Dancing For Grandma

It was my second suicide attempt that landed me in the mental hospital. My mum and dad didn’t really seem to care as much as I tried to make them. I wandered the halls of our house surrounded by brothers and sisters, but feeling like I might as well have been a ghost. My little brother was the pride and joy of the household until my baby cousin came alone, as it seems in families it is whoever most recently emerged from the womb becomes as valuable to everyone as the crown jewels. 

The first time that I had hung myself, my parents swept it under the rug. The second time I slit my right wrist as well, and because I was bleeding to death, they called the ambulance, and I was taken to the hospital and revived. After living in the hospital for a while and being eyed up by the porters for a reason I didn’t yet understand, I found myself waking up in the cellar of an old house and living day to day as a slave for a fat, middle-aged man and his elderly grandma. 
“Dance quicker!” shouted the grandson as I pranced around in front of the dead-eyed old woman. I did dance quicker, I danced however quick or slow he wanted me to dance because there was nothing else I could do. Nothing else I wanted to do.
I had been stuck in their godforsaken basement room for around six months by that point, and I had started to crack. I was seeing shadows move in the dark corners of the room and was hearing the sound of banging on the walls that wasn’t there. My only purpose in his house was to dance. I’d never danced before, and I haven’t danced since, but in that period of my life, dancing was all I did. 
The mental hospital that I was living in after my nervous breakdown and suicide attempt was where he got me because a gang of porters had developed a system where they sold the quietest patients to the highest bidder, and no one really noticed that they had disappeared. I was a quiet patient, and no one had come looking for me. 
Six months previous, I was drugged in my bed with pentobarbital, and when I came to, I was being wheeled out of the back of the fat man’s van as he explained to me what I was doing.
“You will be a dancer, and you will dance for my grandma whenever she needs entertainment. She needs entertainment quite often now, and when she wants it, she lets me know by screaming as loud as she can. I have danced for her for almost two years now, but it gets tiring, you know? So you’re in now. You’ll be fed and watered and sheltered so don’t worry about that. All I ask in exchange is that you dance for my grandma.”
According to the fat man, his mum and dad had both died in a car accident years before and when his grandfather died, he was the sole carer of his grandmother. She didn’t know who he was, but it didn’t seem to matter to her as long as she was happy. Sometimes, she saw him and recognised him instantly, other times, it took her ten minutes, and sometimes, she would talk to me like I was her grandson and she’d known me since my birth. Sometimes, I’m sure she’d play it up for her entertainment just to watch us squirm as we tried to play along to whatever delusion she was claiming to believe. 
The house that I was trapped in was hers, and she’d lived in it with her husband for years, and it showed by the fact that it was falling apart at the seams. I never saw her move from in front of the large fireplace, rocking back and forth and staring into the flames. Her grandson, the fat man, was constantly on the move, trying to make sure that she was satisfied. He fed her, cleaned up after her when she had an accident and he bathed her once every three days. 
I was brought out almost every day for a few hours to dance in front of her when she got bored and started screaming. She never reacted, save for the fact that she would stop screaming upon seeing me, but she never seemed happy or unhappy to see me, and when I started dancing, her stare remained cold and uncaring, which I assume isn’t abnormal for someone with that kind of progressive disease.
I would never dance to music, as it would upset her. I would just dance at whatever speed the fat grandson thought she would enjoy the most. Some days, I would waltz around the living room with an imaginary partner and other days, I would be flying around as though I was at an illegal rave. When he told me to speed up, I would, and when he told me to slow down, I would.  
I lost any sense of self-worth in that house. I was nothing to either of them and by the time I had been set free, all I could do was take orders from people. I couldn’t be independent. I also struggled to wear clothes because the feeling of them on my body became incredibly stressful since I spent most of my without any clothes. I was always naked when I was presented to the grandma, as that was how she wanted me to be. On that topic, it was surprising how interested she was in sex for a woman of her age, especially with a disease like what she had. It seemed to be one of the only things that she’d retained from her younger years, and she clung onto it like a dog to a bone. 
That was another one of my jobs.
I was never informed of how she got her sexual satisfaction before I arrived, but I can only assume that it was from her grandson. He had a sort of thousand-yard stare that I think only a man who has ejaculated inside his grandma could have. Weirdly, I found the sex less troubling than the dancing because it seemed less bizarre at the time, less natural. I didn’t want to do it, but I could zone out and think about better times. She only really wanted one position, so it was just a matter of thrusting the hips and trying to drift away.
The dancing was different because I was never completely sure if what I was doing was right or whether it would get me in trouble. When I got in trouble, I would be whipped, and that hurt. The fat grandson would usually tie me down and whip my back until he felt like I had gotten the message. I realised that what usually got me whipped was if I tried anything like locking and popping because it reminded the grandma of hip-hop in the 1980s, and she had a serious problem with seeing black people on television. Her husband was a dedicated Nazi general during the second world war, and she carried those values with her until the end, almost as much as she carried the strong desire for sexual intercourse. I’m not sure if the grandson was a Nazi, but he didn’t seem to have any problem with filling the house with Nazi imagery, so I assume that he was just indifferent.
So yes, the fat grandson told me to dance quicker, and I did. He clapped along to whatever beat he could find in my manic flailing and occasionally cheered if I did anything impressive, which wasn’t very often. Grandma just stared at me like she always would. I couldn’t tell if she was even paying attention sometimes. 
“You can stop now,” he ordered.
I stopped dancing and waited for him to either grab a condom or the whip, as usually, it was one or the other after my dancing had got his grandma lathered up or irritated. Instead, he just shooed me away, and I returned to the basement like a slightly embarrassed naked version of Renfield. 
I would remain in the basement now for more than a month, as I eventually lost count. I was fed, I was given water, I was never washed. I wondered if it was a way of making me miss what I did for his grandma. If it wasn’t, then I did anyway. I couldn’t wait to perform for her again, and I looked back on my sexual escapades with the near-corpse through rose-tinted glasses. I just wanted to see her again.
The visions became more intense the longer I was submerged in the darkness of the basement. I heard rats in the walls, I felt them burrowing into my skin, their teeth chewing holes through the tops of my fingernails and licking their thin tongues into me, feasting on my blood. I just wanted to see her again.
Then, one day the fat grandson appeared in the basement with a plate of food and a message. 
“We’ve got a replacement,” he said, calmly.
I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I’d been broken up with by the love of my life. I pushed out a word.
“Who?”
“Another patient. He’s musclier than you, he can dance for longer.”
“I can work out, I can improve myself.”
“Don’t worry. You’re free now.”
He slipped a black bag over my head and slipped a needle into my arm. I collapsed onto the basement floor, and I still remember nothing after that except for blackness and the urge to see her again. In the darkness of my unconsciousness, I heard the gentle sound of my penis slipping inside her and her rasping breathing. I heard the dry-wet sound of her lips smacking together in satisfaction. I remember feeling her sagging skin and worrying that I’d poke a hole through it with my finger and feel the wet, pulsating, bare muscle underneath. I remember wondering what was wrong with me, wondering how I had let myself become what I was. I didn’t care.
I woke up in a farmer’s field in the middle of nowhere, completely naked and being watched over by a confused elderly man in his pyjamas, holding a shotgun by his side shouting words at me.
“Boy! What are you doing in my field, lad?”
“Where am I?” I asked.
“In my field.”
The farmer stared at me in confusion and I stared back at him, equally confused.
“Come on, I’ll get you inside.” He said before he lifted me up off the ground and led me into his house. He gave me a towel to wrap myself in and made me a cup of tea. All he wanted was for me to just want me to explain what I was doing in his field in the death of night, completely naked, covered in scars and stinking of shit.
“I broke up with my girlfriend,” I half-lied, as it felt like the truth to me at the time.
“Right. I’m not going to pretend I understand how that led you here,” he began, “but unless you have somewhere to go you can sleep in the spare room for tonight, and you can have a bath before you sleep and borrow some of my lad’s clothes because you smell bloody awful.”
“Thank you,” I said, sincerely. 
That night, freshly washed and lying in the single bed in the farmer’s spare room, free from the grandma and her fat grandson, I cried for the first time since before I was put in the mental hospital. It felt overwhelming. I couldn’t explain what had happened, but I felt like it was my fault. I hated myself more than I hated them because I felt like, against all odds, I loved her. I felt sorry for her. I felt like the two of them were put in a horrible situation and reacted as best as they could.
The next morning, I left the farmer’s house. He gave me breakfast and let me keep the clothes, and I was grateful. I just could not shake the heavy weight that I felt since I’d been set free from the house. It felt like my stomach was weighed down but void of any emotion at the same time. I still feel that way.
I don’t do much now other than think about what happened and wonder if it happened at all. I have a house, I have a wife, and I have two kids. I love them dearly, but I still feel like I could’ve done something differently. Even now, I wonder if my replacement was any good. I often also think about finding the house and going back and killing them or locking them both in the basement, but I don’t really have the time anymore. I wouldn’t call what I’ve gone through since a process of forgiveness because forgiveness would require me to have hated them and to no longer feel that way. I feel like what I’ve gone through is the opposite of forgiveness because I hate the two of them now more than I ever did. 
I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive them. I do know that even after everything that happened if she is still alive and I go to finish her off, the old bitch probably wouldn’t remember me. So, what’s the point?