Light and dark, light and dark, until I was sure my mind was splitting on the axis of it.
Hunger gnawed, then retreated, and returned sharper, always sharper, until I could hear my own bones chewing on my flesh.
I hallucinated, I think.
Sometimes the glass sweated blood; sometimes the cinderblock walls leered with faces I’d seen in my worst memories.
Sometimes the rats came out and spoke with my father’s voice,or my mother’s, or Lillian’s, and I did not bother to answer because I could not tell if I still possessed a mouth.
I watched Caiden the whole time.
Even in the haze of waking nightmares and real nightmares, I counted every time his ribs moved up and down, the way he pressed his forehead to the glass as if wishing to bash straight through it by willpower alone.
He scared me less now than before.
Maybe that was the point of our captor’s design: whittle us down to the gristle, burn away the old rot, so that all that remained was the most basic and desperate urge to survive.
When the food came, I ate. He did too.
Some of it made me sick, and some of it made me sleep for so long that waking up felt like being born again in a world where I had never known sunlight.
Sometimes, when I woke, the tray was gone, and I could not recall eating at all.
Maybe I had eaten my own tongue out of madness. Maybe I had willed myself hollow.
The barrier was warm now, smeared with our sweat and the condensation of desperate breath. Caiden had started pressing his lips to it, as if breathing the ghost of me would keep him alive.
When I touched my face to the glass, I could almost hear his pulse, slow and thick as oil.
Once, in the hours before dawn, I heard him sob. He tried to hide it, but the sound traveled through the barrier anyway, warped into a sick, animal whimper.
I lay on my side and watched the ceiling rotate slowly overhead.
If I closed my eyes, the world swung like a pendulum, and I could almost believe, for a split second, that I’d wake up outside, with the wind in my hair and a forest to run through.
The walls were closing in, day by day.
Each moment I spent in this cage, I felt haunted by the mysterious man who trapped us in here. Tormenting us, taunting us,breaking me apart.
I could still feel the phantom touch of his cold and sickening hands on me.
The darkness didn’t help. It intensified the suffocation and helplessness.
I slept in bursts, each waking worse than the last. My body ached. My fingers tingled with an electric panic that crawled up my arms.
I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to even open my eyes and look at Caiden through the milky glass, but the claustrophobia was a weight on my chest, a parasite feeding off every shaky breath.
Sometimes I sat up, curled so tight I was almost fetal, and pressed my forehead to the cage wall until my skin went numb. Sometimes I paced my half of the cell, circling like a caged rat, the rhythm of my bare feet on concrete the only sound I could control.
But mostly, I just lay there, feeling my heart pound out a warning.
Not safe, not safe, not safe.
The man hadn’t come back in a while. Maybe hours. Maybedays. I’d lost all sense of time, and the thought clawed at me, a raw animal terror that I was already dead, that I’d never left the forest, that this was hell and my punishment was to keep reliving the same panic over and over without end.
I jammed my hands between my knees and squeezed, trying to slow the tremor, but it only made the rest of me shake harder.
My mouth was dry. My tongue felt like a clump of dirty cotton.
