Gobby Blank

The deer blind was like a cocoon. Gobby's limbs ached with stiffness, but she wasn’t ready to leave just yet. One more would come by soon, she knew it. They were far too predictable. She reached for the biscuit in her pocket only to realize she’d crushed it somehow, and now she had a pocket full of crumbs. She tried balling the crumbs together in her fist to no avail. The next thing she knew, she was eating the crumbs from her hand like a rat. It made her think of her mother, who didn’t have teeth. She couldn’t have rat-mouthed these biscuit crumbs.

She heard movement on the rocks in the distance. He would see her soon as he rounded the building remnant. Her deer blind was in one of the only trees. There he was with a wild look in his wide eyes, searching the ground for tripwires, thinking they were hidden beneath the debris. He looked up and saw her just as her arrow pierced his chest. His rifle fell to the ground. “Fuck you!” he screamed, and then he died. Gobby closed her eyes, and in the darkness, she found her heart-shaped locket, and like a mist, she wafted through the keyhole and laid her resolve on the red velvet sofa by Genie, who smiled with approval. Gobby opened her eyes, took a deep breath, and grinned. She climbed down and surveyed the five dead men strewn around her on the ground. She walked over to a crumbling wall and dug out a duffle bag from under the rocks, then she began to strip her prey of their belongings. Guns, pants, belts, shirts, shoes, goggles, socks, hats, glasses, wallets, anything of value she found on them, she took but not their underwear. She never touched their underwear. She opened their mouths to check for any good teeth. If they had any, which was rare, she’d pull them out and throw them in the duffle bag too.

It was the year 2130, Gobby Blank was fifteen years old, and she was a killer. She lived in Proll, a state that consisted of the remnants of Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. She’d never attended school because her parents were members of Cult45, a cult of white American followers of the 45th president of the United States, who died in prison. The Cult45 followers had all migrated to Proll because they feared the browning of America. They didn’t trust the government, science, medicine, doctors, schools, or outsiders. Gobby lived in one of the cult45 trailer park communes at the southernmost tip of Proll, which was actively being consumed by the ocean.

Gobby’s deer blind was in one of the few trees left in the area. It was north of town near a fresh and expanding sinkhole. The land around the hole was piles of debris, broken condominiums, and highrises that had been pushed inland by floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, cyclones, and other natural disasters.

Gobby threw her duffle bag over her shoulder and started her journey home. She admired her new boots, which she’d just taken off one of her victims. She sang a verse from an old Orville Peck song.

The sun goes down, another dreamless night

You're right by my side

You wake me up, you say it's time to ride

In the dead of night

Strange canyon road, strange look in your eyes

You shut them as we fly

As we fly

Her grandmother sang at the only bar in town when Gobby was little. She always sang this song. Gobby would sit outside the bar's back door and listen to her sing, wishing she could sing in a bar.

Gobby lived with her mother and aunt. The man she called “dad” was dead. Her grandmother told her they didn’t know for sure if he was her dad. Her mother never married but had many men around. When a doctor told her dad that he had diabetes and had to inject insulin, or he would die, he thought the government was trying to plant a chip under his skin. He wouldn’t take the shots, and diabetes killed him.

No one Gobby knew had teeth except her. She was shunned by her family and everyone in the trailer park because of it. They believed that people with teeth had sacrificed babies and sucked their blood or were descendants of Hillary Clinton, a woman who ran for president against the Cult45 founder. They believe Hillary was the devil incarnate and that she drank the blood of babies. Gobby, therefore, was despised and tortured by not only her community but her family also. She knew the only reason they kept her around was that she killed their enemies and brought home the loot. If you were a woman in Proll, men were the enemy. They could do whatever they wanted. So Gobby sitting in a deer blind, killing men was perfect for her aunt and mother. She was their animal, their tool, their killer.

When Gobby was nine years old, her father raped her behind a curtain at a Cult45 initiation ceremony. As part of the new member process, they had to humiliate an enemy of Proll publicly. Since Gobby had teeth, the cult believed she was the descendant of Satan herself, Hillary Clinton, so her father chose her.

After her father raped her, he asked if any other men wanted to humiliate a descendant of the devil herself. Five men accepted his offer. Gobby never cried or screamed; she only winced in pain. She escaped into her mind and found a heart-shaped locket. She blew through the keyhole and sat on a red velvet sofa. Beside her was a beautiful genie, smiling at Gobby with perfect teeth and blond hair. “One day, you will kill these men. Isn’t that great?” The genie asked gleefully. Gobby smiled at her and decided to name her Genie since she was a genie, and then they played a game of checkers on the velvet sofa inside the heart-shaped locket.

The evening after she killed the five men and had taken the loot to her mother, Gobby decided to head back to the deer blind. She’d grown quite fond of it. It was high and away from everything. There weren’t many trees surrounding it, only trash and rubble, but it was still the place Gobby felt most at home.

As night fell on the deer stand, Gobby stared down at the dead men on the ground below. “They all thought they could get me, but they were wrong.” She thought. They’d all raped her multiple times over the years. Some of them rented her out to travelers who came by boat to their eroded coast. But Gobby had grown tired of being used. The first time she let them know she was no longer playing their game was when she bit a man’s penis off and ran like a wild animal with it still clutched in her teeth. That’s when the town started to fear her. For punishment, her mother made her stay in the deer blind and told her if she came back to the house alive, it had better be with things of value they could sell.

The first man she killed was the scrub whose penis she bit off. He came looking for revenge on the scrawny child. He was sure his gun would give him the advantage, but it didn’t. She sat in that deer blind, quiet as a mouse, and her arrow pierced his heart before he even knew what happen. After that, people in the town decided she was not just the child of Satan; She was Satan. No one would go near her except for men who thought they could still rape her and were sure they wouldn’t allow a child to kill them. They were all wrong. She was done being raped and she was happy to kill them.

Gobby and Genie laughed and relaxed, played checkers, listened to her grandmother sing that Orville Peck song, and fell asleep on the velvet sofa until sharp pains in her abdomen jolted Gobby into the real world. “What is this?” Gobby thought. She shifted her weight in the deer blind, but the pain kept coming in waves and worsening with every wave. She started to feel pressure in her crotch, which also felt like it was on fire. Genie held her hand and whispered to her that everything was going to be alright. Gobby squatted and pushed because that is what her body dictated, and then there it was, a baby girl laying on the ground of the deer blind—a tiny baby girl. Gobby sat in her blood, looking at the tiny being just there between her legs. Genie told her to cut the cord, and she took out her knife and cut it. She was in shock. Gobby took a shirt out of her backpack, wrapped the baby, and nuzzled it to her chest. The baby rooted out one of her nipples and latched on. Gobby felt both love and repulsion. Then she passed out.

By morning light, the baby’s screams woke Gobby up. She knew she had to do something. More men would be coming to get their revenge, her mother would be expecting more loot, and she had no idea what to do with a baby.

Gobby was sore; walking wasn’t easy, especially while carrying her duffle bag and a baby, but she made it to the dock where the boats came in that brought the men. Gobby found an old kitchen drawer in the building debris. She lined it with a shirt she’d taken off one of her kills. She realized she had to feed the baby before abandoning her, so she pulled out her left boob and latched on the little mouth.

The water lapped against the dock. The wind rustled the bushes. It was quiet and calm. Gobby looked down at the baby, “If only the world was like this, just us, the water, the breeze..but it’s not, and I can’t bring you to the heart-shaped locket.” Gobby yanked the baby off her breast, but the baby didn’t cry. She was asleep with milk dripping from her lips and the happiest look on her face. At that moment, Gobby wanted to throw the baby in the water. She hated her because she couldn’t allow herself to love her. She placed the baby in the drawer and left it on the dock.

Gobby ambled back to the deer blind. Genie held her hand. That night she killed another Scrub. The following day she brought home the loot to her mother and aunt, and she heard a tale of a baby being found on the dock by a scientist from the Mars Colony.

“..said theys seen it from them cameras in the sky. Big Brother see everything, this proves they still spying on us! You know theys wanting babies since can’t none of them have any. Said baby’s blind though but they found out after they took it. Probably gonna do experiments on it cuz you know those folk on the colony don’t keep no messed up babies.”

Gobby’s mother's voice trailed off as Gobby became a mist and blew through the keyhole of the heart-shaped locket. Inside she sat on the velvet sofa and cried while Genie held her hand.