w a k e

I have been kidnapped by a man who is obsessed with my life. He locks me in a room with dozens of floppy, marble-covered journals, like the kind second-graders write spelling exercises in. He tells me to write my life story. He threatens me; he’ll hurt me if I don’t do as he asks. My past is horrible and strange. I do not want to write, but he commands that I begin.

I begin. I write for hours, and then days. Weeks writing, reliving the terrible past on paper, and still he will not let me stop, he will not let me leave the room. I have but one visitor besides the man; a woman about my age – 20 or so – whom he kidnapped some years back. She lives in this house with him, uncomplaining, resigned. She is even allowed to leave the house, but I cannot leave the room, so she sits with me sometimes, soothes me. She tells me that he became fixated on her life the same way he did on mine, and she too had to write her life story for him. She finished a few months back, and she tells me the process has healed her. “It’s not so bad, here. He won’t hurt you if you do as he asks. And when he’s busy, the two of us can hang out, talk late into the night, tell stories.” But I do not want to stay here. I do not want to write. Every day it weakens me, my life draining into the pages and leaving me empty. The nightmares have come back; sometimes I have then during the day as well – most times, now. The words are coming alive to swallow me. I am fighting to remain.

Weeks later, I reach the point in my past that simply cannot be written. It can’t ever be recorded because it would poison the world. I cannot write it. I cannot conceal it. There is nothing left but nightmares. I am not surprised when the knife appears in my hand.

My wrists are bleeding, but I do not feel anything. I am numb as I watch the red ribbons twine around my arms, curiously not staining the pristine sheets of the bed I have collapsed on. The world is starting to fade.

The door slowly opens. It is the other girl. She sees me on the bed, but she is not surprised either. She hurries over to me, silent. Lightly, efficiently, she binds my wrists in bedclothes, as if she has had experience in such things. She croons gently in my ear.

I look up at her as my vision greys. I recall something the man whispered to me – “You look like Esther. You look like her.” The girl beside me is not Esther. But she is her. I don’t realize I’ve spoken aloud until I see the clouds cross her face. It is the last that I see before I lose consciousness.

The girl cannot wake me. Neither she nor the man can wake me. I slip into a coma.

My head is now my prison. No longer must I relive my pain in my journals; but now the past is here, in my head, all around me. I am reliving it for real. I am in agony. I am dying a little more each day.

The girl knows this. She knows I will not make it; but she can’t face being alone. So she reads my journals – as much as I’d managed to write. This is how she learns of the Guardian.

I do not know how she tracks him. She goes out one day, and when she comes back, he is with her. She brings him to my room.

He sees me struggling with my demons there on the bed. He sees the slick sheen of the death that coats my skin. He knows there is but one thing left that he can do. One way to save my life.

In my head, a man with a pale face and long spindly fingers lunges towards me. I scream and claw at him, but I am unable to get off the bed. And then – the Guardian’s face appears.

The pale man twists into blue smoke.

Gazing at my shaking body, the Guardian casts his spell. It is a spell to reverse memory, to erase the past. But life lived is past written; one cannot exist without the other. To reverse the past is to reverse life itself.

And so as he backs away from the bed, the girl inches forward and covers her mouth. There on the bed is a tiny baby, lying amid the knotted blankets.

The guardian makes no sound. He picks up the journals; he picks up the baby. He leaves the house. The captor has not returned.

He takes the baby to a quiet apartment in a quiet building. A quiet woman opens the door. The Guardian says, “She needs your care.”

He places me in her arms.

Then, my journals still in his hands, he walks away. He does not look back.