Pounding rains. Pounding hands. Pounding metal.
Mister pounds on the door of the shack I live in. I am tired. I have not slept well for innumerable nights. The hay prickles into my skin, leaving marks like the decaying wood of my shack.
I get out of the pile of hay I call bed and put on the apron that does nothing to cover me. I walk out into the rain.
Mister waits for me. He and the fluffy creature outside of my shack are there. The fluffy creature sniffs at me. Mister has a boom on his hip, which I recoil from.
Mister leads me to the henhouse, where I collect the eggs from the hens and feed the brood. My body aches from the hay's prickly skin and Mister's cuddles. I finish the egg collecting and come into Mister's house after my work is done.
He dries me off and makes me prepare breakfast for him. He calls it an omelette, where I stir an egg's yolk and put something he calls cheese into the center and fold it over. He eats his omelette. I wait to see if he would like something else.
"No more. Go back to bed."
Today I will go without breakfast. I trudge back through the rain and the muddy slop and see the fluffy creature that guards my shack. It lets me back into my shack.
I notch another mark into the wood of my shack. There are innumerable notches in my shack that mark the days I have been on Mister's farm. He claims there are four thousand four hundred and fifty-one. I do not know.
I look up at the leak in the rusting roof over my head. Water from the rain is leaking into the shack again, this time from a hole I can put my fist through. I curl in my hay bed and go back to sleep.
YOU ARE READING
Wasting in the Rain
General FictionThis is all she's known. This is the shack she's been chained in for twelve years, since she was four years old. She's now sixteen. She's only known Mister, the man who has threatened her with guns, violence, rapes, and beatings every day for twelve...
