Captive

Captive

                She was locked away in the room again.  That dark and indifferent room where feeble light came in from an unnaturally small window.  Too small to escape from, too high to reach.  All the world lay outside that window, but that world was not for her.

                She had done nothing wrong to be put in that room.  Well, how wrong could it be to pull a drape aside a crack to peer out at the garden?  A sin in his opinion and locked away she went.  He did not tell her for how long she’d have to remain there.  He never did.  If she received food and drink, she knew it wouldn’t be for days. 

                She cursed herself, not for the apparent offense she had committed but for being caught.  She knew better.  She had to strain her ears to catch his light steps, creeping about as he tried to catch the few members of the household doing something that would displease him.  She had to train her face to the appearance of innocence.  Most of all she had to….oh, but what did it matter?  He found reasons to be offended.  He took his greatest pleasure in a mire of torments he could unleash upon her and the staff. 

                The staff stayed for reasons of their own.  They were all old, corpse like, and grim countenance, appearing to thrive under his ire.  They scraped and bowed before him and smirked when turning away.  They endured the sufferings of his madness with a bleak pleasure and nary a kind word to her.

                The room grew darker.  Was it her thoughts that dimmed the light, or a cloud across the sun?

                She saw the sun once as a child, the day her mother was to be buried.  They opened the creaking and protesting front door to carry out her casket.  The brightness was surprising, almost frightening.  Her curiosity made her foolishly ask the question as to what she saw.  The answer carried a slap and a profanity.

               The room darkened slightly.  She heard a key scrape in the door.  She did not stir for he frequently would give the pretense of letting her out only to lock the door again.  She would not give him the pleasure of her hopeful movement. 

                How long had it been?  Minutes or hours?  Time was nothing in this house.  No clock was set to the right time.  Or perhaps they were all the right time.  Ticking clocks, chiming clocks.  The second hand marking abrasions across the mind.  There were no clocks in this room.  A small mercy.

               The key rattled again, and it was silent.  The light grew fainter.

               She closed her eyes, not to sleep but to block out the light completely.  Darkness was better than the promise of sunlight that couldn’t penetrate the interior.  She stilled her thoughts so she wouldn’t scream, beg, or worse, grasp for the too high window in the vain chance of touching the sun.  No, she couldn’t do that; in spite of the occasional wisp of brightness floating over her eyelids, tempting her away from the blankness of mind.  She made herself small, so very small until she was a speck and her existence seemed to cease. 

               A key and the scratching of sticking door woke her to reality.  The maid, bent and bloated, set a tray on the floor.  Food, or rather gruel and stale bread, meant a long stay in the tight little room with the unnaturally small window. The thin porridge and rat-chewed husk of crust was unpalatable but she was determined to maintain her somewhat plump flesh so she ate.  Though such a diet would not long allow for her figure.  As she chewed, her eyes wandered unwillingly to the window.  Did it seem ever so slightly larger?  It was hard to tell with the light so weak.   

              The next morning (was it morning?), she received another tray, this containing more stale bread, a lump of dried out cheese, and a cup of water.  The bread crumbled almost to dust when she bit into it.  The cheese was equally hard and brittle.  She ate every bit she could.  She unpinned her hair and combed it out with her fingers.  She pinned it back up again, both wishing for a mirror yet glad the room didn’t have one.  There was little light coming from the bare window glass to see by anyway.  A cloudy day maybe? And yet, the window did seem larger.

              She wrapped her finger in the hem of her skirt and wiped her teeth.  She then dampened the hem in the last drops of water and scrubbed at her face. Through her squinted eyes, she thought she caught a shimmer.  She looked in the direction that it came from: the window.  Surely, it was larger.  She shook her head.  A play of shadow certainly.

              Finishing her meager ablutions, she returned to her stillness and closed eyes.  She may have slept a little, dreamless and timeless.  Another tray came but she had made herself so small she barely noticed its arrival.  She tried to be like dust, floating, but the air was too stagnant.  She imagined floating anyway.  Floating on fresh air and bright sunlight, wondering what it would feel like.

              Finally, she breathed, and the room lit up with the orange light of sunset from the small window.  The window seemed to grow taller, wider.  She reached up and could feel the edge of the window, smooth and warm. She grabbed a sunbeam. 

              The house shuddered.  The window warped as it grew.  She pulled at the sunbeam, and the window cracked.  With one more strong tug, the window glass shattered.  Sunlight poured in.  She clung to the sunbeam, its strength not weakening even though the sun was setting.  Tears came out of her eyes as she worried the sunbeam would disappear with the sun.  It didn’t, and it pulled her away.