Depth

2. limbo

     It was the twelfth day. It frightened her to think that there have been times in the past years where she had gone fourteen days without calling her mom. And it was only the twelfth day. How would anyone know she disappeared? Her stomach turned. She attended a pretty large private college and was lucky enough to get a flat to herself. There wasn't a single person she saw on a consistent daily basis.

     Her mom had to know. There wasn't a chance that she would not reach out on her only child's first day of class of her senior year to get the scoop on how it went.

     "I'm ready for you to come get me, Momma," she whispered to herself.

     Hot tears dripped down her face. She hadn't allowed herself to cry in a couple of days. It was too easy to lose herself in the time spent in silence, so she avoided emotional breaks. Her thumbs ran over her jawline and cheeks as she wiped at her tears, and her fingers brushed over her nose, eyes, and lips.

     She hadn't seen a reflection of herself in long enough that she stopped caring. She had forgotten the composition of her features, the ones she used to be so fond of. A couple hours were spent trying to describe the shape and dimensions of them, in order to put together a complete picture of what she might look like. In the same way she couldn't remember what her late grandmother looked like, her own face was long gone as well. Faces were easy to forget with the expectation of being able to see them again.

     The effort to remember her face was lost as her stomach protested her meal from earlier. She swallowed an urge to vomit- she needed the nutrients. She found herself distracting herself by circling back to the how and why of the situation. They were topics she should try to avoid, but it was a good diversion from the physical discomfort.

     The last normal thing she remembers was falling asleep in her own bed the night before the first day of classes. There was no struggle. She opened her eyes and she was caged in this small cavern.

     She shook her head to be rid of the unknowns. They would drive her insane if she spent too much time on them. That was the thing about forced time alone, she could never spend too long on one thought. It was dangerous.

     She hadn't noticed the man had been standing over her, above the grate. He stared down, his features shadowy and unreadable. He was holding something in his left hand, probably her dinner.

     She didn't scramble to hide, even though she was only in her underwear. The man squatted and pushed a decent-sized chunk of bread through the grate. It fell softly into her lap; it was fresh. She didn't even glance at the offering, though her stomach growled.

     "Please let me out," she said with much less force than she had anticipated.

     The man didn't respond, only watched.

     "Why are you doing this?" she pleaded, brushing the bread off her lap so she could stand, bringing her face closer to the remaining light above the grate.

     "Ungrateful." He spat.

     "Bread will kill me!" She exaggerated as the man turned on his heel and stomped out of sight.

     The man murmured something else but his voice was lost, inaudible below the grate.

     She fell asleep not long after, stomach rolling, lips chapped. There was no such thing as tossing and turning on such a hard surface. No position would wield comfort.

     Her dreams were visions of hands, soft motherly hands, rough, calloused hands, all sorts of hands, reaching down through the grate, somehow fitting through without getting stuck. She let her own palm fall in the first one it touched. It was warm and thick, calloused but not too rough, maybe a callous formed inside of a working glove. The strong arm attached pulled her upwards to the grate, so eager to pull her out, to rescue her, but her freedom stopped at the shoulder. Her cheek pressed up against the grate, but no matter how hard the arm pulled, it couldn't get her to slip through the way her arm had. All of the hands grasped at her arm and shoulders and head, anything they could reach. She tried to push, to squeeze, but to no avail. The bodiless arms pulled her up to her boundary, but she was trapped still.