“What do you mean together?” I point at Frannie 2. “Where are her awful modifications? Why doesn’t the White Angel give her pink wings?”
Frannie 2 gets off the floor and walks over to me. She stands below my hanging form. She bends over and spread her cheeks for me, as if I’m an ass goblin taking roll.
“Stop!” I shout. “Don’t do that!”
She wiggles her bottom and the tip of a tongue pokes out. Another few inches of the tongue worms from her buttocks as she gyrates. More and more tongue appears until the tip reaches the floor. A belch from inside of her. No, not a belch. A croak. The croak of a toilet toad.
Frannie 2 nearly splits in half as a toilet toad leaps out of her ass. She drops and convulses on the floor, drooling. A puddle forms around her head like a halo.
The toilet toad stands on its hind legs and waves at me, tongue floating through the air toward my exposed behind. “No! Somebody help!”
“Don’t fight the toad,” Frannie says. “Your ass needs to be fed. Otherwise it’ll get hungry and eat you.”
“No, that’s not true. Help me.”
“The White Angel gave us explicit instructions. I trust him. Even if he mutilated our bodies, he rescued us from Toy Division. He promised that we’ll never go back. We’re test subjects now.”
“I don’t want to be a test subjahhhhh!!!” The toad uses its tongue like a retracting pulley and rises into the air, entering me.
Frannie 2 regains consciousness, her face slick with drool. “The toad saves,” she says. “The toad saves.”
The White Angel barges in. Otto hisses. Everyone else goes silent. Even the toilet toad inside me stops croaking and squirming. A second ass goblin enters the cell long enough to place a stepladder beneath me. The White Angel stands on the top step and grabs hold of me. He yanks my ass off the hook, tearing my flesh and spilling my blubber.
The White Angel sets me on the ground and kicks Frannie 2 across the room. “My toad!” she says. “Give me my toad!”
“Enough about toads,” the White Angel says.
“But you said toilet toads are necessary. You told us 999 needed to be cleansed and fed,” Frannie 2 says.
The White Angel’s eyes extend on their stalks and stretch over to Otto’s corner. “Is the spider not getting on with his mates? I thought the four of you were friends. You’re two pairs, after all.”
Otto raises his front legs as if to attack. He hisses, pressing farther into the corner.
“All in due time,” the White Angel says.
I huff and puff, my mouth against the floor. Unlike ass goblins, I have maintained my child eyes, so not all is lost. “What do you want with us?” I ask.
The White Angel retracts his eyes from Otto and smiles. “You’re my perfect army.”
“Army against who?” Frannie says.
“Darling, don’t you know? Adolf can’t be gone forever.”
An idea congeals in my brain. I assume it sat there for a while before I noticed it. “You did away with Adolf, didn’t you? He didn’t vanish into thin air.”
“We live in a rational universe. Nobody vanishes into thin air. Adolf is interested in two things. He loves ass dolls and wants to rid the earth of children. We all love the dolls, and we’re bitter about being born old, with all the miseries and disappointments that age imposes. He wants a childhood. We all do. We’ve been cheated out of happiness. “Adolf thinks ass backwards. He refuses to believe that science can deliver childhood to our race. Our golden age will dawn not when children die out, but when we take what we want from children. While Adolf has been away on his sex odyssey, I have made the decision to seize control of Auschwitz. After the four of you destroy him, I can synthesize a childhood serum. Your deaths will give rise to a glorious empire of happy ass goblins.”
“What makes you think children are so happy?” Frannie says.
“In your natural habitat, you children live far away from death, in a land of magic.”
“Then what gives you the right to make us suffer?” Frannie 2 says.
“You are hybrids. Children will hate you now, and ass goblins have always hated you. Killing Adolf and lending me your childhood are your sole remaining purposes.”
“I won’t fight for any ass goblin,” Frannie 2 says, shaking a fist at the White Angel.
The White Angel kicks her in the tummy and marches out of our cell.
The toilet toad inside me stirs again, tonguing my insides. It doesn’t reach for vital organs as it would have in the past. The tonguing actually feels cleansing, like it’s gobbling up toxins and other harmful agents. The toad croaks and vomits in my rectum. The puke must be recycled, purified nourishment. It rejuvenates me. Now I see why the ass goblins eat dinner this way, even if it doesn’t work with child butts. Toilet toads are the most brilliant solution to starvation and waste management ever. Not that starving was ever a problem when kids were in charge.
“What is a sex odyssey?” I ask.
Frannie and her twin open their mouths, but before they say a word, an ass goblin unlocks the door and wheels in a metal cart piled with cider jugs and a mound of kidskin.
“You’re a cannibal,” Frannie says. She glares at me through the eyeholes of a greasy face.
I take another swig from a cider jug and shudder as the alcohol leaks into my belly. She pokes her tongue out of the kidskin mouth. “And a Judas,” she says.
“You’re the one eating the skin of children,” I say.
“That’s because I have to,” she says.
“How is it any different?”
“Eating skin isn’t bad because it’s necessary for survival. Drinking cider makes you a traitor. It’s cannibalism.”
I point at Otto. “He’s drinking cider too.”
“Otto is part spider. He probably doesn’t know any better.”
The Frannies munch on kidskin in one corner while Otto and I chug cider in our own corners of the room. Frannie 2 doesn’t eat any of the fresh skin. She waits for chunks to fall from the lips of her sister, then sucks on the mushy flesh.
I want to explain to Frannie that mine and Otto’s goblin genes must be responsible for our need of cider, but she’s all open mouth and closed ears.
Chapter Seventeen
Days sink into other days. Irrelevant in Toy Division, time in the surgery ward melts down to a few minute alterations: when ass goblin sentries change shifts with other ass goblins, skin and cider feasts, the White Angel’s visits, and how the four of us adjust to our various mutations.
Otto does pushups around the clock. He gets more buff every hour. Frannie 2 learns to fire the toilet toad out of her ass. It only shoots about halfway across the room, but she practices and improves daily. I am learning to flap my wings, hovering a foot or two in the air. I can also morph into partial S.S. mode, but I’m still overcoming a handicap that purebred ass goblins never encounter: I have eyes on my face. Frannie is worse off than the rest of us. She coughs up goblin asses on the one bed in the room. She boots them away, miserable and disgusted. This is how we pass the time.
I continue to practice Shit Slaughter, learning to widen my mouth and turn my head into a chainsaw of destruction. I am getting better, visualizing ass goblins for some mental target practice. When not doing pushups, Otto broods in his corner.
Twice daily, an ass goblin wheels in a cart of kidskin and cider. The White Angel visits once per day. Of course, I am still a hypocrite and a Judas to Frannie. In her eyes, Otto is now a perfect being, incapable of error.
Chapter Eighteen
The White Angel does not visit us today. For strange reasons I could never explain, I start to miss the barracks, the horrid alarm of morning. Frannie speaks to Otto and her sister, who mutters to herself. No one else speaks to anybody else. The sentries monitor us day in and day out. None of us know morning from night, not without habitual tortures and humiliations to remind us. Something is happening in Auschwitz. I don’t know what. Maybe it’s the separation from my usual role. The White Angel does not visit us today. That’s all I know, for better or for worse.