I WANT TO COLOR: Chapter 1-5
I WANT TO COLORο»Ώ
By Ekona Del Rey Monroe
-
Chapter One: THE BOX
The dark was not empty.
It pressed.
It had weight, a slow, continuous pressure that settled against her eyelids and the soft places beneath them, against the thin skin of her forehead, against the bridge of her nose until she could feel the shape of her own face as something separate from the rest of her.
She did not open her eyes at first because the dark was already inside them.
Opening them would only confirm what her body already understood: there was nothing to see.
Her first clear thought was not a name.
It was the shape of the space.
She lay on her back. The surface beneath her was hard, unyielding, faintly rough in places where the grain of wood had not been smoothed. Her shoulders touched both sides at once. The contact was intimate and final.
There was no give. When she tried to draw her elbows outward even a fraction, bone met wood. The lid sat so close above her that the air between her face and the underside of it felt thinner than the air in her lungs.
If she lifted her head the smallest distance her nose would brush it. She knew this without testing it. Her body had already measured the distance in the dark.
She tried to bend her knees.
They would not rise more than a few inches before the lids of her kneecaps met resistance. The space was wrong. Not the length of an adult body. Shorter. Narrower.
As if the measurements had been taken for someone else and then used anyway.
Her breath shortened.
She did not yet scream.
The impulse arrived and stalled somewhere in the middle of her chest, trapped between the need for air and the sudden understanding that sound would travel only as far as the wood allowed.
She exhaled instead, carefully, and felt the warm moisture of her own breath return to her face almost at once. The lid held it there.
She became aware of her hands.
They lay at her sides, palms up.
When she tried to lift the left one the motion stopped halfway. Something cold and rigid held the fabric of her sleeve against the wood.
She turned the wrist as far as it would go.
Metal. Thick. The head of it larger than any ordinary nail. She felt along the shaft with the tips of her fingers until she found where it entered the wood of the base.
It had been driven through the cloth and into the grain. The right wrist was the same.
When she tried to draw her ankles upward the same cold resistance met her. Four points. Wrists. Ankles. Each one pinning cloth and a thin layer of skin against the bottom of the box.
She understood then that she could not turn over.
The knowledge arrived without drama.
It simply settled into the same place where the measurements of the space had settled.
She was held.
Not tightly enough to cut, not loosely enough to slip free. Precisely enough that the range of motion remaining to her was almost nothing.
Her heart began to work harder against the limited space in her ribs.
She counted the beats for a while because counting was something the mind could do when the body could not move.
The numbers did not calm her. They only measured the speed at which the dark was becoming louder.
She did not know her name.
The absence of it did not feel like forgetting.
It felt like the name had never been required until this moment, and now that it was required it refused to appear.
She searched for it the way a hand searches for a light switch in an unfamiliar room.
Nothing.
Only the pressure of the lid and the four cold points of metal and the sound of her own breathing returning to her in the small space.
She did not know how long she had been unconscious.
Time had no edges here. The dark did not change. There was no difference between one minute and the next except the slow accumulation of discomfort in her joints and the gradual awareness of thirst at the back of her throat. She might have been here for hours. She might have been here for days.
The body offered no reliable clock, only the steady complaint of muscles that had been held too long in one position.
She began to inventory what she could reach.
Her left hand, limited by the spike, could still flex at the fingers. She swept them outward along the wood until they brushed something smooth and cylindrical.
Plastic. A bottle. She worked it closer by degrees, rolling it with the tips of her fingers until she could curl them around the neck.
The liquid inside shifted with a soft, heavy sound. Water. She did not open it yet. Thirst was present but not urgent. The bottle was finite. Everything here would be finite.
Further along the same side her fingers found a smaller object. Metal. Rectangular. A lighter. She recognized the shape by touch alone: the hinged lid, the striker wheel, the small reservoir.
She did not strike it. Light would change the dark into something with edges, and she was not certain she was ready for edges.
Near her right hip, just within the limited arc of that hand, she found two rectangular shapes bound in what felt like cheap cardboard or thin leather.
Notebooks.
One slightly thicker than the other.
She left them where they were for the moment. Paper required light or at least the possibility of seeing. She was not ready.
Something else rested near her left ankle, close enough that the outer edge of her foot could brush it when she flexed the toes.
Small. Hard. Carved.
She explored it carefully with the sole of her foot and then, when the spike allowed a fraction more movement, with the tips of her toes. Wood.
Smooth in places, worn in others.
The shape resolved slowly: a body, four legs, long ears laid back against the head. A rabbit. Tiny. The kind a child might keep in a pocket or on a windowsill.
She stopped moving when she recognized it.
The recognition did not come with a memory. It came with a certainty that had no images attached. She knew the object. She did not know how she knew it. The knowledge sat in her chest like a second heartbeat, heavier than the first.
Near her feet, beyond the rabbit, something softer waited. Cold. Yielding. She pressed the sole of one foot against it and felt fabric worn thin, stuffing that had compressed over years, the faint suggestion of a shape that had once been more defined. Another rabbit.
This one soft. The stuffed kind a child sleeps with. It was damp in places, or perhaps only cold from the wood. She could not tell.
She did not try to pull it closer yet.
The spikes limited everything.
A small blade lay somewhere near her right thigh. She found it last, the edge guarded by a simple sheath, the handle short enough to fit in a childβs hand or a womanβs when the space allowed almost no grip. She left it sheathed.
That was all.
Water. Lighter. Blade. Two notebooks. Wooden rabbit. Soft rabbit. The four iron spikes. The wood. The dark. Her own body, which no longer felt entirely like hers.
She began the work of freeing herself.
It took a long time.
The spikes had been driven deep. The heads sat flush enough against the fabric that her fingers struggled to find purchase.
She worked at the left wrist first, scraping skin against the rough iron until the tips of her fingers went numb and then burned as sensation returned.
She could not lift the spike. She could only worry at the cloth around it, tearing threads one by one with her nails until the fabric gave enough that she could slide her wrist a fraction sideways.
The metal still held the remaining cloth.
She tore further. The sound was small and intimate in the dark: the slow separation of woven fibers.
When the last threads parted she drew her hand free and felt the sudden, almost shocking range of motion in the elbow and shoulder.
The right wrist took longer. She had to reach across her own body, the lid scraping her forehead when she lifted too far. Sweat gathered in the hollow of her throat and ran sideways into her hair. She ignored it. The second hand came free with a final soft rip of cloth.
The ankles were harder.
She could not sit up to reach them. She had to work by touch alone, sliding her freed hands down the length of her own legs in the narrow space, the lid a constant pressure against the backs of her hands.
The left ankle spike had caught more fabric.
She tore it carefully, aware that the blade existed but unwilling to risk cutting skin in the dark.
When the cloth finally released she drew the foot upward and felt the knee bend further than it had been allowed before. The right ankle followed. The last spike left a cold absence against her skin when the fabric parted.
She lay still for a long time afterward.
The spikes remained in the wood, four upright iron markers of where she had been held.
She could move her limbs now, but the space itself had not changed.
She still could not sit. She still could not turn onto her side without her hip and shoulder meeting the walls at the same moment.
She could draw her knees up only until they pressed the lid. She could lift her head only until her nose brushed the underside of the wood.
Freedom from the spikes had given her nothing except the ability to feel more completely how completely she was still confined.
She understood then that the box had been made for a body smaller than hers.
Or for a body that was not expected to move.
The thought did not arrive with fear first. It arrived with a strange, flat clarity. Someone had measured.
Someone had chosen the dimensions.
Someone had driven the spikes with enough force to hold clothing and skin against the grain. The work had been deliberate. The purpose remained unknown.
She reached for the lighter.
The metal was cool. She flipped the lid open by touch and rolled the striker with her thumb. Sparks. Then a small, unsteady flame that filled the immediate space with a yellow that was almost painful after the long dark.
The light reached only a short distance. It showed her the underside of the lid: plain wood, unfinished, the grain running lengthwise.
It showed her the four iron spikes standing upright like the beginnings of a cage.
It showed her the narrow walls, the bottle, the notebooks, the wooden rabbit near her ankle, the soft shape of the stuffed rabbit further down. It showed her her own hands, the torn cuffs of her sleeves, the faint crescents of dirt beneath her nails.
She held the flame as long as she dared, then closed the lid and let the dark return. The afterimage of the light stayed behind her eyes for several breaths, a rectangular ghost that slowly faded.
She opened the bottle and drank.
Three careful swallows. The water was room temperature, or whatever temperature the closed space had settled into. It tasted of plastic and nothing else. She capped the bottle and set it back against the wall where her fingers could find it again.
Then she reached for the first notebook.
It was the thinner of the two. The cover felt soft with wear, the corners rounded. She opened it by touch, then risked the lighter again, holding the flame high enough that the pages caught the light without coming close enough to scorch.
The first drawing occupied most of the page.
A house. Simple. Square walls. A triangle roof. A door in the center. Two windows. A chimney with a single curl of smoke. Beside the house a tree with a green scribble of leaves. In front of the house two figures held hands. One taller. One smaller.
Both smiling with the exaggerated upward curves a child draws when happiness is the only expression available. Around them, near the bottom of the page, several rabbits.
Some sitting. Some standing on hind legs.
One with long ears laid back. The sun in the upper corner was a yellow circle with straight lines radiating outward. At the top of the page, in uneven capital letters:
MOMMY & ME
She stared at it until the flame began to burn her thumb.
She closed the lighter.
In the dark again she whispered, without meaning to speak aloud:
βThatβs me.β
The words left her mouth and settled into the small space like something that did not belong to her. She did not know why she had said them. The taller figure on the page had no features she recognized.
The smaller figure was only a childβs approximation of a child.
The house was generic. The rabbits were the kind any child might draw after seeing one in a book or a yard. Nothing in the image should have produced the certainty that had moved her mouth.
Yet the certainty remained.
She lay with the notebook open against her chest, the wooden rabbit still near her ankle, the soft one further down, the four iron spikes standing in the places where her wrists and ankles had been, and the lid so close that every breath returned to her face carrying the faint scent of wood and her own skin.
She did not know her name.
She did not know how she had come to be inside the box.
She did not know whether the drawings were memories or warnings or something else entirely.
She only knew that the first image had felt like a door opening inward, and that whatever waited on the other side of it was already in here with her, in the dark, in the narrow space, in the quiet that was not quiet at all because it was filled with the sound of her own heart learning the exact dimensions of the place that held it.
She closed the notebook carefully, as if the paper might tear under the weight of what it contained, and began, very slowly, to reach for the next page.
-
Chapter Two: THE RABBITS
The flame was a thin, unreliable thing.
She learned its limits quickly.
Too close to the paper and the edges curled with a bitter smell that filled the small space and refused to leave.
Too far and the drawings became only suggestions of lines, shapes that could have been anything.
She held the lighter in her right hand, the notebook braced against her chest with the left, the lid of the coffin pressing down on both wrists whenever she tried to adjust the angle.
Every few pages she had to close the flame and let the dark return so the metal would cool enough to touch again. In those intervals the images stayed behind her eyes like afterimages of something that had looked back.
The second drawing was almost gentle.
The same house, smaller this time, pushed to the left edge of the page. In the center a little girl sat cross-legged on a patch of green scribble that was meant to be grass.
In her lap rested a rabbit drawn with careful, uneven strokes. The ears were too long.
The eyes were two dark dots pressed hard into the paper. The girl smiled the same exaggerated smile as before. Above them, in the same uneven capitals:
MY FRIEND
She stared at it until the lighter grew hot again.
A fragment surfaced without permission.
The smell of dry grass and something warmer, living. Small bones moving under soft fur.
A childβs hands, not hers, cupping a body that trembled only a little.
The memory had no faces and no location.
It lasted less than a breath and left a hollow place behind it that felt older than the dark.
She turned the page.
The third drawing showed the girl standing beside a wire rectangle that must have been a cage. Inside it three rabbits sat in a row. One of them had been given a carrot, an orange stick held in the girlβs drawn hand.
The mother figure appeared again in the background, taller, smiling, still without eyes.
Only the mouth curved upward. The sun was present but weaker, its rays shorter.
WE TAKE CARE OF THEM
The words were written beneath the cage in pencil that had been pressed so hard the paper had nearly torn.
She whispered the sentence once in the dark after the flame went out. The sound of her own voice was too loud. It bounced against the wood and came back thinner.
Another fragment.
A kitchen.
The particular smell of boiled water and something vegetal left too long on a counter.
A wire door clicking shut. A childβs voice, high and certain, saying a word she could not quite hear. Then the sound of crying that did not belong to the child. The crying was quieter.
It came from somewhere else in the house.
The fragment ended before she could decide whose throat had made it.
She lay still for a long time, the notebook closed against her sternum, the wooden rabbit pressing into her ankle like a small, insistent fact. The stuffed rabbit at her feet had begun to feel damper.
Or perhaps her own skin had grown damp enough that the distinction no longer mattered.
The air inside the coffin tasted of warm plastic from the water bottle, the faint metallic tang of the lighter, and the deeper, slower scent of wood that had been closed too long around a living body.
She opened the lighter again.
The fourth drawing was the first one that felt wrong without being able to say why.
The cage stood empty.
The door hung open, drawn as a single crooked line. No rabbits.
The girl sat beside it with her knees drawn up.
Her smile was still there, but the pencil had pressed harder around the mouth, as if the child had gone over the curve several times.
The mother stood in the doorway of the house, still eyeless, one hand raised in a gesture that might have been a wave or a refusal.
The sun was gone. In its place the child had scribbled a dark oval that leaked black downward in uneven streaks.
Beneath the empty cage, in letters that listed slightly to the right:
HE IS HUNGRY
She read the words twice.
The lighter shook.
She steadied it against the edge of the notebook and felt the heat climb into her thumb.
She did not close the flame. She needed to keep looking at the empty rectangle of the cage until the wrongness settled into something she could name.
It would not settle.
A new fragment arrived, sharper than the others.
The sound of a small body moving against wire. The soft, repetitive thump of feet that were not human. Then silence. Then a childβs voice, closer this time, almost inside her ear:
Mommy, heβs hungry.
The voice was so clear it made the dark feel crowded. She turned her head as far as the lid allowed and found only wood. The voice did not repeat. The memory of it stayed, however, lodged somewhere behind her eyes where the afterimage of the flame usually lived.
She turned the page with fingers that had begun to sweat.
The fifth drawing showed a rabbit lying on its side beneath a tree.
The tree was the same one from the first page, but the leaves had been scribbled over with black until they looked burned.
The rabbitβs eyes were open. The child had drawn a single dark cloud above it, so heavy the pencil had torn a small hole in the paper. The girl stood a short distance away, hands at her sides. No smile. The mother was absent.
HE WENT TO SLEEP
She closed the lighter and pressed the notebook against her face. The paper smelled of old graphite and the faint sourness of hands that had held it too long. Her own breathing returned to her, warm and too quick. She forced it slower. The effort made the lid feel closer.
When she lit the flame again the sixth drawing waited.
Several dark shapes beneath a line that must have been ground. They were roughly rabbit-shaped, but the child had filled them in completely until they were only black masses. Above the ground the girl stood alone.
The cage in the corner was empty again.
The mother appeared at the far edge of the page, drawn so lightly she looked unfinished. Still no eyes. The mouth was a flat line this time.
No caption.
She stared at the black shapes until the flame threatened to scorch the paper. Then she turned the page and found the seventh.
The girl sat on the floor of what might have been a kitchen. In her hands something indistinct, an oval of scribbled brown and white. Beside her the outline of a rabbit that had not been filled in.
The girlβs smile had returned, wider than before, the pencil strokes going outside the lines of the face.
The mother stood in a doorway behind her, one hand on the frame. The eyeless face was turned toward the child.
Beneath the drawing, in letters that looked pressed into the page one stroke at a time:
I WAS HUNGRY
The words landed in her chest with a physical weight.
She felt the soft rabbit against her feet more clearly than before. The dampness of it.
The way the stuffing had compressed into a shape that was no longer entirely animal.
She thought of the wooden rabbit near her ankle and the way her toes had recognized it before her mind had.
Two versions of the same creature. One that could be held. One that could be carried into the dark.
A longer fragment opened.
A childβs hands, smaller than hers, holding a wire door closed. The sound of something moving inside, frantic and then less frantic.
A kitchen table with a bowl that had been empty for days. The smell of the house when there was nothing left on the shelves that could be cooked.
A voice (hers? anotherβs?) saying it would be all right, that they would find something tomorrow.
The childβs voice answering that tomorrow was too far. Then the quiet that followed, the particular quiet of a house that had begun to understand what hunger actually meant.
She made a sound in the dark that was not quite a word.
The lighter had gone out.
She did not relight it at once. She lay with the notebook open on her chest and the four iron spikes standing like markers around the places her body had been pinned.
The air felt thicker. Her skin had begun to stick to the wood in places where sweat had gathered.
She could smell herself more clearly now: the salt of it, the slow chemical change of a body that had been closed inside too small a space for too long.
When she struck the flame again the eighth drawing waited.
An empty cage.
No girl.
No mother.
Only the wire rectangle and, beneath it, the words:
THERE WERE NO MORE
She read them once and closed the lighter so hard the metal edge bit into her palm.
The second notebook lay near her right hip where she had left it.
She reached for it in the dark, fingers brushing the cover. It was thicker.
The binding felt more worn, as if it had been opened and closed many times.
She brought it up onto her chest beside the first and opened it by touch, then lit the flame with a hand that trembled enough to make the light stutter.
The first page contained only handwriting.
No drawings.
The letters were careful, almost gentle, written in dark ink that had bled slightly into the paper.
You will remember her before you remember what happened to her.
She read the sentence three times.
The handwriting was familiar.
Not in the way a strangerβs hand becomes familiar after long study. In the way a face is familiar when it has been seen every morning in a mirror that no longer exists.
The loops of the letters. The particular way the lowercase y dropped below the line. The slight leftward slant.
She knew this hand. She did not know how she knew it.
She whispered to the dark:
βWho wrote this?β
The dark did not answer.
She turned the page.
More writing, the same careful hand:
You remember the rabbits.
You donβt remember why there were no more.
The flame shook. She steadied it against the edge of the notebook and felt heat climb into the webbing of her thumb.
The words stayed on the page as if they had been waiting for the exact moment she would be ready to read them.
Or as if they had been written by someone who already knew the order in which she would find each piece.
Another fragment rose, longer, heavier.
The child standing in a doorway, holding the soft rabbit by one ear. The wire cage in the corner of a room that smelled of old newspaper and the particular musk of small animals kept too long in one place.
The childβs voice asking if they could keep just one. Her own voice (she was almost certain it was her own) answering that they would try.
Then later, the same room with the cage empty and the soft rabbit still clutched in the childβs hands, the fur around its neck worn smooth from being held through long nights.
The child saying she was hungry in a voice that had lost the expectation of being answered with food. The quiet after that. The quiet that had teeth.
She closed the second notebook and pressed both of them against her chest.
The wooden rabbit dug into her ankle. The soft one at her feet had grown colder, or her own blood had begun to move more slowly in the confined space.
She could feel the places where the spikes had held her, four dull points of memory on her skin even though the iron no longer touched her.
The lid remained an inch from her face. The walls still touched both shoulders at once. Nothing about the box had changed except the amount of knowledge it now contained.
She lay in the dark and understood, without knowing the childβs name, that the girl in the drawings was her daughter.
The knowledge did not arrive as a revelation. It arrived as a recognition that had been waiting underneath every other recognition, the way the shape of the wooden rabbit had been waiting under her foot. She knew the girl the way she knew the handwriting.
Completely. Without evidence. Without the ability to explain how the knowing had gotten inside her.
She did not know the girlβs name.
The absence of it felt deliberate, as if the name had been removed with the same care that had driven the four spikes into the wood.
She opened the first notebook again and turned back to the drawing of the empty cage.
She lit the flame one more time and held it until her thumb burned.
The words HE IS HUNGRY stayed visible even after she closed the lighter.
They remained written on the underside of her eyes, on the inside of the lid, on the dark itself.
She whispered the only truth she was certain of:
βI remember the rabbits.β
Then, quieter, almost without sound:
βI donβt remember why there were no more.β
The sentence hung in the small space between her mouth and the wood.
Outside the coffin there might have been earth or air or the weight of years. Inside it there was only the notebooks, the two rabbits, the diminishing water, the four iron spikes, and the slow, irreversible work of a mind beginning to understand that the drawings were not imagination.
They were a record.
And the record had been waiting for her in the dark long before she woke.
-
Chapter Three: THE GIRL WHO WAS HUNGRY
The dark had begun to taste different.
It was no longer only wood and the faint metallic ghost of the lighter.
It carried the slow accumulation of her own body: the salt of dried sweat along her hairline, the warmer, thicker scent that rose from the places where her skin had stayed pressed against the grain for too long, the sour edge of breath that had nowhere to go except back into her mouth.
She had stopped noticing the four iron spikes as separate objects. They had become part of the architecture of the space, four upright facts that marked the exact positions where movement had once been forbidden.
She could still feel the ghost of them on her wrists and ankles whenever she flexed too far.
She opened the first notebook again because the alternative was to lie still and listen to the sound of her own pulse measuring the distance between the lid and her face.
The lighter caught on the third strike.
The flame was lower now. She had begun to ration it without deciding to, the same way she rationed the water. Three swallows at a time. A few seconds of yellow light.
Then the dark again while the metal cooled against the wood.
The next drawing had lost the sun entirely.
The page was dominated by a single room drawn in shaky rectangular lines. A table.
A chair too large for the figure sitting in it.
The girl occupied the chair with her knees drawn up, feet not touching the floor. In front of her sat a plate. The plate was empty except for a few dark crumbs the child had pressed into the paper hard enough to shine.
Beside the chair the outline of a rabbit lay on its side, unfilled, only the suggestion of ears and a round body.
The girlβs hand rested near the outline. Her smile was present but wrong; the pencil had gone outside the lines of the mouth and kept going, as if the expression had continued after the face ended.
In the doorway behind her the mother stood with one hand on the frame. Still no eyes. The mouth was a flat, careful line.
Beneath the plate, in capital letters that leaned into one another:
I WAS HUNGRY
She held the flame until her thumb burned and the words stayed visible even after the light went out.
A fragment opened like a door that had been left ajar too long.
The sound of a spoon moving around an empty bowl. The particular scrape of metal against ceramic when there is nothing left to gather. A childβs voice, not crying, only stating a fact the way children state facts when they have already learned that asking will not change the answer.
Mommy, my stomach hurts. Then the quieter sound of a refrigerator door opening and closing again without anything being removed. The smell of a house that had begun to understand the difference between appetite and need.
The fragment ended before any adult voice replied.
She turned the page in the dark by touch, counting the edges of paper until she reached the next one, then struck the lighter again.
The girl sat on the floor now. The plate was gone. In her hands something roughly oval, scribbled in the same brown and white that had once been used for rabbit fur. The shape had no clear features. It could have been bread. It could have been something else.
Beside her the empty cage stood with its door hanging open. The mother remained in the doorway, drawn smaller than before, as if the child had begun to lose interest in the proportions of the adult figure.
The motherβs hands hung at her sides. Still no eyes.
No caption this time.
Only the same three words written near the bottom edge, pressed so hard the paper had thinned:
I WAS HUNGRY
She closed the lighter and pressed the notebook against her mouth so the paper muffled the sound she made. The sound was not a word. It was the shape of a word that had never been allowed to form completely.
Another fragment, longer.
The child standing on a chair to reach the higher shelf. The soft rabbit tucked under one arm, one ear wet where it had been held between teeth. The wire cage in the corner with newspaper that had not been changed.
The smell of the newspaper when it grew damp. The childβs voice again, patient, almost instructional: If I donβt feed them they go to sleep forever.
Then the quiet that followed when no adult corrected the statement.
The quiet of a room that had started to accept new rules.
She lay with the notebook closed and the second one waiting near her hip. The soft rabbit at her feet had begun to feel heavier.
Or her own legs had begun to feel less able to tell the difference between the weight of the toy and the weight of the dark.
She shifted as much as the space allowed and felt the wooden rabbit roll against her ankle bone.
The contact was small and specific. It hurt in a way that had nothing to do with pressure.
She opened the second notebook because the first had begun to feel like it was looking back.
The handwriting waited, the same careful, familiar slant.
You remember the rabbits.
You donβt remember why there were no more.
She turned the page.
She tried to tell you with the only language she trusted.
You thought she was playing.
The flame shook. She steadied it against the edge of the notebook and watched the ink blur slightly where her thumb had left a smear of sweat. The letters remained legible.
They remained gentle. That was the worst part. The voice on the page never raised itself.
It never accused.
It only continued, as if the two of them were sitting across a table that no longer existed and the only task left was to speak carefully about something that could not be spoken carelessly.
She turned another page.
You remember her saying she was hungry.
You donβt remember what she did after you told her to wait.
The fragment that rose this time had edges.
A kitchen table. A bowl with a thin film of something that had once been soup.
The child sitting with her feet swinging because the chair was still too tall. The soft rabbit in her lap. The childβs voice not asking this time, only informing: I took care of it.
Then the smell that had entered the room afterward, the particular smell of something small that had been opened.
The adult voice hers, she was almost certain saying they would find more food tomorrow. The childβs answer: Tomorrow is too far for them. The silence after that had been different from other silences. It had weight.
It had lasted.
She closed the second notebook and pressed both of them flat against her chest. The lid of the coffin met the backs of her hands.
She could feel her own pulse in the places where the wood touched her skin.
The pulse was too fast. She tried to slow it by counting the beats and lost count after twelve because the numbers began to feel like the numbers the child had sometimes written in the corners of the drawings, small, careful, without context.
She returned to the first notebook.
The next drawing showed the girl alone in a room that had no furniture.
The walls were scribbled dark. In the center of the floor the outline of a rabbit lay unfilled. The girl sat beside it with her knees drawn up and her arms around them. Her smile was gone.
The pencil had drawn the mouth as a single straight line. In the doorway the mother stood with both hands raised, palms out, the gesture of someone refusing or warding off.
Still no eyes. The child had begun to fill the motherβs face with heavy loops of graphite until the features disappeared completely under the weight of the marks.
Beneath the drawing:
THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE
She held the light until the flame licked the edge of the paper and left a thin brown crescent. Then she closed it and lay in the dark while the smell of scorched paper joined the other smells in the small space.
The questions arrived the way the fragments arrived: without permission and without complete edges.
Had the child been neglected?
Had the house simply run out of food?
Had something been wrong with the child that made hunger different for her than for other children?
Had something been wrong with the mother that made her unable to see what the drawings were trying to say?
Each question opened onto another until the dark felt crowded with them.
She tried to answer one and found only the memory of a refrigerator light falling across an empty shelf and the sound of a wire door clicking shut in another room. The answers refused to form.
Only the questions remained, multiplying in the narrow space between her face and the lid.
She began to scratch at the wood.
At first it was only the movement of her nails against the grain near her right shoulder, a small, repetitive sound that gave her hands something to do while the questions continued. Then the sound grew louder.
She turned her wrist as far as the space allowed and dragged her nails in short, hard arcs.
Fine particles of wood fell against her cheek.
The smell of raw timber joined the others. She scratched until the tips of her fingers burned and the wood developed a shallow, uneven trough that her nail could catch on.
The action did nothing to enlarge the space. It only made the dark feel slightly less absolute because it contained a sound she was choosing to make.
She stopped when her breath became too loud.
In the silence that followed she heard something else.
Three soft knocks.
They came from above.
Not against the lid of the coffin. Higher. Further away. Three distinct sounds, evenly spaced, the way someone might knock on a door they expected to be answered. Or the way someone might test the thickness of earth.
She froze.
Every muscle locked in the exact position it occupied when the sounds arrived. Her nails still rested in the shallow trough she had made.
The notebooks still pressed against her chest.
The soft rabbit still touched the soles of her feet. She did not breathe. She listened with her entire body, the way an animal listens when the dark has suddenly acquired a direction.
The knocks did not repeat.
She waited through one hundred of her own heartbeats, counting them the way she had counted the pages. The dark remained silent except for the internal sounds of her own blood and the faint, continuous tick of the wood adjusting to the heat of her skin.
Nothing.
No voice. No further sound. No shift in the pressure of the air. Only the same closed space and the same objects and the same two notebooks that knew more than she did.
She exhaled very slowly and felt the warm moisture of her breath return to her face.
The second notebook still lay open near her hip. She reached for it in the dark and opened it to the last page she had read. She did not light the flame. She only rested her fingers on the paper and felt the slight ridges where the pen had pressed.
She whispered the sentence the page had given her earlier, the one that had begun to feel like the only true thing the dark contained:
βYou remember the rabbits.β
Then, quieter:
βYou donβt remember why there were no more.β
The words left her mouth and settled into the wood.
Above her the silence continued, complete and unhelpful. Inside the coffin the drawings waited with their empty cages and their plates and their eyeless mother and their child who had learned the difference between hunger and appetite before anyone had been ready to teach her.
The soft rabbit at her feet remained cold.
The wooden one remained hard against her ankle. The four iron spikes remained upright in the places where her body had once been prevented from moving.
She closed her eyes even though the dark made the gesture unnecessary, and began, very carefully, to turn the next page by touch alone.
-
Chapter Four: MOMMY
The second notebook had begun to feel warmer than the first.
She noticed it only after she had held both against her chest for a long time, the way she noticed most things now: slowly, through the skin, after the dark had already accepted them. The first notebook stayed cool, its cardboard cover still faintly damp from the earlier sweat of her hands.
The second one carried a low, residual heat, as if the ink itself had not finished drying or as if the hand that wrote it had left something behind that the paper refused to release.
She opened it again because the silence after the three knocks had grown too large to lie inside without company.
The lighter caught on the fifth strike. The flame was smaller. She had begun to count the remaining fluid by the height of the yellow, the way she counted the remaining water by the weight of the bottle when she lifted it.
A few more pages of light. Then the dark would become permanent again unless she chose otherwise.
The page waiting for her contained only two sentences, written in the same careful, familiar hand.
You called yourself a good mother.
She stared at the words until the flame threatened to scorch the margin.
Then she spoke out loud for the first time since she had whispered the captions of the drawings.
βI was.β
The sound of her voice filled the coffin completely. It bounced against the lid and the walls and came back to her denser than before, as if the wood had absorbed some of the air around it. She waited. The notebook did not answer. Notebooks did not answer.
Yet the next page was already waiting under her thumb, and when she turned it the ink was there as if it had been written in the pause after she spoke.
I know.
Two words.
She made a sound that was not language. The flame shook and nearly died.
She steadied it against the edge of the notebook and watched the letters stay exactly where they were, gentle, almost kind, refusing to become an accusation.
That was what opened her mouth and left it open.
An accusation she could have fought. This was something else. This was agreement. This was the voice on the page accepting her claim and then continuing past it into territory she had not agreed to enter.
She turned the page because the alternative was to close the notebook and listen again for knocks that might not return.
You still call yourself that.
Even now.
Even here.
She answered immediately, the words leaving her before she could decide whether they were true.
βI was good to her.β
The flame stayed alive long enough for her to turn the page again.
You were.
That isnβt the same thing.
She closed the lighter so hard the metal lid snapped shut like a small bone breaking.
The dark returned with the smell of the extinguished wick and the thicker smell of her own breath. She lay with the notebook open on her chest and the lid of the coffin pressing against the backs of her hands.
Her mouth stayed open. The sentence remained inside it, unfinished, because there was no answer that did not feel like agreement with something she had not yet agreed to.
When she lit the flame again she returned to the first notebook. The drawings had begun to change in ways that felt personal, as if the child had started watching her through the page.
The mother appeared in every one of them now.
In the first new drawing the mother stood in the center of the house, arms open.
The girl stood several steps away, holding the soft rabbit by one ear.
The motherβs face had no eyes. The child had drawn two careful ovals where the eyes should have been and then left them empty.
The smile was still present, wide and fixed. Beneath the drawing the child had written:
MOMMY IS HAPPY
She whispered the caption and then answered it out loud, as if the page could hear her.
βI was happy when she was happy.β
The second notebook lay open beside her. She turned to a fresh page and found the ink already waiting.
You keep speaking as if the past tense will protect you.
She stared at the sentence until the flame burned her thumb.
βIβm not trying to protect myself.β
She turned the page of the second notebook without closing the lighter.
Yes.
You are.
The flame went out. She did not relight it at once. She lay in the dark with both notebooks open and the soft rabbit pressing against the soles of her feet and the wooden one hard against her ankle.
Her mouth remained slightly open.
The conversation had begun to feel less like reading and more like being answered by someone who sat just on the other side of the wood and refused to raise their voice.
She struck the lighter again and returned to the drawings.
The next page showed the mother from behind. The girl stood in front of her, looking up. The motherβs hands rested on the girlβs shoulders. The childβs face was detailed, the eyes large, the mouth a small uncertain curve.
The motherβs face was completely scribbled over with heavy loops of graphite that had torn the paper in two places. No eyes. No mouth. Only the dark mass of marks where a face should have been.
Beneath it:
MOMMY DOESNβT SEE ME
She spoke before the lighter could heat again.
βI saw you.β
The second notebookβs next page was already under her fingers.
You saw what you needed to see.
βThat isnβt fair.β
It isnβt about fair.
She turned the drawing page and found the girl hiding.
The child had drawn herself under a table, knees pulled to her chest, the soft rabbit clutched against her mouth.
The motherβs legs were visible beside the table, standing still. The motherβs upper body was not drawn at all. Only the legs and the suggestion of a hand hanging at the side.
The child had written the caption in very small letters near the bottom edge:
I AM QUIET SO MOMMY WONβT BE SAD
The lighter shook. She steadied it with both hands and felt the heat climb into her palms.
She spoke to the page the way she had once spoken to a closed bedroom door.
βShe never had to be quiet for me.β
The second notebook answered on the next leaf.
She thought she did.
That is the part you keep refusing.
She closed both notebooks and pressed them against her face.
The paper smelled of graphite and the salt of her own hands and the deeper, slower scent of a body that had been closed inside wood long enough for the wood to begin answering.
Her mouth stayed open against the covers.
The conversation continued even with the pages closed; the sentences had already moved inside her head and begun arranging themselves in the same careful, familiar handwriting.
When she opened the first notebook again the mother had no face left at all.
The child had filled the entire head with black until the pencil had torn a hole through the paper. The motherβs body remained, arms open, palms out.
The girl stood several steps away, holding the soft rabbit.
Between them the child had drawn a thick vertical line that ran from the top of the page to the bottom, a wall that had not been present in any earlier drawing.
The caption was written twice, once on each side of the line:
MOMMY
ME
She whispered both words and then spoke louder, the way a person speaks when the other person has begun to turn away.
βShe loved me.β
The second notebookβs page turned under her thumb as if the motion had been expected.
She did.
The flame stayed alive long enough for the next sentence to appear.
That isnβt the same thing.
Her mouth opened and stayed open.
The lighter burned her fingers. She did not close it. The two sentences sat on the page one above the other, gentle, almost tender, and between them the entire distance of everything she had never allowed herself to measure.
She tried to answer and found only air leaving her throat without shape. The flame finally died against her skin. The dark returned with the smell of burned flesh so faint it might have been imagination.
She lay without moving for a long time.
The soft rabbit remained against her feet.
The wooden one remained against her ankle.
The four iron spikes remained upright in their places. The water bottle remained within reach, its remaining weight known by heart.
Nothing in the coffin had changed except the amount of truth it now contained, and the truth had begun to take up more space than the air.
She opened the first notebook to a page she did not remember seeing before.
The lighter caught on the seventh strike. The flame was very small.
The drawing was simple.
A rectangular box. Underground. The child had drawn horizontal lines above it to show earth. Beside the box the girl stood holding the soft rabbit by one ear. Inside the box a figure lay with its arms at its sides.
The child had drawn four dark vertical marks across the figureβs limbs, thick and deliberate.
The motherβs face, for the first time in many pages, was visible. It had eyes. The eyes were open.
Beneath the drawing, in careful capital letters:
MOMMY IS INSIDE
The flame went out.
She did not relight it.
She lay in the dark with the page still open under her hand and her mouth open against the underside of the lid, and the only sound in the coffin was the sound of her own breathing trying to learn the new shape of the space it had been given.
-
Chapter Five: THE THING AT HER FEET
The soft thing at her feet had been waiting longer than the rest.
She had known it was there from the first hour, the way a person knows the presence of a tooth that has begun to ache before the pain sharpens: a low, continuous awareness that never quite rose into full attention while other, louder discoveries demanded the limited light and the limited air.
Now the other discoveries had quieted enough that the soft shape became impossible to ignore.
It pressed against the soles of both feet whenever she flexed her toes. It yielded.
It was cold in a way that did not match the temperature of the wood or the temperature of her own skin.
The cold felt stored, as if the object had brought the chill with it from somewhere else and had not yet decided to release it.
She began the work of bringing it closer.
The coffin did not allow her to sit or to roll fully onto her side. She had to draw her knees upward until they met the lid, then use the limited flex of her ankles and the edges of her feet to nudge the object along the grain.
The motion was slow and intimate and faintly obscene in its awkwardness. Each small success brought the shape further up the length of her legs. The fabric of it brushed the thin skin on the inside of her ankles.
The stuffing inside the fabric shifted with a soft, granular sound, as if whatever filled it had broken down into smaller pieces over years of being held and then not held.
The cold of it transferred through her socks and into the bones of her feet.
She kept going until the object rested against her left hip, close enough that her freed hand could reach it without dislocating her shoulder against the wall.
She did not light the flame at once.
She explored it first by touch alone, the way she had explored everything else in the dark. Worn plush. Seams that had been repaired with thread that did not match.
One ear longer than the other because the seam along its edge had opened and been stitched closed again by fingers that were not expert.
A small hard place near the center where the stuffing had compressed into a permanent lump.
The shape resolved under her palm the way the wooden rabbit had resolved under her foot days or hours earlier: head, ears, body, the suggestion of limbs that had never been fully separate from the torso.
A rabbit. The soft kind. The kind a child carries by one ear until the ear darkens and grows thin from the oil of a small hand.
She knew it.
The recognition arrived without an image attached, the same way the handwriting had arrived and the same way the girl in the drawings had arrived. Complete. Immediate. Unwelcome.
She knew the exact weight of it in a childβs arms.
She knew the way the left ear had always folded forward. She knew the faint, sour-sweet smell that rose from the plush when it had been slept with for years, a smell that was not quite dirt and not quite skin and not quite the inside of a closed drawer.
The knowledge sat in her chest like a second heart that beat out of time with the first.
She struck the lighter.
The flame was very low. It showed her what her hands already understood. The rabbitβs fur had once been white or pale yellow; it was gray now, darkened along the ears and the stomach from years of contact.
One button eye remained. The other was missing, the threads that had held it still trailing from the empty socket like tiny unfinished sentences.
The stitching along the left ear was clumsy, done with red thread that had faded to the color of old blood.
She stared at the red thread until the flame threatened to die, then closed the lighter and let the dark take the image away.
A memory opened that felt too complete to be safe.
A store aisle that smelled of plastic and new fabric. Her own hands, she was almost certain they were her own. Reaching for this exact rabbit on a shelf that was slightly too high.
The small decision of choosing the one with the longer ears.
The later moment of handing it to a child whose face she still could not see, only the shape of the hands that closed around the plush and the immediate, absolute way the child tucked it under one arm as if the rabbit had always belonged there.
Then the nights. The rabbitβs ear in the childβs mouth.
The soft, repetitive sound of a small body settling into sleep with the toy pressed against its face. The memory had no sound of crying in it. It had only the quiet of a room that believed it was safe.
She held the rabbit against her chest beside the notebooks and felt the cold of it begin to leave the plush and enter her own skin.
Another memory followed, harder and less willing.
The same rabbit, years later, still held by the same child.
The fur darker. The missing eye already gone.
The child older, the hands larger, the way of holding the toy more deliberate, as if the rabbit had become less a comfort and more a witness.
Then the final image, the one that made her mouth open in the dark: the rabbit resting in the crook of a childβs arm while the childβs body remained very still.
The rabbit had been there at the end. She knew this the way she knew the handwriting. The child had been holding it when she died.
The knowledge landed with a physical weight that made the lid feel closer.
She whispered to the dark, to the rabbit, to the four iron spikes still standing in their places:
βWhy are you here?β
The soft plush gave no answer. The cold had almost left it. In its place the rabbit began to take on the temperature of her own body, as if it had been waiting for permission to become warm again.
She opened the second notebook because the alternative was to keep asking the same question of an object that had already given her more answer than she could hold.
The handwriting waited, familiar and careful.
She had a system.
You thought the rabbits were only rabbits.
She turned the page. The flame was almost gone; she used it in short, rationed bursts.
They were not metaphors.
They were records.
Each one was a person or a day or a thing that happened when you were not looking.
The words made the air inside the coffin feel thinner. She had believed, until this moment, that the drawings of rabbits were the ordinary inventions of a child who loved small animals.
The empty cages and the dark shapes under the ground and the plate with the indistinct oval had been terrible, but they had still belonged to the category of a childβs imagination stretched by hunger or fear.
The notebook was removing that category.
It was telling her the rabbits had been a language.
A private, precise language the child had used because the other one, the one made of spoken words. Had not been enough.
She turned another page.
You saw the drawings.
You called them cute.
You put them on the refrigerator.
You never asked why the rabbits kept disappearing.
The lighter died. She did not relight it.
She lay in the dark with the soft rabbit pressed against her collarbone and the wooden one still hard against her ankle and the two versions of the same creature suddenly feeling like evidence rather than comfort.
The uncomfortable weight of the realization spread through her chest and into her limbs: the child had not been inventing.
The child had been documenting.
And the mother (the woman she was, the woman she had been) had looked at the documents and seen only stories.
She returned to the first notebook with hands that felt less like her own.
She turned pages by touch until she found one she had not examined closely before.
When she struck the lighter the flame was a tiny blue ghost of itself. It was enough.
The drawing showed a rectangular box.
The child had drawn it with careful, uneven lines. Inside the box a figure lay with arms and legs extended. Across each limb the child had pressed a thick black mark, four vertical strokes, heavy and deliberate.
The marks matched the exact positions of the iron spikes that still stood in the wood around her. The proportions were childish.
The perspective was wrong. The spikes themselves were unmistakable.
She stared at the page until the last of the flame licked her thumb and went out.
The dark returned with a new quality. It felt watched. Not by an external presence.
By the objects themselves.
By the soft rabbit that had been present at a death it should not have left. By the wooden rabbit that had been given in a store aisle she could almost remember.
By the four iron spikes that a child had drawn with accurate placement long before the woman inside the coffin had woken to find them driven through her clothes.
She whispered the only question that still had room left in the small space:
βHow did you know?β
The second notebook lay open under her right hand. She did not need the lighter to find the next page.
Her fingers moved to it the way they moved to the water bottle or the blade: by memory of position.
When she struck the flame one final time the ink was already there, waiting, written in the same gentle hand that had called her a good mother and then told her that was not the same thing.
Because you showed me.
The sentence sat on the page without further explanation.
The flame died.
She lay in the complete dark with the soft rabbit against her chest, the childβs drawing of the spikes still open under her hand, and the notebookβs answer repeating itself in the exact handwriting she now understood had always been hers.
The discomfort was no longer only physical.
It had moved into the space behind her eyes where the fragments lived, and it had begun to rearrange them.
The rabbits had never been only rabbits.
The spikes had never been only iron. The soft toy against her heart had never been only a comfort a child once carried.
Everything inside the coffin had been placed here with knowledge.
Including her.
