Tatemae

Day 7 - Night - A Beautiful Lion's Den

I wake to the sound of my own heartbeat.

I must have just come to from a nightmare. My pulse is racing. I can feel the cluster of hearts in my chest beating a million beats per minute like a blunt knife trying to submerge through my skin. The heart in my throat is giving me a headache. I'm twitching like a bug after both its wings have been plucked off.

Someone's outside, watching me. I feel them long before I see them.

"Poppy." I say, smiling. She puts a finger in front of her mouth again to quiet me.

What must I look like? It's been over a week since I've showered or had the chance to change my clothes. Surely I smell pretty bad. It's strange; normally none of this would concern me. I guess it must be that I'm dying soon. I'd trade dignity for freedom any day, but since I have no choice but to die, I might as well go down with my dignity intact. God, what would Mom say now if she could see the state I'm in? If Dad could smell me, he'd probably puke.

She fumbles with something in her hands and the cage opens.

She does not have to say a word to me. I know what she means by the furrowed brow and the finger ever still against her lips. I can't scream. If I scream, all the demons that haunt me in my sleep will wake and I'll be killed before I can even scream. Maybe Poppy will be killed to. There's no way I'll speak a word!

She motions with her hand and we walk out of the arena where I see her vanish to almost every day. In my head, I'd imagined the town around the arena differently, with flowers as far as you could see and clean, clear paths. I'm met with a quiet city twinkling in the night. It lurks against the horizon like a shadow in the back of a closet, darker than even the blackest part of the sky. I can tell where it is from the faint traces of what I can only imagine is rich people cooking with real oxygen and the lack of stars where the city lies. The buildings are hard to distinguish from each other. They blur together like paint in water.

Poppy takes my hand.

I flinch. She's colder than a ghost, papery like the wings of a bug, and chilling like a room after a fire has died. I squeeze her hand tighter, and feel the blood moving through her veins and into her fingertips like the branches of a dead tree.

She does not look back at me. Instead, we weave in between houses like children playing tag back in the Lumière city. She guides me with a sense of determination. I wonder what she sees in each other buildings; how well she really knows it all. Does she pass by this part of the town every day or is her slight pauses a result of her struggling to remember the way in the darkness?

Eventually, she stops at the door of a home.

My hand thumps against my thigh as she lets go of me and reaches into the neck of her dress for a necklace hiding a key, its silver end glittering in the distant glossy light coming from a home nearby. She places the key gently into the door, and then presses the handle down. Without a word, Poppy walks inside.

The darkness welcomes me with a wink.

"Are you afraid of the dark?" Poppy asks, as I stay shivering in the cold.

"I'm not afraid of the darkness. For I have learned, I am the darkness."

I walk inside and Poppy pushes past me to close and shut the door.

"My sister and my caretaker aren't home." She says simply, in plain speech. The sound of her voice sends a shiver down my spine. I can feel my eye twitching. "They won't be coming back."

"Your parents?"

"They died some years ago. There's a woman who takes care of my sister and me. We're alone."