Written: 10–18–13
Edited/re-witten: 2–16–18
She kept her eyes closed, breathing slowly. Inhale. Exhale. All she knew was the darkness, she didn’t want to see what was around her. Loud, high, short sounds of terror made its was through the two thin walls and into the ears of her and the person who caused them. She knows he’s smiling, watching the other young girl squirm and fight, trying her hardest avoid more black and blues along with sharp, hard, and painful contact all over the body.
“Experiments,” he called them. “Advancements in science.” He had said when she was blindfolded, tied, and dragged from her living room in the middle of the night. “People will be so grateful for you. For me.” He insisted above her attempts to scream through the tape over her mouth and kicks and efforts to get free from her bounds that he tied tightly around her wrists and ankles.
Inhale. Exhale. Closing her eyes even tighter, as if that would block out the screaming from the other room. Inhale, slowly. Exhale, painfully. As if the other girl’s screams were her own, she could feel pain on her body, envisioning what he was doing to her. A heavy feeling in her chest because she knows she can’t help her just like how the other girl can’t come to her rescue either. They can’t help themselves. They’re pretty much dead. They know their future.
“For science,” she whispered, “for science.”
Sudden silence. No movement. No screams. No footsteps. No doors opening. Nothing. An agonizing silence that was almost worse than the cries of help from the other room. The “lab.” She was stuck in the trophy room in absolute silence, forcing herself to be in darkness as she kept her eyes closed.
Scared.
The silence scratched at her brain, like claws of a terrible, unimaginable creature trying to climb up her brain to laugh at her. What was going on? How could it possibly be this quiet? All she could hear was her own breathing. Slowly, as if expecting a stomach turning sight, she opened her eyes. Nothing. Darkness. He had kept the lights off this time when he came and got her and she pretended to be asleep. No windows to tell them how long they had been in there. Just a mind twisting darkness that she preferred over looking at the trophies he kept. Mind numbing darkness. Darker than her old room when she turned the lights off to sleep. Darker than how her street looked when there was a power outage. She could almost feel her blood moving through her veins. The floor was freezing, barely heated from her body despite the fact that she had hardly changed positions because it hurt too much to move.
Trapped. Chained to a radiator that didn’t work, forcing her to sit close to it at all times, squishing her between a cage that was her bed and another wall in a small corner. He kept the cage in case she “misbehaved” or tried to get away although she has not tried to get away once, the labyrinth of halls too complex for her to memorize on feel alone after being blindfolded for the walk down to the lab.
She closed her eyes again and felt better. She did not feel cramped when she closed her eyes. When she closed her eyes, she liked to imagine being back at home with her pets and music and free will. With her eyes closed, she was causing the darkness. It was not consuming her. Although, she had to admit, this coping method worked better when the lights were on.
But the silence was eating her. It was picking at her nerves and making her throat feel the burn of her stomach acid that she forced back down. She could not throw up. There were consequences more severe than the silence or the cage or the darkness, reserved for any rules that were broken.
She began dry heaving as she tried her best to keep it in side. She didn’t want to be a rule breaker. She had to try to hold it together, but the more that she couldn’t hear the other girl, the more nervous she became about what was happening to her.
“For science.” She coughed. “For science.”
