With no emotion, I set the phone next to me and stood up. I could hear the distant sound of my mother's anguished cries and feel the dark clutch of agony in my own chest. Memories were stirring in the back of my mind threatening to come flooding forward into my consciousness. Pushing against a door in my head, a door that had been locked so tightly for so long, I had forgotten it was there.
Could the trauma and the drugs have really led me to believe that a small child was actually doll? Asking for food, asking for utensils to eat with, asking me to protect her from the bad man...
No...
I slowly turned around and brought my eyes down to the chest. Surely, it was too small. You couldn't fit a person in there. You couldn't. But what about a very small, starving, emaciated child? What about her? If I were an investigator looking for a child I would never consider looking in this chest. It was just too small.
I knelt down to the ground and unclipped the clasps. It would be better to not look. After all that I had overcome, this new life that I had earned. It could all be undone by opening this toy box. I shouldn't open it. I should throw it in a landfill and forget it ever existed. I should not look inside..
I opened the chest.
I never had a doll. My mother never could afford to buy me one. I never had a wagon either. But I did have a toy box. A pretty, blue and white toy box. And when I was five, I drowned my two year old sister and put her in it. And now my life is over.
SORRY ITS SO SHORT
