Books

Could you hear it? Rising above the beams, pushing past a century of dust and grime. Past the decaying carcasses of roaches and mice, themselves aging into dust, becoming a feeding ground for ants and mites and smaller creatures. Things you always said were there, but I couldn’t see with my naked eye. (Though I never did understand how an eye could be anything but naked.)

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Did you recognize the sound? Could you tell it had come from you? Or, like everyone else, did you think it was something else entirely? Maybe it was the tomcat that lived under the porch next door, yowling to ward off the curious grasp of the Lipinsky boys. A hawk flying free in the sky.

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Or were you already gone by that point? Sealed inside your chrysalis, with its walls of filigreed iron. Still beautiful, delicate as the gold and black scales of a monarch’s wing, but impervious to anything outside yourself.

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Did you know when the men arrived? Could you feel their hands? I hope not. There were so many. Hands pushing your shoulders back against the wall. Hands on your boots, pulling your legs out straight, resisting your resistance. Hands forcing your chin up, hands that held flashlights to burn your eyes, blind you, leave explosions of orange and black. Hands clawing to unlock your arms from your chest, prying back fingers that raked dress fibers beneath your nails, leaving red crescents in the flesh beneath the fabric. Tiny blood moons.

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And the voices, moving about in hysterics, refusing to stay put. They came at you in waves, lapping across your body, crashing against your shores. Could you not hear them, or would the syllables not coalesce? Did your mind catch words—hurt, happened, tell—but assign them no meaning? Or were the voices simply noises? Reverberations no different from the skittering of squirrels across the attic floor.

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Did you know I was there? I saw it all from the hallway. I wanted to run to you, hold you, protect you, but I was held back by more men, more hands. Everywhere in my body, I could feel my heart hammering. Like the voices, it would not stand still. I felt it in my chest, in my ears, in my elbows, knees, tongue. Everywhere searching for an opening, some way out. Desperate. Like an animal gnawing through its leg to break free of a trap.

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Was it that way for you? It must have been. Your heart moved to your stomach and lashed the remains of your breakfast. Then it jumped into your lungs, sucking up air, stealing your breath, denying your screams.

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Or maybe your heart had found its way out of your body by then. Maybe your heart is what built the shelter you disappeared within. It blocked out the light. The light extended only as far as your toes. The world ended there. And if you drew in your legs, the walls closed in, the world became smaller. If you curled yourself up, you could shrink the world. Curl tighter and tighter until you fit on the head of a pin.

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I’ll bet that’s why you fought so hard to make yourself so small.

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So you could obliterate the world entirely.

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So there would be nothing left to break you.

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So there would be nothing left for you to break.