AMELIA
The cage became a universe of rot. I watched my own hands shake, wondering at what point they’d stopped being mine.
Hunger wrung me out and left me feverish; my skin crawled, and every now and then I’d scratch until I bled, just to feel something.
I tried to remember the feeling of sunlight on my shoulders, or the way it felt to run, or to laugh. These memories came in fits, then sputtered out.
Mostly, I existed only to count the seconds between my own shuddering breaths.
Sometimes my body ached for touch so much that I pressed myself to the glass, desperate for the simple pressure of another human. Sometimes I shivered away, curled up so tightly I could not tell where my own limbs began or ended.
I whispered to the darkness because silence terrified me more than the idea of being heard.
I started talking to him. Not always so he would answer; not even because I expected him to listen, but because every word I spoke aloud was like scraping my nails against the inside of my skull, and the pain meant I still existed.
Sometimes I told him about the dreams, or the shapes I saw in the corner, or the memory of a bird I watched once as a child, itswings snapping against a windowpane over and over until it broke its neck.
He didn’t respond.
I wasn’t sure he heard me at all. Some nights, he went so still I wondered if he had willed himself out of existence, and a not-small part of me envied him for it.
Once, I pressed my face to the warm glass and said, “Do you remember that time you threw a snowball at my eye?”
He didn’t flinch. Maybe he was asleep, or maybe the memory hurt too much. I closed my eyes and let the silence pool around me.
It was a stupid memory. I tried again. “You used to sit behind me in algebra, and you’d flick the back of my neck with your eraser. I hated it. I still hate it.”
The condensation on the glass trembled, collecting into rivulets that cut lines through our fingerprints. The silence pressed back, thicker than ever.
I started telling Caiden the stories I had kept to myself, revealing secrets I’d never shared with anyone, not even with my own thoughts, not even when I feared death.
"I always knew Lillian was going to kill herself," I confessed, "and I hated her for making it so obvious." I looked at him, admitting, "There were times I wished you’d get expelled, locked up, anything that would make you disappear.
I paused and added, "Mom was already rotting from the inside long before she stopped breathing. The last thing she ever said that made sense was, ‘You’re the only one left. Don’t be like me, Melly.’ I’ve already failed her, Caiden."
I told him how I used to draw versions of myself that weren’t so small and brittle and breakable. "Every time I did, I swear I could feel something warm under my hands, like I was holding on to the ghost of a future," I said, hoping he understood the depth of my longing.
Maybe I hoped Caiden would snap, or scream, or at least acknowledge that I was still here, that I wasn’t just a reflection against the glass.
He never did. Not even when I told the stories that involved him
I told him how, sometimes, when I was a child, I would hide beneath my bed and pretend the dust and old socks were stalactitesin a cave, and if I made myself very quiet, the monsters would walk right past.
How even now, when I inhaled the bitter tang of mold and rust, I could imagine I was somewhere else, expelled from time, floating between worlds.
I told him about the first time I saw a dead thing, a rabbit my mother’s car had clipped on the way to the pharmacy. The way its body twitched after the impact, the way I thought it would get up and run, but it didn’t.
I told him how she scraped it from the tire with a stick, face blank and efficient, and how she said, “Life is harder than death, Melly. Remember that.”
I had never known whether she was warning me, or herself.
I told Caiden how much I hated the sound of my own name in his mouth, how I’d rehearsed every possible comeback to his taunts but always said nothing, because I was more afraid of his father than I was of him.
I told him how sometimes I pictured the two of us growing up somewhere else, somewhere without chain-link fences or screaming mothers or the taste of metal in every bite of food.
I told him how I walked until I could not feel my legs one day, and ended up sitting on the Baxter front steps, staring at the black hole that was their living room window.
I said that I’d wanted to throw a rock through it, but couldn’t.
