CAGED

One•

Looking at these sugar glazed donuts should make me throw up. This woman feeds me like a rat.

I was slapped awake in this room that has a little warmth. Even after I opened my eyes, trying to adjust to this place, I was slapped again. Hard whack across my face that made me pass out. Again.

She wants to kill me. She wants to end my existence but she chose slow torture for me. I have never been afraid of death but I am afraid of this door opening to reveal that woman whose face is like a sculpture in an art museum; devoid of emotions.

I have lost track of time. This is the fourth day I have not been slapped into oblivion or been sedated. There are iron bars she constructed on the door. I was half awake the day she did it. It was after that she gave me more injections.

This place feels like a higher level of the place I was held before. I seem to have been promoted to a different level of suffering. My food here has been two donuts in a transparent bag. She throws it through the bars to land on the couch or the bed. So I crawl to reach it if it is far off. The pain that shoots through my leg makes it difficult to use it.

Today, I just sat on the couch and stared at it beside me. Was there no more food, why does she keep giving me donuts? 

Back home, we fed poorly especially when my mother was being punished but no one ever gave us donuts as food. Donuts? Two small round snacks. Why is she giving me donuts! It seems to be thinning my brain - my observation skills, my alertness, my reasoning. They were all reduced.

I let out a scream from my depth of frustration. It is not so loud. It is the extent I can go without further hurting my facial muscles which have been feeling like they were run over by a train. I have been screaming often. It's freeing. She must hear the sound but it does not seem to bother her. 

This new space is larger. There's a couch and a bed too. There is an adjoining bathroom with a moderate sized bathtub and a toilet. Big cartons of teddy bears, duvets and throw pillows are at one end of the room. The food is poor but I now have an option to use a bed, though sleep has not been my best buddy these days.

Just one click of the key, without warning the door opens. She stands at the door looking around the room with a metal box in her hand.

In the past, I never understood how a person could be described to be not ugly and at the same time not beautiful. This woman has a plain face without distinct features. It is as if the creator just molded her face and threw a mouth into it while reading a book, threw in the eyes inattentively while answering a phone call, then threw in her nose while thinking of what to eat.

"Have you missed this place?" I ask.

She does not acknowledge me but moves to the closed window  and looks at the bars there.

"I can't run away; I don't have a leg."  

" You seem to have lots of energy today," she says. There is a way she says " lots" that makes having energy seem like a bad thing. I decide to stop talking.

She squats down in front of me and begins to lay out the things in the box. There are knives of different shapes, needles - big needles and other tools that I did not understand but they looked dangerous.

Strangely, my eyes begin to water. "Please, I want to die. I prefer guns. Just shoot me and I'll be gone." 

She begins to unwrap the bandage around my leg. I watch on till she was done.

"There's a bullet in your leg."

"You put it there," I reply.

She spreads out her instrument so the steels scrape against the tiles as they move. I wince, dreading the way the contact causes a rippling from my head down to my hands.