattered it all to pieces. He could tell Gutters about the years of grappling with his sexuality, with society, with spirituality, about his mother’s misguided attempt to cure him or O’Grady’s misguided attempt to destroy him. He could assure Gutters that no matter what anyone tried, and no matter what anyone did, Joe simply could not change the indelible nature of his own ontology, in spite of the fact that it brought injury after injury upon himself.
Joe could say all that to Gutters, but he knew better than to do that now. Gutters’ mind, like Herman’s mind, was already made up. There was no way that Joe could justify himself in Gutters’ eyes, so he opted for a more diplomatic approach.
“You know what I don’t get about guys like you, Gutters?" He said, as Gutters' watery eyes bored into him. "You spend all this time and energy being angry at guys like me, and none of it being angry at the giants.” Joe scanned the cage as his watchsmith’s mind ticked away in search of an escape. “At the end of the day, you and me both ended up in the same damn place, and I bet if we worked together we could help each other out of it.” Gutters’ eyes followed Joe’s finger as it pointed to a hinge on the side of the cage that was agonizingly close to being reachable. “See that pin inside that hinge up there? You're a tall guy. I bet if you gave me a boost, I could pull it out. We don’t have to be stuck in here like this. We could escape and then never see each other again. Wouldn’t that be something?”
Gutters let out a wheezy cackle in reply.
“Don’t make me laugh. If I helped you out, then you would get to go free along with me. Why should you deserve that?”
Joe was just about to answer when the dogs went ballistic and a pair of shadows filled the doorway across the room.
"There's no time for me to explain. Either we get out now or we get out never!" Joe said.
Gutters shrugged and smiled.
"Then I guess it'll have to be never." He replied, and Joe could only pity how readily Gutters had sealed both their fates.
The shadows grew larger, and the weather-beaten house heaved under two sets of footsteps as the snatchers entered the room.
“Frankie, you worthless piece of shit!” Scolded the voice of an older man with an accent that reminded Joe of Usine. “I want women, or strong men I can send to the fights, not these useless drunks!”
“I’m sorry, sir! I-I’m sorry!” Said the much younger voice that accompanied him.
Joe pressed himself up against the bars to get a closer look, and in the dim light he could see the figure of an immense giant holding a much smaller one by the collar and shaking him.
“Did you not see that their little city burned down? Why are you still searching on the beach? Why not there?” Said the voice of the larger man with the accent.
“There were too many people there, sir.” The smaller giant, Frankie, replied.
Frankie backed up into the room and stepped to the side. In the light, Joe could see that he was barely an adult. He wore a large coat in spite of the warm weather and clutched a floppy hat as he trembled in the larger giant's presence. Joe felt as though he had seen this young giant somewhere before, but couldn't place where.
“They were loading them all up into a car.” Frankie continued.
“What kind of car?” The older giant interrogated.
“I-I don’t know, Mr. Lessard. I dunno the breeds of car... but! There was a whole team of snatchers working together. Guarded them real closely, too. See this?” The quivering young giant gestured to a shoeprint on his forehead. “I tried to grab some up, I really did, but one of ‘em attacked me.”
Mr. Lessard tugged Frankie by the collar again.
“Is that a girl’s shoeprint? Beaten by a girl? Bah! Pathetic!" Mr. Lessard barked.
Joe flinched as Mr. Lessard tossed Frankie aside like a rag doll. A team of snatchers swarming Tiny Town? Joe would have been damned one way or another whether O'Grady had gotten him or not, he figured.
Mr. Lessard released the boy and stomped into the light. The man was a hulking mass of a giant who downright dwarfed the farmhouse he was in. He wore a starch-white shirt and he was rubbing his face with one hand while his fingers on the other held a lit cigar and twirled it about in frustration.
"Frankie, Frankie, Frankie... Why do I keep you around at all!?” Said Lessard.
Frankie raced over to the cage of freshly snatched miniatures, and Joe’s fingers squeezed the bars tight in fear. The other miniatures that surrounded him scampered away in anticipation. All but two of them, that was: in the center of the cage, a mother clutched a little boy in her arms and shook in abject horror as the giant approached.
“Look here, I got one woman. And a kid, too. That’s worth something, isn’t it?” Frankie pleaded.
The floor shook as Mr. Lessard drew closer to the caged tinies. The mother held her son tight and tried to esape, but in a flash the massive giant threw open the cage door, snatched her up, and pried her son out of her arms. Lessard’s face didn’t move an inch as the woman let out a devastating scream and fought against him in desperation, clawing desperately in the direction of her little boy. He ignored the noise as though it were the sound of a passing car and carelessly tossed the child back into the cage like garbage, then he examined the woman thoroughly through a jeweler's loupe.
A long plume of cigar smoke billowed from Mr. Lessard's mouth as he began to laugh.
“Worth something!? Look at her, Frankie. She’s as big as a house! Crooked nose. Ugly face. She looks like she has a drinking problem.” He said.
Joe heard more dry laughter coming from behind him. To his disgust, he turned around to see that Gutters was laughing at the poor woman’s misfortune as well. Turning his attention back to Mr. Lessard, he watched in horror as the giant coldly deposited her into another cage to the right of the table Joe's cage was currently sitting on. He could just make out a sign above it that read Low Value. He squeezed his eyes shut as his heart ripped in two at the sound of the little boy crying for his mother.
“Oh, shut up.” Mr. Lessard snapped at the boy, and snatched him up next. “This one is worthless too. Put these little piggies to work instead! Maybe it will inspire them to lose weight, you know? Make them healthier.”
Frankie laughed nervously.
“Yeah. We could uh… sell them by the ounce or something!” The young giant suggested, his voice shaking and faltering.
Joe could see that Frankie, too, was shaking with fear.
Mr. Lessard dangled the tiny boy upside down for three painstaking seconds before tossing him into the Low Value cage along with his mother, who caught him and held him like the treasure that he was. As sad as it was to watch the two cling to each other and cry, Joe was relieved that they would at least get to be together a little while longer.
Then Mr. Lessard stepped towards the cage the rest of the miniatures were in, and Joe was knocked off his feet as the entire thing was lifted into the air.
“None of these will fetch us much money.” The older giant declared. “We need a pretty face. One we can sell easily.”
“Yes sir.” Frankie croaked.
A series of screams rose from the cage as Mr. Lessard turned the entire thing upside down and dumped its occupants into the opening of the one reserved for low value tinies. Joe clung to the bars with all his might and refused to let himself fall in easily. Having been awkward and homely during puberty, he had been put in that cage before, and he knew where it would lead him. He would go to the watchmaker’s, or the factories, to be used as cheap labour and then discarded when spent. He fully expected that this was where he would end up the second time around, but he refused to go out without a fight.
He was soon forced to let go when Mr. Lessard’s square hand struck the side of the cage with all the force of an incoming meteor. Joe’s heart dropped first and the rest of him followed as he jolted downwards, though when he landed he was not met with the sting of metal but the roughness of calloused human skin.
When he rolled over and sat up he was met with the eye of Mr. Lessard, magnified through the lens of the loupe, gazing down upon him the way a falcon would lock onto its prey. Everything about the man appeared threatening to Joe, from his rectangular face framed by greying sideburns to his stony features; it was the sort of face Joe saw reflected in statues of important historical giants, the sort those giants would consider austere or noble. Joe saw nothing of the sort in this man, this monster, who was looking at him no better than one would examine a piece of meat.
“...this one is good.” Mr. Lessard announced after what seemed like an eternity to Joe.
He could hear Frankie breathe a sigh of relief from all the way across the room.
“His face is a little beaten up, but he has good bone structure. He is insured, too.” Joe’s skin crawled as Mr. Lessard’s finger stroked the left side of his face, and he could sense that insured had something to do with his missing ear. “If he heals well, he could be worth a fortune to the right person.”
Joe’s stomach lurched as Mr. Lessard carried him over to a cage that sat on a table to the left, across the aisle from the cage the other miniatures had been put in. Before Mr. Lessard placed Joe inside – much more carefully than he had handled the other tinies – he was able to sneak a glimpse of the sign above it. High Value it read.
Turning around, Joe could see that he was accompanied by five women, all of whom were slim and pale-skinned and some of whom were frighteningly young. His skin prickled at the sight of them and he wondered why only tinies that looked a certain way were being labelled as high value when Mr. Lessard knew absolutely nothing else about them.
“If we are lucky he will breed. He would have beautiful children, no?” Said Mr. Lessard as he locked up the cages.
Breed. Joe was revolted at the thought. How could anyone want to do such a thing in a place like this? Even if there was a boy of proper age there who Joe wanted to be with, he could hardly imagine himself taking his clothes off in plain view of strangers!
“Now, Frankie, let’s get to the dogs. How is the training going?” With that, the snatchers turned and left, and the entire room of miniatures breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Joe looked across the aisle and studied the members of the low value cage, still perplexed at what esoteric quality it was that separated Joe from them. The woman Mr. Lessard had insulted was gorgeous by miniature standards, with beautiful freckled cheeks and a heavyset build that was sure to survive the winter. Her son, too, was delightfully plump and sturdy, clearly in good health for his age. He tried to imagine what they would look like in a happier setting, smiling and playing games.
As he sat there and despised the fact that any of them were being commodified at all, he contemplated the ugliness of the world he lived in. Scanning the hopeless faces that surrounded him, he found the way they were being appraised and sorted oddly reminiscent of Tiny Town. There was a shallowness that was buried deep in the human soul, Joe thought. It compelled people to reduce other people to things, and that, he hypothesized, was the source of all the cruelty in the world.
As the woman and her son wept together in fear, he thought about the way Mr. Lessard had justified his cruelty towards them. Right now they hardly looked inspired to lose weight; they just looked sad and scared. How often it was that cruelty, like poisoned chocolate, was couched in superficial goodwill and feigned concern. Perhaps that way it was easier for people to convince themselves that the victims of the torment were deserving of it.
Joe sank down and shuffled into the corner as the girls in the cage eyed him with wary suspicion. He began to draw on the dust at the bottom with his finger just as he had done when he had been trapped in the jar. He thought of that poor woman in the cage across from him, and O’Grady, and the fire. He thought of Dawson at the podium and Danny at the stake. He thought of Herman, and the moment the buildings came crashing down upon him. He wondered if Herman was even alive after that, and further still he wondered if it was a bad thing that he would be sad to learn the giant wasn't. He wondered if it was a worse thing still that, in spite of everything that had happened between them, he still missed Herman deeply.
It was there in the cold of the cage that a vision came to him of a painting so visceral, so compelling, so heinous, that any viewer who saw it would not be able to look away. Joe tuned out the sobbing of the other miniatures as he sketched a thumbnail into the dust and filled in the blanks with his imagination, going over every detail again and again until its perfect image was emblazoned into this mind.
As Joe sat alone in his corner he knew he had no choice but to survive this ordeal. He had to make it out alive so that he could paint this image and mirror all the evils of the world back at anyone who was willing to look at it. Then, maybe, others would see the same ugliness that Joe saw. Maybe some of them would have the power to do something about it.
If others could see the world the way Joe saw it, maybe they could help make it a better place. Though he knew it was a long shot, all he could do was try his best and hope that the rest of the world would do the same for him in return.
It was all he could ask for in life.
Read the next part here!