The Girls Before

Below

I don’t know how long I’ve been down here in the dark. Three days? Four? Maybe longer since the door at the top of the concrete steps (twelve steps: the bottom one is cracked; it will try to catch your foot) has opened. Since I last saw the rectangle of light and the shape that cancels it.

That’s how I think of my captor: the shape, the shadow. Never a person, never a beast or a monster, not even really a thing but an event. There is an arrival and a departure. And in between—-I blot it out, like the shape blots out the light.

Always it comes, and always it leaves, and always it comes again.

Until now.

I’ve never been alone down here for this long. Except that I’m not alone, not really. I’m never alone because the other girls are here.

They carved their names in the secret place—-their names, their words, their warnings.

Instructions passed from one dead girl to another in the hopes that one of us might survive.

And with their names, I have conjured them, here in the dark where there is no difference between opening your eyes and closing them, between the waking and the nightmares.

Their whispers are a gossamer sound, like insect wings being drawn over one another.

Their shapes are gossamer, too, hallucinatory, flickering at the edge of the nothing that is my vision—-glimpses of gleaming hair, pale limbs, bruised throats, and gaping wounds.

I have no idea how they actually died, but I can never imagine them whole.

It’s good that it’s been so long since the door opened, one of the girls whispers.

Maybe it won’t ever open again, another says.

A girl with sparks of auburn in her hair gives a hiss. If the door doesn’t open, the food will run out.

So what?

So she’ll die.

I know they aren’t real. My mind has invented them to stave off the madness of a world without light, without any sound but my own breathing, the horrible beating of my own heart.

These are the things that are real: A wooden bed frame.

A thin mattress, stained, occupied by things that scuttle over my limbs when I sleep.

A cold chain, one end anchored to the wall, the other to the manacle around my ankle.

The quarter circle the chain affords me: six steps to the corner, no more.

The toilet, the plastic crate, the supplies inside it.

The world beyond my fingertips: concrete walls, everything gray.

Milk crates against one wall. A table, two chairs (I have been allowed to sit there, sometimes).

A broom and dustpan in the corner (I have been instructed, sometimes, to use it).

A light switch on the wall, far out of reach.

And the stairs. Twelve steps. The door at the top. If I am fast enough, someday. If I am strong enough, someday. If the chain is gone. Then I can climb them.

But the door has not opened, and the gossamer girl with cherry--gloss lips is right. The food is running out. Is almost gone. And the door has not opened.

In the pure black, a silvered hand brushes mine, and a dead girl whispers in my ear:

You are running out of time.