Ryan Priest

Buried Swords

Bethany shuddered. She knew some of these men. How was she supposed to respond if she encountered them at the grocery store or Wal-Mart after this?

“Hey, hey, Lady!” Another came in punching a fistful of crumpled bills at her. When she took them she found they were unaccountably wet. The man pulled his mask off and threw it over the counter. She had to duck to avoid it. 

More and more men showed up. They just kept coming. The gray security box she’d brought was overflowing with cash. She’d never seen the library this crowded before. There were people everywhere but no one was reading. 

“Is this…the place from the ad?” Another had approached the counter. Crestfallen, Bethany nodded and took his fifty dollars. The man first removed his mask, then his long overcoat. He was completely nude underneath. He ran in to join the others. 

Bethany had never heard such sounds before. It sounded like fifty mothers furiously scrubbing their hands with dish soap or maybe an army of bored children squeezing their palms down in their armpits to create suction and the flatulent sound that goes with it. But these weren’t mothers and they weren’t children. They were all gross and hairy men. 

There was no way to open the windows after hours but the odor had become overpowering. The funk of an uncountable number of men, naked and fucking each other, spread across the two stories of the library. 

She’d never seen anything like this before, never wanted to. A pudgy man wearing only a black vest, nothing else, had allowed himself to be strung up in the air, face-up, his knees tied to his elbows. He was bald on top but had wiry silver hair sprouting out of the sides, like some aged clown. He was being violently thrust into the crotch of another man, while yet one more pushed him by the shoulders to add force. It sounded like they were killing him. It looked like he might die. But Bethany stayed away. She’d made this horrible bargain and was now bound by its precepts. 

“Don’t interfere.” Gilbert had commanded. He was the one who’d set this all up.

“Yes sir.” She’d said. Since Covid things had been bad. Her husband had lost his job. Every other day the city was threatening to lay her off. Someone had overheard the mayor asking what was the point of paying librarians to work from home because it wasn’t like they could stack book shelves from home. Six years of college for a master’s in library studies and everyone still thought her job entirely consisted of stacking books all day. 

“Look, these folks know and accept their risks. Despite what you may see, do not ever interfere. Do you understand?” 

“I understand.” She’d said the words but really had no idea what it all meant. The way Gilbert had been explaining it, these were just people who wanted to be around others. They needed a place where they could gather and not have someone bothering them about masks and social distancing. 

“We just want a little normalcy.” He’d said and it seemed like an okay deal at the time. She’d keep the library open after hours and for fifty bucks a head these people could use the facility. 

People. He’d used the word “people” but these were all men. Throughout the night only one woman showed up. She was a gussied-up blonde whose mink coat and sheer party dress must have cost a lot of money to make her look so cheap. 

She was drunk and stumbled in seemingly unable to walk in her own high heels without draping herself over the little guy with the thinning shoulder length hair who held her up. They were both giggling and laughing. She had one of those high-pitched chortles that one’s never supposed to hear in a library. 

At first the couple made their way to Bethany. As they got closer, near enough to see the “party” going on inside, the woman stopped in her tracks and gasped.

“C’mon baby, this is what we talked about.” He cajoled.

“I’m not….I’m not going in there.” The woman held her hand up to her mouth and her many diamond rings and silver bracelets shown in the light. 

“We came all this way!” The guy had all the charm of an impatient boss. Bethany was only three feet away but she didn’t even pretend not to be watching the fight go down. Anything was preferable to the horror show behind her.

“No!” The blonde wanted no part of what she saw in there. Kinky coked up key parties were one thing. Maybe even the occasional Anything-Goes-Party-Bus but this couple had just peered into the abyss of male sexuality run completely amok and she didn’t like it one bit. The woman turned and hobbled away like a damsel in distress as her knight in Drakkar Noir and artificial tanner chased out after her. 

It sounded as if the building was filled with ghosts and MMA fighters. Bethany could hear nothing but a symphony of moans amidst the ubiquitous slap of skin hitting skin at high velocity. 

No one considers themself a prude, Bethany no exception. She’d read Fifty Shades of Gray with one hand. Her husband liked to tease her whenever she brought home a romance novel with a hunk on the cover. As an avid book lover she prided herself on the fact that she’d even read a gay romance novel or two. But nothing had prepared her for this. First off there was no romance, at all. The only kissing she witnessed seemed violent acts of aggression. There was no tenderness, not even smiles. At best, the men performed their acts like disinterested masseuses and at worst, they seemed hateful. It was as if the other man’s body had done them a great dishonor and they were now exacting revenge. 

A dead bird being picked at by insects. A fat person dancing. A dog with his face caught in a jar. These are things you just can’t look away from.  Well it turned out, so was a library full of middle-aged men lubricated in oils and one another’s juices, congealing their bodies together in arrays that seemed to defy the understood limits of human anatomy. 

The intensity and extremity only increased as the night wore on, accelerated by a series of unspoken dares. You could have told her that these men were possessed by devils or under the influence of alien mind rays or even an elaborate hallucination brought on by stress and Bethany would have eaten it up. She’d have loved an excuse, any excuse, other than the horrible truth that was so vividly being displayed before her. These were just men. Behind every smile, every suit and tie, everyone’s grandpa, their fathers, all men, were just like this on the inside or if given the opportunity. Willing to turn it all over, to let themselves digress into heedless, wanton lust.

Bethany wept until she had no tears left. Her water bottle had gone missing and she did not want it back. She felt robbed of her energy and her smile too. Her body sat there numb and empty while the minutes on the clock mercifully ticked down to two o’clock. The deal was that everyone would go home at two. 

There were no complaints, like when a bar closes. There was no talking. Just a crescendo of moans topped off with each man apparently doing an impression of the sound he’d make if murdered.  

Then they shuffled out, putting back on their clothes and masks. The businessmen went back to being businessmen. The homeless piled on their rags and left. Nobody looked anyone else in the eye, especially not Bethany. 

None of this had gone how she’d expected. She looked out over the library and gasped at the mess the men had left behind. 

“Hey, don’t worry, most of that will dry off by morning.” Gilbert was the last one out. He was fastening the buttons on his shirt. 

Bethany looked down at the floor, unable to reply. 

“I can tell you’re a little shell shocked. But you gotta understand…”

She looked up at him.

“This is the fucking apocalypse.” He put on his face mask. “It’s not like we expected. No fiery comets and no angels with trumpets but this is it. Maybe it’ll take five years, maybe even fifty but we’ve all felt it. We’ve lost something and we’re not ever getting it back. 

“Locked inside. We’re cut off from our friends, our family, our coworkers. That cute new thing at the office who you’re now never going to get to know any better. The friend you’ve been meaning to get around to visiting, you won’t. You’re not going to bump heads with your soul mate reaching for the same book at a bookstore. That gravy train of human progress has derailed. It’s all downhill from here.”

“How does any of that explain…this?!” 

“They took sports. We’re not supposed to play basketball or wrestle. We can’t watch a game and cheer together. Just like a woman needs affection and emotional support, men need to feel one another. Competing with him, fight him, fuck him. Bury your sword in him, figuratively. Half those guys aren’t even gay. We just need to taste his sweat and press our bodies against his. We need to breath heavy, work together or maybe against one another.  Women need affection, men need this. People need food, water and some sort of physical reassurance from another human being to know that we still exist.” 

Bethany hadn’t thought she could get any more depressed tonight. 

“So are we set for Tuesday night too?” 

Bethany wanted to throw up. Then she looked down at the gray box that sprung open like a jack-in-the-box made of cash whenever she opened it. She looked at what she could see of Gilbert’s face behind his face mask and then out to the mess in her library. The defenseless books so fouled that she’d have to pick them up with a grabber and drop them into the incinerator. She didn’t know if Gilbert was right, if this was in fact the apocalypse. The emotional roller coaster she’d just taken for the last four hours, the sights she’d seen, had left her without the energy to care one way or the other. 

“Fuckit.” She consented. “Just next time, if they want to use books for their little props, they need to bring their own from home!”

“Yes ma’am.” Gilbert gave mock salute and escaped back into the night. Bethany affixed her own mask, turned out the lights and said goodbye to all the lonely books. Her husband was still awake when she got home. He had nowhere to be in the morning. They cuddled up together and watched some TV. Happy to have one another in the face of a possibly ending world.