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No one had to tell him to go into the punishment hole. He would do it himself.
Of course, the accommodations for a ‘punishment hole’ here were quite different from the walk-in at the village. He tried to fit himself in the garage freezer, but it was so full of hot pockets and ice cream sandwiches that he could barely wiggle in his foot. He tried just sitting in the empty hot tub, but it was right in the sun and surrounded by trees and flowers whose beauty he surely did not deserve. He tried the cabinet at the top of the stairs, thinking the odor of mothballs and mildew would do something to put him in his place, but it was too narrow and he couldn’t get the door to shut.
He eventually settled on the floor of his bedroom closet. If he shut the door it was dark except for a little crack by the floor, and the carpet was rough and prickled uncomfortably into his skin. It wasn’t particularly cold, but he could strip his clothing off and shiver anyway.
He could think about it in here. He had to think about it. He’d done terrible, unspeakable things. God was watching in shock. His father was looking on sternly, disapproval knitted into his puckered eyebrows. He had to show them he could repent. He would try to be good.
He first closes himself in the punishment hole three days after, when he has no more adrenaline to spare. Something heavy settles in its place, building sinful clouds across his mind. He thumbs a scabby pimple on his cheek and tries to remember.
Terror creeps up his spine like spiders. They move into the shape of a hand and it walks its fingers behind his neck and encircles him there, constricting his breath. He can feel the bathroom wall, textured beneath a coat of warm tan paint. The light is off because the fan turns on with it and squeals like death.
He sticks his fingers down his throat because he thinks maybe the feeling he’s having is one of vomiting. He cannot remember when he ate last. All he can do is choke and gag and constrict his wet insides, unused to touch, against the two intruding fingers. It burns in his eyes, which drip hot tears never intended to spill.
His body is contorted by sobs and he shakes on his side against the rough red bath mat. He is big enough to lift a bookcase, but he is so small in here, like a pillbug. He does what he can to hold his breath, to stifle his crying, to press it into himself and let only his tears come out like a juicer full of lemon. This is his dear secret, his personal escape, his terrible inconvenience.
The man outside is peacefully asleep, tucked into a puffy comforter on his mattress on the floor. He does not stir, not for many, many hours. The torment exhausts him. Toki wishes he would wake up. He would rather take the blade, the sharpness of his words, the bones of his elbows, the promises that he loves him, the hands exploiting his body. The active torture, he decides, is better than the passive.
Carpet scratches his chin. He looks up and finds himself swimming under rows and rows of t-shirt hems. He reaches forward in the blackness and grabs the protruding shape of a cold doorknob. When it opens, the closet coughs him out, and he presses his torso into the ground and chokes on fresh air and moonlight through the window.
It is night, so he gets up to use the toilet and brush his teeth and put his hair in a braid and set his alarm for the next morning when his life will resume and he will be back to normal. He goes to bed because that is what he is supposed to do. He lays there and shakes beneath his one fluffy blanket and clings to his teddy bear and thinks that even his tried-and-true velveteen friend cannot ever know what he’s done.
Toki does not recall falling asleep, but he recalls waking up because his phone is ringing and there are tears pouring down his face and he cannot breathe for his sobs and he is begging for it to stop.
The two missed calls are from Abigail. He turns his phone off entirely when she texts a ‘please call me back’. He rolls out of bed and slides to the floor and reaches up his arm to fumble through the drawer of his desk.
He’s had the same blade, pulled from a pencil sharpener, since he was fourteen. It is stained pink: perhaps with blood, perhaps with rust. It is dull. He has to slice at his forearm in quick, heavy strokes, like a violent violinist. He cannot control depth this way. In some places, his skin barely splits into a little bubbling line. In others, his skin peels apart and soft white tissue ripples open under it, expanding like insulation foam.
It only hurts once he’s run out of places to go, and the side of his right hand is tacky with drying blood. It hurts terribly, then, and he holds his raw arm against himself as a bird would hold its injured wing, and he mashes his face into the carpet and prickles his eyes with the itchy fibers.
He does not make it to the punishment hole.
He makes it to the bed, the deceiving pile of whimsical stuffed animals, crowned by the fluffy little sun with a beaming smile on its face and dangly brown legs. At night he’s held each toy tenderly, like it’ll hold him back, like its blank bead eyes will blink at his and its sewn-on mouth will tell him it’s alright. Not a single one has awoken for him. He clutches the emptiness beside him now and pretends deaddy bear is tucked into his arms and drying his tears.
He smokes the weed he’s offered, lets a gummy soaked in liquid LSD be slipped into his mouth, thinks the promise that he’s special, that he’s the one, is real. He dries Toki’s tears this time, leans above him and smiles down and calls him his boy. His face swims in and out and is consumed in the gentle shapes of waves. The more suggestible Toki becomes, the more he’s willing to follow. Perhaps, Toki thinks, he is right. He is smarter than him, older than him, more experienced than him. He knows better.
It is only later that shadows come up the walls. They pinch the light and warp Toki’s mirror image so he is small and thin and bruised like a peach. They show him how his dirty shirt hangs from his sweaty body, how his hair falls limp along the slopes of his shoulders. The room is impossibly large and he shrinks within it, swimming in the blankets, in the pillows, in the snow that has piled itself on the ground and the roof and caked the gutters of the house across the way where he saw a partygoer tumble out the window and thought, for a second, of sneaking over to them and begging to be saved.
His head throbs against the strobing of the bedroom’s color changing lights. He pretends to sleep and sees on the back of his eyelids himself, the moth, the lamb, the sacrifice, bleeding from each wire of his heart, pouring into a strainer like that will fill a pot.
When he returns, he does not look at the sorry lump on his bed. He lays with his back to it, pressed against the wall like he does not wish to share space with something so abhorrent.
Toki finds himself crouched under the spout of the bathtub. It pours frigid water down his numb arm and it soaks into his pink pajama pants like it will wash out the brown stains of blood. The soles of his slippers fill like sponges. Water pools between his thighs, sticking his too-big t-shirt to the clammy skin of his belly. The flaps of skin on his arm ripple under the force of the water, revealing white and pink beneath them.
Toki pulls his arm back and holds it in front of himself and stares with awe as the deepest cuts start to well up with fluid and blood once more and it seeps over the texture of other scars and drips down towards his elbow. He sucks in a breath and shoves his arm under the icy faucet once more and rubs at it with his right palm so all the skin is pink and tender.
The fabric of his shirt sticks to his open wounds. He has to peel it off in the morning, and he spends a long time watching little orbs of blood form on the surface. He picks at bits of clotting, then pulls off whatever scabs have begun to form.
He eats breakfast like he’s cheerful. He sits at the desk at work and smiles at his coworkers’ questions. Yes, his boyfriend is handsome. Yes, he enjoyed visiting him. Yes, he is happy. He is so happy he could break.
He screams in the punishment hole, his head pressed in a storage bin of winter coats and scarves. It snows outside, dusting the green backyard like powdered sugar.
It snows a whole week. He waits and waits for the door to open and he watches it in terror and awe and impatience. As hours pass, he thinks about how he can fix this. All he needs to do is be good. He can be good. He can figure it out. He can play the game. If he gives him enough time, he will figure out how to make him happy.
He cannot make him happy with his inexperienced kissing. They do not keep trying because there is nothing left to try, because this was a test and he did not know to study, so he failed. He sits in the little en-suite with its broken fan and pokes at the tattoo that is healing on the side of his leg and imagines his skin drained of color like the world outside the window.
He vows to change and sets aside those misgivings in his mind. He tries to love the way he’s told to, and then he’s told it’s wrong, that he’s too gentle, too eager in the wrong way, too romantic. He will find someone else to do it better.
Toki begs to fix his mistake. He yields his body as his bargaining chip, offers its imperfection and naivete as apology.
He stares at the sleeping figure next to him and swallows the taste of his skin. He runs through the routine of a day in Stardew Valley. Pick the vegetables. Water the fields. Collect milk from the cows and goats. Feel unloving hands like vices on his thighs. Turn truffles to oil and apples to jam. Watch the calendar turn to winter. Let the mine swallow him and his sword each day, and spit them out each night. Suck back his disgust at the ungentle fingers that wrench him apart inside. Gift Linus a berry. Visit Elliott at his seaside cottage. Fish in the gray winter sea. Blur the screen with the flow of tears he cannot shut off.
He sits on his knees and leans into the cracked-open door and smears blood on the eggshell paint when it tips open. He means to say something important, and it comes out of him like the vomit of a word search, and he is in the punishment hole again, screaming to come up, his voice going hoarse, his lungs folding in suffocation.
Fabric-softened blankets tickle his nose. Baritone vibrates against his side, its rise and fall repeating itself. He feels the weight of deaddy bear in his arms and looks down and sees his plush face, swaddled in with Toki’s neck, looking up like he’s missed him. A heavy palm settles on his hair and smoothes it against the back of his head. Under the weight of the blanket, he feels tight bandages around his arms.
The mantra continues. You’re okay. I have you. You’re okay.
“I was in the punishment hole,” Toki mumbles.
“You don’t have to be there anymore,” Nathan replies.
Toki smiles and thinks it would be nice to believe him.