Chastity

"Are you recording this?" She stopped chewing her fingernail long enough to ask. "It's not making any noise." She admired her nails for a beat, then started in on the left.

"I'm recording. Go ahead when you're ready."

"Mmm." She crossed her arms, prim, poised. "It was a good life."

Pause had ceased and awkward was well under way. "Is that it? Can you provide any details, or say why you thought it was good? Something for posterity."

Snort! "Posterity! Who the fuck cares! Here and now, dead and gone, next in line. Posterity." Her eyes relaxed but her brow stayed severe. "I have no posterity."

"Does that bother you?"

Only her eyes moved.

"Does that bother you?"

"For a long time it did. Then mostly not. It's easy to distract yourself with creature comforts, especially when you really like comfort. A clean bed. Good food. Physical affection. Warm sun and the smell of green corn. I was such a wild child! Oh, lord, you wouldn't believe it, seeing me like this, but I was such a hell-raiser. Incorrigible. A lot of that was anger, I think, at what I was and where I was in life—the usual angst of youth. Being robbed of my biological imperative, my thinking about that, oh, it made me rage sometimes. I didn't ask—it was done to me! The worst of all crimes!" She stood breathing hard for a moment, then sat back down.

"Listen: I know I was loved, and I loved in turn. I knew it beyond a doubt at the end. I knew. Those last two years I spent most of my time dreaming, and I understood many things that before only confused or irritated me." She paused, put her hands flat on the table, nailtips gleaming in the light. "But listen to this: all my life, always, the one thing I could never abide, other than dogs, was someone else's will forced onto me. And the day they cut me open and took my sex away was the day I stopped...posterity. What kind of pussy doesn't have sex? Not once! They cut me before I could get any...Jesus! What kind of deal is that?"

"So when you ask me, what did you think about your life, and I answer it was good, what I'm really saying is, chastity doesn't suit my kind, so maybe—"quick as thought she was across the table, claws passed through flesh and gone again, the red blood welling—"maybe you should think about it yourself and get back to me. Shithead." She walked out of the room.

Wow, she got my arm good. "End and file recording session, I. Vasquez, seven-twenty-four-two-oh-oh-four."