All I Need Are These Four Walls and Some Positive Feedback

by Janelle Bassett

Kelly Sikkema

Treatie is a second-generation Delightico confectioner. Actually, she’s probably the thousandth-something generation, if you go back to the rainforest where her mother was captured and dig into the time and bones you might find there. But she is the second generation to make confections for a company, for placement in plastic wrappers, for global distribution.

Treatie looks like a furry Cabbage Patch baby in a Miss Piggy wig and lives alone in a small room with a hammock and a deep sink. She doesn’t brush her fur at all because she is a wild animal, even if she was born in a room with artificial lighting and minor conveniences. Sometimes she likes to sleep in the sink and lick her paws clean in the hammock to prove to herself that she’s not fully domesticated. See, she thinks, I have options and preferences and some of them are wet and wild.

Today, like all her days, will mostly be spent on the floor. To make the round two-inch patties the world requires of her, Treatie has to lie on her side, put her wrists together above her head, and concentrate on the idea that something can come from nothing. She pictures, of course, the stock image of creation—new plants poking through the soil—but she also thinks of concrete pouring from the drum of a massive mixer, heads escaping fully dilated cervixes, cells dividing evenly, Polaroid cameras ejecting square photos, the first squeal of a baby piglet, mold forming inside a jar of pesto, time-lapsed worms regrowing the section of body they once lost, steam rising from dryer vents on the exterior of a brick house, a hair popping up at the exact midpoint between two eyebrows.

She does what she’s told during the daylight—always meeting or exceeding her output quotas—but at night she can use her claws to scratch up the formica if she wants to. In the morning, she thinks these claw marks look like they came from a creature who wants to escape, which troubles her, because she loves her one good home.

(Further evidence of her animal heart: she occasionally makes the sound she knew how to make without ever being taught. The sound is nearly a shriek, but more rumbly and guttural. And it loops and repeats, like the sound is chasing its own tail. Once a brown bug got into Treatie’s room and when she saw the bug’s many legs moving across her floor, this ancient pre-installed sound came out of her and the bug fell on its back and died of horror.)

Mid-morning, as instructed, she gets off the floor to check her tablet for comments and messages from her chocolate fans. The tablet was made especially for her, meaning it’s claw-operated and bigger than her sink. (She classifies all objects as either “smaller than the sink” or “bigger than the sink” because her sink is one of the only objects she’s experienced first-hand.) Even without the right kind of voice box for speaking, Treatie has the written vocabulary of a twelve-year-old, thanks to the daily lesson she received during her youth involving flash cards and motivational papaya chunks.

The replies “So glad you enjoyed it’’ and “Of course I’m real!” work for nearly all of her photo comments, which are overwhelmingly positive. She once saw a comment that said “this shit taste like melted pantyhose” but it disappeared right away, so Treatie convinced herself that what it actually said was “shit, this tastes like melted paradise.” This morning she posts a picture of her hair flipped in front of her face and captions it: Treatie is here, or is she? KIDDING. Peekaboo and keep yourselves way too sweet today, babyfriends.

Then back to the floor, to production. She tries to mix up the montage, shuffle shuffle, to keep her awe fresh and her flavors potent. The shuffling comes naturally because she was given a tablet that played a video compilation of these images as soon as she was old enough to hold an object up to her face. They (the handlers, the execs, the humans who kept her room clean and stocked) called this tablet her treat. When she wanted to nurse and nuzzle her mother, to fall asleep near that familiar warm belly, they told her no, get up, get back, Mother needed to work, but here, she could have her treat instead. She once threw the tablet against the wall and cracked the screen, and that’s when they settled on her calling her Treatie, rudely naming her after her own refusal.

(Treatie learned about regurgitating tree frogs and the way the darkness of nighttime swallows the forest from her mother, who could make Delighticos without video inspiration. Treatie has tried to incorporate these second-hand memories into her candy-making, but since she has no visual reference—and since her mother is no longer there to further describe them—they make her Delighticos come out flat, like graham crackers, and sharp, like vinegar.)

Slowly, if she focuses on what she can actually picture, and if the wrist rubbing and the mental conjuring are quick enough, the Delightico begins to form between Treatie’s wrists. The center appears first: a tiny ball of almond paste and coconut nougat, then a layer of carmel, then the crunchy cookie shell, and last the chocolate, which comes out of her accompanied by euphoria and the thought “this is for me.” Then she immediately gives it away, placing the confection on a wire rack with the others—ready to be packaged, boxed and driven toward the people who don’t really believe she exists outside of some marketer’s imagination. But all Treatie knows is that her comments are truly overwhelmingly positive.

She makes seven more Delighticos, then checks for new comments. The first one reads: Ryou sloth? Right then one of her handlers comes in with two spiky pineapple crowns for her to gnaw on. He asks her if she needs her litter box changed (yes please) and reminds her, once again, not to post any more pictures of her sink. Enough is enough, he says.

When he leaves, Treatie goes back to find the comment. She’s never been compared to a sloth before. A spider? Often. But never a sloth. (One of Treatie’s first video montages contained a spider spinning a web, and yes, she sees the resemblance in terms of process, but not, thankfully, in terms of physicality.) But since she’s never seen a sloth she can’t know for sure if she, in fact, R sloth.

She reads the question again and it makes her feel overheated, like the thickness of her fur has doubled. All her other comments express sentiments more like yum, yummy or yummers. She notices that the sink photo she posted yesterday has been taken down. Treatie is hurt by this because she was only trying to give the drain its due. She wishes her account wasn’t so curiously slippery, that words and pictures would stay where she put them.

In order to answer the question in an informed way, she types the word “sloth” in the search bar of her photo-sharing app, knowing this will make her behind in her production schedule. And just like that, she’s looking at squares and squares of creatures who look like they could be her mother’s baldheaded cousins. Six, twelve, twenty-four, thirty-thousand, endless cousins. Not exact matches—their heads are more squashed, less round, and their limbs are longer and meatier, and of course the lack of long, flowing hair—but she can tell these are relatives, the most family she’s had in some time. She uses her claws to stroke the pictures, especially the wet snouts, where the resemblance to her mother is strongest.

There’s a sloth hanging upside down with what appears to be a dopey smile and the caption: “A sloth’s main goal is to conserve energy. They move at a leisurely pace and hold off on their poops until the very last minute.” Oh, maybe we aren’t alike after all Treatie thinks as she moves back to the floor to make more Delighticos. I’m a mover and a shaker. I keep a tight schedule and have never even considered delaying my poops.

But that night, quota met, she finds that someone has answered the sloth question. For her. As her. Sloth? Not even close! But keep your eyes peeled for the reveal of my new Happy Easter packaging. Hope you like pastels! For the first time, she makes the connection between her sink pics being deleted and her handlers’ hatred of her sink pics.

But that night, she tries chewing her dinner extra slowly, breathing through the rushed pace that normally propels her, and swallowing only when the food is fully mushed. For the first time in years, there’s a pause to her constant stomach ache.

But that night, she hangs upside down from the underside of her hammock instead of sleeping in its dip, and for the first time her dreams are right-side up.

****

The next morning she makes zero Delighticos. She counts her breaths and watches the lines in the tiled floor. She pictures her identical counterparts out there in the untiled wild, out there being still in the trees, and tries to sync herself up with a pace that doesn’t recognize the word “output.”

After doing the most nothing she’s ever done, after forcing her mind to slow down enough to mull things over, she decides to post the photo with the hair over her face again but with these new words: I would never say that I am not even close to a sloth because, I am really plenty close. Check the snouts. My mother, she remembered swinging from trees and a certain orange berry that was worth the climb. The point is, they are writing to you pretending to be me. They are deleting my posts and they will probably delete this one too. So listen, I slept upside down last night and my limbs loved it. Listen, they told me my mother would be right back. Listen, I can no longer stand to picture all that something coming from all that nothing. Listen, I can make this wild sound, for real. You won’t believe it. See my stories for video proof, sound UP.

As soon as she posts, someone tries to open her door. But they don’t know that she’s taken her hammock down and is ready to use it as a capture net, they don’t know how much the formica has sharpened and strengthened her claws, they don’t know that last night she opened wide and took a picture of her canines to confirm their shape and capabilities, they don’t know what her fans will do on her behalf, or about the real power of brand loyalty.

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Janelle Bassett’s writing appears in The Offing, American Literary Review, The Rumpus, Smokelong Quarterly, VIDA Review, and Slice Magazine. She is an Assistant Fiction Editor for Split Lip Magazine and she lives in St. Louis.