An old terror surged through me, left over from when she’d locked me in here for months when I was sixteen—for daring to even suggest I wanted to go to college to learn a trade of my own choosing.
I banged the side of my fist against the metal door she’d commissioned from Naomi’s father, Danso, a furniture maker with a store along the route to Waterloo.
“Let me out!” I pleaded. “Mama, please, please! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m so sorry!”
Silence.
No matter how hard I sobbed and begged, only silence answered me.
Hours passed. Then days. Then weeks. Maybe. I lost track of the date quickly.
Mama had boarded up all the windows in the house when I was a child. “To keep the gossipers from having their look,” she said when I asked why.
Without the sun’s rise and fall, time melted.
Reuben’s scent faded from my skin.
I carved three wolves and added intricate details, like deep-set eyes, toothy smiles, and waves of fur. A Mama, a Papa, and a Baby Wolf who they treasured.
Winter was over, but I slept. A lot. And made up stories for my happy wolf family in between. They loved and respected each other. Never yelled. Never shamed. Just went on whatever adventures they could find inside my room.
A full moon came and went, then another. Maybe three. It was hard to tell. But the morning after one of them, I woke up to find strange gouges at the foot of my bed—deep claw marks, bigger and angrier than anything I’d seen on any of the community buildings leftover by someone getting stuck outside during a full moon.
Had I done that?
The Spring Fire had vanished around the time I lost track of the days, but the violence I worked so hard to keep suppressed hummed inside of me as I stared at the shredded wood.
And stared.
And stared.
Anywhere but here.
Who said that?
Oh.
It was me. Or, at least something inside of me, half-growling, half-whispering…
Anywhere but here…. Anywhere but here… Anywhere but here.
It was a wish. A wish, my soul couldn’t stop repeating.
But wishes were futile in a room where you couldn’t even see the sky, though.
More time passed. I stopped wondering how much and found myself sleeping whole days away. But one morning, when I was actually awake and playing with my wolf family, the metal door banged open without warning.
“What is this nonsense?” My mother’s eyes narrowed on the wolves gathered around the little den I’d built for them out of buttons, fabric strips, and mattress stuffing.
I could only imagine how the scene looked to her--her overgrown six-foot-plus daughter playing a game of make-believe on the floor.
“I rebuke this tomfoolery!” my mother cried out with more fervor than our Bishop warning us against the devil.
Before I could stop her, she reached down and picked up both the Papa and Mama wolf. One in each hand.
Crack. She crushed them inside her palms—splinters of wood falling like judgment from her fists.
She was small, just five foot four, but I’d seen her snap thick tree limbs without wrinkling her blue dress. Her brown eyes glittered underneath the prayer covering she always wore tied tight over her braids, even though they weren’t required in the privacy of your own home.
