"Whispers of Eternity"

She had pleaded for her life once. She knew that, somehow, in the back of her mind, in the depths of the madness that had overtaken her being. She had pleaded to be free from this hell. It was almost a foreign thought, a life outside of her bonds, away from her mistress, who could give her freedom or death with a flip of her perfect dark hair. A taunting smile on impossibly crimson lips turned cold each time they left bloody kisses all over her body, now frail and porcelain from lack of sunlight.

She had been vivacious, once. Completely and utterly full of life, embracing it. She shunned it now, as she shunned the light that would one day kill her. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that if she were to venture into the world of light and sanity, she would go crazy. She was used to it here, in her realm of darkness and silence, of solitude and pain. Her captor had taught her how to stay alive despite it all, or for it all, and to tolerate anything that was given. She could take any sort of torture now, could take anything… anything at all, except the light. Except freedom.

So the words did not register, at first. They did not quite reach the recesses of her hazy mind, dreamy with lack of use. She’d not thought in days, months, years, decades… How long had it been, she wanted to ask. How long since she had last seen life, not this pathetic mockery of it? How long since she had been free…

All at once she felt terrified, and she clung to her mistress. The woman responded by slapping her once, hard, across the face, and she stepped back as she stifled the cry rising in her throat. She ducked her head in submission and looked at the door, which had been locked and closed for all this time. Furnished with cobwebs and spiders, this had been her home for… so long… It was standing wide open, and the light was blinding to her weak eyes. She did not wish to see what was beyond the door. She did not wish to dress and leave, or just pretend that her former life could ever return. She would never see things the same, and this she knew without even a slight doubt.

Nothing would stay the same once she stepped through the door, never to return, and to be replaced by another as rebellious as she’d once been. As stubborn and hard to tame, as independent. But she had been tamed, and tamed well. In the beginning she’d have run to the open door, clawing at it in desperation as it slammed in her face. She’d have fought with everything her weakened body had left. Then she had lacked the opportunity; now she lacked the desire. Her mistress was telling her to go, but she did not want to.

How long had it been that she’d been in this dark prison? How long? How long would it be until she could make those furtive steps to the open door, the tiny steps to freedom? Could she? Would she? She’d always thought that the second the opportunity presented itself, she would run, but her mistress had been right.

There was a time, despite all of her protests and arguments otherwise, that she had given up. Her mistress had warned her in the very beginning that there would come a time when she would have to leave and she would not want to.

She had laughed in her mistress’s face, and only a shadow of a smile had appeared on the woman’s cold face. But now… it was different, so very different.

Now she wanted to throw herself at her mistress’s feet and beg, plead, anything to not have to leave the place she’d called home for so long now. She wanted to stay. But she could not-

How long had it been? How long since she’d left reality?

Now she was getting the chance to leave and she had to take it. She held her head high, feigning pride and the stubbornness that had long ago fled her, the very independence that had gotten her into this whole situation in the first place. She tried to be even a shadow of her former self, failed. But still she walked toward the blinding light.

She was… free.

But the time, and her mistress, had changed her. How long? How long had it been?

Forever?

-February 2003, © Mackenzie Anderson.