My name is Capricorn. At one point, I imagine it was something like Nichole or Samantha, but any memory of that name has slowly faded away with who I imagine were my mother and father. Their names are even more distant, yet sometimes a simple warm smile creeps into the forefront. It’s my mother’s smile and she’s looking down at me with such pride and joy. The only thing I have left of my time as a Michelle or Brandy.
I am Capricorn. I share a room with Scorpio and Sagittarius. Sagittarius was my best friend before Gramps took her away. Gramps is the reason we’re all here. All twelve of us. He was the one that took me away from my mother and then he took Sagittarius from me too. He says he loves us, but I don’t know how that can be true. He seems nothing but mean. His nephew Nellie is the only other man we see. He always carries a shotgun and kicks us and hits us. He says that if we don’t behave, we’ll end up like that dog he shot. Libra couldn’t stop crying for days after he shot that dog. She was so scared.
Across from the old house where we all sleep, there’s a barn. We’re told that we’re never to go in there, but one day when Nellie had gone to town to get some food, Sagittarius and myself decided we’d get a little brave and try to peek into the barn through the window on the back of the barn. I hoisted her up and she grabbed the little bit of ledge there was so that she could see what it was that we weren’t supposed to see. Just at this moment, Gramps came lumbering around the corner of the barn.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he screamed like a bucket of spit with lips, grabbing her ankle and yanking her from my shoulders causing her foot to hit me in the side of the head. After she landed, he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the front of the barn. “You want to see what’s in there so bad? Then, I’m going to show you. All you girls take a good long look because this is what happens when you get too nosy!” He dragged her kicking and screaming with tears streaming from her eyes. She had the look of someone who knew they were going to die, and he didn’t care. He just unlocked the barn door and pulled her inside. Just like that, she was gone.
It was just a couple of days and Nellie came back from the road with another girl named Sagittarius. So young that she hadn’t even had her special time yet. That meant she couldn’t go to the barn. No one disappeared into the barn until they had their special time. It didn’t mean that Nellie wouldn’t do things to you, but it kept you away from the barn. Once you went inside the barn, you didn’t come back.
That night, I quietly sobbed until my body could no longer stay awake while Gramps marched up and down the hallway with a shotgun shouting, “let that be a lesson, to you nosy little bitches!” Outside, Nellie was digging a hole out in the field. He wasn’t planting corn. I assumed it had to be Sagittarius. Gramps made it a point to turn the Reverend up extra loud on the tv. He always played the Reverend when we were trying to sleep.
The Reverend’s shouting made sure that we never got any kind of good rest. He’d shout things about hell and rewards. Sagittarius said she saw him on the tv one night and that he was a big fat man. That’s probably why he always sounded hungry. There was a fat man that would come to visit the farm every so often. He always came in a big, fancy car with a man in black driving him while he rode in the back. He’d get out and shake Gramps’ hand before Gramps took him into the barn. After several hours, the big fat man would come out covered in sweat and hop back into his fancy car. They’d drive off. This seemed to happen at least once or twice a month, or seemed like it. We’re not allowed to have clocks or calendars so it’s hard to say.
Everything changed for us after Libra, the youngest of all us girls, got her special time. I switched her sheets out with mine and did everything I could to clean her up so that Nellie or Gramps wouldn’t find out, but even though they seemed like hillbillies, they rigorously kept up with our days. In other words, they knew it wasn’t mine and that I was trying to keep Libra’s first time a secret. As a result, Nellie smacked me upside the head with the butt of his shotgun. It wasn’t the first time, but that didn’t make it bruise any less.
A couple weeks later, Gramps came for Libra. She started crying and thrashing about as he wrapped his arms around her waist to drag her out of her room. We knew exactly what was going on from all the other times he came for a girl in order to drag her to that damned barn. The reverend was going on and on about how God’s hungry for our love and all he wants us to do is sacrifice ourselves for him because he gave us so much. Scorpio looked across from me in her bed. Her eyes were wide open. I thought about all of the things that God had gave me as Libra attempted to plead with Gramps not to take her. He wasn’t listening, but I heard it all and so did Scorpio.
She rolled out of bed and kneeled down to begin disassembling the metal rails from her bed frame. She undid some screws and produced a steel rod about the size of a baseball bat. “What are you doing?” I asked her.
“Go out into the hall and start crying. Get Nellie’s attention,” she said as if possessed by something. Sagittarius protested, “you can’t be serious. He’ll kill us.”
“What do you think they’re going to do to Libra? And then you? And then Capricorn? Then, me?”
I knew she was right. “I’ll do it,” I agreed.
I walked out into the hallway and summoned all those tears I had for Sagittarius and all the friends I had lost to that barn. I began wailing. Nellie stood at the end of the hallway with his shotgun on his shoulder. “What the hell do you think you’re doing” he yelled as he began stomping my way.
Just as he walked past our door, Scorpio jumped on his back with that steel rail digging into his throat. Sagittarius slammed the end of the other steel rail Scorpio had yanked off the bed frame into the side of his head. The sharp jagged hook that fit into the wooden leg stabbed his skull and the pain caused him to release his grip on the shotgun. I quickly grabbed it and cocked it, shoving it into his face. Scorpio looked at me, jumping off of his back while she screamed “shoot!” I pulled the trigger and there wasn’t much left of Nellie’s head after that.
Scorpio instructed Sagittarius to go up and down the halls opening the doors. “Get all the girls out of here! Y’all head to the woods and we’ll meet you there.”
I knew where we were going. We had to go to the barn and get Libra. I handed her the shotgun. “You don’t want to kill him?” she asked me. “I think that one will do me for a lifetime if I’m honest,” I told her, my body still trembling. “Fine by me,” she said then cocking the shotgun. We headed towards the barn.
She held the shotgun up aiming it the best way she imagined she was supposed to, but to our surprise, Gramps never came storming out of the barn after all the commotion. There was the barn door, heavy and swinging with just a little bit of light creeping out from within. Scorpio went first, and I followed closely behind her.
Gramps was trying to strap Libra into a chair, but she wasn’t going easy on him. There were eleven other chairs just like the one he was trying to get Libra into, all in a circle. Each chair had a woman strapped into it, and there was a hole in the middle of the circle with a giant eye and green arms coming out of its side reaching between the women’s legs.
“Let her go!” shouted Scorpio. Gramps turned around. “What the hell do you…”
Blam! He didn’t even have time to finish his question before Scorpio put a gaping hole in his skull. She dropped the gun looking at all the women strapped into those chairs. The life had been sucked out of them. Their bodies were bloated and grossley white, all except one. As Scorpio undid the straps Gramps had managed to get on Libra, I went and grabbed the axe hanging on the wall of the barn.
I walked over to the young pregnant woman strapped into the chair. I looked into her eyes, and although she looked like she had gone through hell, she wasn’t like the others who had just become empty saggy sacks of flesh. It was Sagittarius. I took the ax to the green arm between her legs and began hacking away. Eventually, I separated it from her and it went back down into the hole in agony. I took off her shackles. “Thank you, Capricorn,” she said with the warmest smile I think I had ever seen. The smile of a mother.
“What about them?” Scorpio asked. “They’ve been through enough and so have you girls. Get out of here,” she instructed us as she picked up the shotgun and then walked over to the box of ammo sitting on a work table in the corner.
We stood outside of the barn. Eleven shots, and then Sagittarius emerged with a gas can. She lit a match and set the gasoline on fire. Before long, the whole barn was engulfed with flames. We went and grabbed a couple of supplies from the house and hurriedly rushed to meet the other girls. Where we go from here, we don’t know. We don’t know who all knew about us and what they might do to keep our story from getting out. That’s why I’m writing this and sending it to you so that others can hear the story of The Zodiac Girls.