Never Free

Captives: Consecutive Substack Story 1217

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

She writes her experiences in a notebook. She understands, in pain and terror, that you would believe the most horrific parts.

The world has conditioned you to believe them.

She doesn’t think you’d understand the quiet, contemplative, even beautiful parts.

Those are concepts harder to grasp.

There are gaps in the notebook, long ones, where she recounts the entire story in her head without writing things down, and then begins to write pages later; things like: the shadow through the window looked like an apple with the stem on fire.

She walks outside, down to the park, and flies her kite.

She made the kite herself.

She made the kite herself out of the shower curtain in the bathroom where she was locked.

She was in the home voluntarily.

Locked in the bathroom against her will, of course.

Screaming and begging and threatening and nothing didn’t help.

She was fed, though she wasn’t always certain what she was being fed.

He spoke to her rarely, though when he did it was frightening, usually senseless.

He didn’t touch her, for which she was grateful, though the entire captivity that situation felt like a possibility.

She had taken a vacation to become her own friend again.

Locked in the small room she argued with that friend and second guessed that friend but ultimately decided that she and her friend would survive.

She was grateful for the commode and the shower.

She was grateful that she got her period.

She was grateful for the shower curtain that became her canvas.

Her paints were menstrual blood and feces, but they were something.

He wanted to talk to her about art.

That’s why she was in the house.

She wondered if her bodily fluid butterfly would appear to him to be a gift.

Maybe it was a gift that would set her free, though she struggled to believe that.

Maybe he would just see shit and blood and not a butterfly and kill her.

Maybe she would be here so long she would get Stockholm Syndrome and fall in love with him.

Maybe that was why he held her captive.

The meals got smaller, as though he was running out of food.

Then he went silent.

She could hear no movement.

She got no morning mystery meal.

She called out to him.

Nothing.

The silence began to be more frightening than his approach.

The claustrophobia that had grown over the days got thicker.

She stripped naked, wanting nothing touching her skin.

Then she screamed and banged and kicked.

She called his name.

She heard her voice devolve into a plea, like the voice of a little girl who wants her kitten and she raged both at him and at herself.

She pulled down the shower curtain rod, bent it, began to use it as a tool to pry the door.

She stopped.

Would he come back?

Would he come back with more people, more men?

She went silent.

The door was damaged.

Would she be punished?

Would she be killed?

She sat in silence for she didn’t know how long.

Then she attacked the door again, not caring about the consequences, just wanting to see the other side of the door.

When she grew tired her imagination grabbed her in a forced terror waltz and created all the traps and tricks he could have laid, he could have set, her mind was a catalog of explosives and tripwires and pits.

She was no longer sure what she was doing when the door splintered, when light came through, when she yanked it open to silence, to more light and to two airborne feet dangling in another room.

At first she thought it was someone like her, a victim, a captive, an innocent.

She couldn’t possibly believe the good fortune that it was him.

She ran and grabbed her clothes and her butterfly, in her panic dressing in his backyard, then hopping a fence.

There is a gap in the notebook where she cannot explain why she didn’t tell the police.

The simple answer was that she didn’t want to talk to any men. But it is far, far more complex than that.

In the months that followed she would be terrified again at how well he had responded to texts from her friends.

He had known things about her she hadn’t known he did.

He was insane beyond words to her and chillingly articulate in texts to her friends.

He knew what he was doing, though that often seemed well above the tangled depths of his mind.

Her friends worry about her.

She flies the kite.

Get another kite, they say. Not the kite.

She loves the kite. It belongs to her in every conceivable way.

The wind may take it one day, and if it does, the wind is welcome to it.

A small girl stops in the park and watches her fly the kite.

The girl’s mother holds her hand.

“Butterfly,” the girl says.

The mother asks where she bought the kite.

“I made it myself,” she says.

The girl says “Mama, I want to make a kite like that.”

Letting out some slack on the string, then pulling her kite back in in an instant panic, she thinks “No you don’t child, no you don’t.”

When the mother yanks her daughter away, she realizes that she said it out loud.

***

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I certainly hope I did this tale justice. If I failed it was not from lack of effort.

Thanks to all of you for reading, newcomers and 4 1/2 year veteran Wealies alike.

Any gratuity, appreciation, support, assistance thrown my way is cherished at this point. Writing a new story every day is probably not as easy as it may seem.

Thanks in advance if you buymeacoffee.com/JimmyDoom or slide into my Venmo James-Graham-80