4

clementine

THE NIGHT OF the full moon, I reported to the gate where I was going to be thrown to the wolves at the appointed time.

The wall was tall and thick, nondescript and gray. The gate was only the size of a door. It was made of metal, with more than one deadbolt and a black doorknob. The ground leading up to the wall was blacktopped like a parking lot, except there weren't any spaces for cars.

As dusk settled, I stood in a line with eight other women, and I watched as two more women were brought in by armed guards, handcuffed.

That was the thing. You didn't have a choice about this. If you tried to resist, they put you in what they called "protective housing" but it was really jail. Then they forced you here, anyway. It didn't make any sense to resist, but some people did it anyway.

The final tithe arrived ten minutes late. There was a tidily trimmed beard on the tithe's face, and I did a double-take until I realized he must be trans. Because, of course, it didn't matter if you didn't identify as a woman anymore. You still had to report to the Council of Tithes if you were assigned female at birth, and you still had to be tested, and if the blood test came back positive, they sent you out across the wall anyway.

"You're late, Noah. Second time. "

"Oops," said Noah with a little shrug. "What are you going to do, force me to be gang-raped by wolves?" He laughed and loped over to stand next to me. He looked me over.

I looked away.

"You're new," he said.

"I didn't mean to… stare," I said. "You get that a lot, I bet."

"I do and am therefore used to it," he said.

"Still," I said. "Sorry."

We were all wearing tithe outfits, which looked kind of like medical scrubs. They were shapeless outfits, a shirt and pants. We'd been told not to wear underclothes of any kind, just the baggy tithe clothes.

He yawned, scratching his stomach. He had a flat chest and I could see his chest hair peering out at the top of the V-neck of his tithe outfit. He looked, you know, very male. "Not a thing, really." A pause. "This is your first time, huh?"

"That obvious?" I said.

"Nah, just that I haven't seen you before, and it's basically the same people every time," he said. "It's my fourth time."

"Oh," I said, looking him over, thinking about seventeen thousand questions and not wanting to say any of them aloud because they were rude and none of my business.

"You know," he said, "they all fuck each other out there, so it's not like this bothers them." He gestured to the chest hair. "Luckily, I'm attracted to men, so… could be worse."

"It's none of my business," I muttered.

"You want some advice about it?" he said.

"You have some?" The truth was that my heart had been beating too fast all day, that my stomach had been unsettled since before I went to sleep last night, and that I hadn't been able to eat anything all day. I was nervous as all hell.

"I mean, they do all the work," he said. "And it does not feel bad."

I nodded, too fast. "Yeah, I mean, I've heard that."

"So, you'll get through it," he said. "Don't worry so much. "

Thanks, great advice. I'll get right on that. Now that you've told me not to worry, it's amazing how all the worry just melts away! I bowed my head. "Sure, sure. Of course."

"You want to know if I have a penis, don't you?" he said, nudging me with his shoulder. "Come on, admit it, you want to know."

I couldn't help but smile. "No," I said, shaking my head, but grinning now. "No, that is none of my business."

"It isn't your business," he sang, "but you still want to know."

"I'll just wait and see," I said, bold, turning to look at him.

He laughed, slinging his arm around me. "Oh, sweetheart," he said throatily into my ear, "if you think you'll be able to concentrate on anything except the twelve dicks that are trying to get inside you or get rubbed against you or pelt you with wolf come, you're in for a big surprise."

I winced.

He let go of me. "Sorry."

I shook my head. "No. It's good to know." I nodded. "I'd rather know." I bounced on the balls of my feet.

It was quiet. How long did we wait here? No one else was showing up. We were all just here in the line, staring at the wall. It wasn't completely dark yet, but it was close. The moon was visible in the sky.

I gazed up at it, and then looked down the line of tithes, and then at the wall, and finally back to the moon.

I turned back to Noah. "So, it's like that? There's a lot of them?"

"There's some kind of hierarchy going on," he said. "So, there's a group of wolves who gets to fuck first, and they distribute themselves evenly over how many of us there are. They run themselves ragged, and then the others get a turn. It takes all night. There's someone who can still get it up all the way until dawn. Okay, probably five or six someones, to be honest, and they're all, you know, getting it up and finding ways to poke you with it."

I swallowed. "But it's not bad, you said. It doesn't feel bad. "

"No, it feels very fucking good."

I nodded.

It was quiet again.

"They don't chase you?" I read that a lot, in some of the stories online, but I wasn't sure if that was real or some kind of fantasy that erotica writers were making up. Prey-kink or something. It turns me on to think that this huge beast-thing is going to tackle me and rip me to shreds and eat me. Not to yuck anyone's yum or whatever. I mean, here I was, right?

Noah furrowed his brow. "Well…" He nodded at the women in handcuffs. "It's not that tithes don't try to run sometimes."

I nodded.

"It's stupid. They will catch you."

I nodded again.

More silence.

"I don't, you know, not yet," said Noah. "I mean, maybe not ever. I keep going back and forth about it, but I started the process, anyway, with my therapists and stuff, to get what I need for the bottom surgery, in case I decide I want one."

A penis, he meant. I blinked at him. "You could not want one?"

"I mean… even if I do it, it won't be like a real man's." He rolled his eyes. "A cis man's. And I, you know, it's handy, the extra hole, sometimes, with, uh…" He shook his head. "Why am I talking to you again?"

"Let's be friends, Noah," I said. "You want to?"

He gave me a little smile. "You're going to be okay, you know. What's your name?"

"Clementine," I said.

He laughed. "Of course it is."

"What the hell does that mean?" I said.

He nudged me with his shoulder again. "I guess I thought, before I transitioned, that, like, men didn't feel like this."

"Like what?" I said.

He ignored me. "And I'm not saying that this —being a tithe— is a situation that men get into anyway, but it doesn't actually matter. Being a man doesn't mean you're not vulnerable, not in the end. Here's the thing. They do it to everyone, men and women both."

"Do what?" I said.

"Force you to do things," he said. "Take away your choices. Impose their superior strength on you. Make you submit. It doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman, there's always just someone else who's dominant. But you survive it, you know, it's okay. We all survive it."

"Right," I said, nodding. "Right."

And that was when I noticed the gate was opening.