Two women sat on the couch and stared blankly ahead. The TV reflected in their glassy eyes: some kind of primary color cartoon with whiz-bang noises and squeaky Japanese voices. Laura lay on the carpet and could only see the two women and not the TV. Her heart thundered in her ears and her breath, limited by the duct tape on her mouth, came in short puffs. Her arms and legs were zip-tied. She had no idea where she had been taken. Those two women had ignored Laura from the moment she had been dumped before them, no matter how much Laura screamed. They sat on the couch in their stupid japanime little-miss-stuffit e-girl outfits and watched stupid cartoons with their mouths hanging open.

“Ai, Rei, did you make Sakura feel at home?”

At the sound of her captor’s nasally voice, Laura pulled impotently at the zip-ties. A hand grabbed her ponytail and yanked Laura’s head off the carpet, shaking it. “Sakura, was Rei mean to you? She can be a little tsun-tsun, but she’s a true friend once you get to know her. I know Rei and Sakura will make lots of magic memories together!”

The woman in a lime-green wig and poofy vampire dress drooled on herself. Some character in the cartoon yelled ‘BAKA!’, whatever the hell that meant.

The crazy woman grabbed Laura by the ankles and dragged her across the carpet, onto linoleum. Laura could see her now – the woman was built like a scarecrow, with coke-bottle glasses, a face-full-of-acne, and thin hair tied into two sad-looking ponytails. She looked like a teenager suffering through multiple growth spurts. The kidnapper wore some kind of fetish school girl outfit. It had a scarf tied under the wide collar, floppy knee socks, and a tiny pleated skirt. She stuck her tongue out at Laura and made the peace sign.

“I’m gomen nasai that I made you wait so long, Sakura! I had to get rid of that ugly car you had. But now I can properly welcome you to our kawaii household! Yoroshiku onigaishimasu!”

She grabbed Laura by the shoulders and hauled her to her feet. Laura looked around frantically. They were in a kitchen finished in pinks and whites. Every available surface had a decal of a smiling white cat in overalls.

“Sugoi, isn’t it? KittyMallow is soo uWu! That’s why she agreed to be our guardian angel. She’s gonna take such good care of you, Sakura. You just need to stop fighting, first.”

The woman hauled Laura over to the table and threw her across it like the catch of the day. Laura tried to wriggle towards the edges while the crazy woman collected tools from the counter. Her kidnapper climbed up on the table and wrestled Laura onto her back. With Laura’s hands pinned painfully under her, the crazy woman straddled Laura’s chest and sat down on her stomach. She squeezed Laura’s cheeks and swiveled her head around to look Laura in the eye. The woman’s smile was manic.

“Oh, you’re so perfect, Sakura! You’re gonna love it here! We just watch anime and have tea parties all day, every day, and look kawaii and be kawaii! It’s Heaven! And I pinky promise, you’ll be the kawaii-est of them all!”

The woman humped Laura in excitement, grinding violently on Laura’s stomach, crushing Laura’s wrists while she could feel (to her disgust) that the woman wasn’t wearing any underwear. Brimming with the joy, the woman grabbed an icepick and a hammer, holding them up for Laura to see the cartoon princesses on the handles.

“And lookit lookit lookit—DreamyBelle and NaughtyBelle! Totemo kakoi, right?!”

Laura couldn’t have stopped screaming if she wanted. The torrent of fear poured out of her. It mixed with pain as her kidnapper pressed the tip of the pick into the side of Laura’s eye, sliding the metal under the lid and along the orbit. Hot pressure bubbled up in Laura’s face as the pick slide deeper and deeper until the tip dug into solid bone. The hammer hit the back of the pick with the first delicate ‘tink’ and Laura melted into a place where fear and pain didn’t differentiate, body vibrating with adrenaline that numbed her bones and loosened her bowels. A second impact rippled through the chemical stupor and a third and a fourth.

Then the pick slid through, and Sakura was ready to watch some anime.