I Am Thinking About Sugar
My legs dangle from the rafters and I’m thinking about sugar. Sweet and pure. Stirred into bitter coffee and spooned to babies after the medicine. I sigh, broken fingernails snagging on the wooden beam.
The manacle around my ankle clinks softly. I imagine I am a bell, something that belongs in this place, making beautiful sounds telling people to gather here. There is no one left that I would want to come to my call anymore.
I shiver in the drafty cold wearing only my dirt- sweat- blood- stained shift. I watch the dust motes caught in the gray light.
Below, the door creaks open and my fear is there again, the shadow with hands around my throat. I do not move. Only watch the man in the hat moving through the detritus below, searching. His steps are slow, unhurried. He believes he will find me — that I will never escape.
But there is much he does not know. Because I left long ago. I wander through meadows of light, pulling down pieces of clouds to fill my empty belly. And he did not know I would file away at the chain link with a rusted nail night after night. Or that I would make it this far across the winter fields and into this unfamiliar ghost town.
I worried I had forgotten how to climb when I found this abandoned church, but my weakened muscles remembered, carrying me up so high.
The man begins to whistle and I feel it like a claw across my chest. It was the warning before the red door opened every time.
My throat aches to sing or scream, to drown it out. But I will not be found. So I hear it echoing. Doubling and doubling without end. Wrapping around me like cellophane. And it is heavy, dragging me down. And I sway so my nails dig in. And I let the pain keep me here.
The man lights a cigarette, the smoke curling toward me. Another inescapable thing. At least it stops the whistling.
Another man enters. He is kinder and for that he is almost worse because his pale eyes will shout his guilt while he never disobeys an order. I blink away the fist falls.
“We ain’t found her anywhere,” he says to the man in the hat.
The man in the hat drops his cigarette, crushing it into darkness.
“She’s here,” he says, voice smooth and soft. “We just have to wait.”
And the fear clenches me tighter. The men go outside, leaving me to the dark and cold and empty.
Sugar. Sugar. I am thinking about sugar. Sweet and pure.
I wish that could be me. Something simple and loved. Something worthy.
I can barely remember the taste of it now. I am left only with vague impressions. I think there were little cakes in a paint-peeling kitchen. A stolen spoon from a honey jar. Shared sugarcubes with impossibly tall horses. But the taste of it is gone. I lick my chapped lips. It tastes like dust now, even though I know that can’t be right. No one would love a taste like that — forgotten and dead and left behind. But sugar — that is worth loving. And I know that I did, once.
Once. Once upon a time. A time long gone.
I’m so tired. I curl on my side like a cat on this beam. I dream of sugar snow falling from cotton candy clouds — until it thickens like cement around my feet. And then it isn’t cement but a chain. And I’m back behind the red door, beneath the flickering overhead lightbulb hanging from a lone string, and I hear the whistling before I hear his boots.
I jolt awake, crying out to escape.
My cry echoes away from me and I wait for the door to open again. Found. And the fog of my breath stutters, waiting. But the door doesn’t open. Instead, I hear the whistling, just outside.
I stand on the rafter, wobbling slightly. I look down.
