I Alone Love You

The darkness was all she knew since she’d been able to know anything at all. She drew her thin knees up to her chin and hugged them there. The thin t-shirt she wore was also short, and she wore no undergarments beneath it. She knew this was wrong somehow, but she could not explain to herself why it was.

She leaned against the roughness of the wall behind her. Every day the faces hidden here in the darkness changed. There were new ones, and old ones were taken away.

How long? She wondered. How long before I get taken away too? How long?

She didn’t even know where “away” was. All she knew, all any of them knew was that sometimes the door opened, flooding the space with brief moments of blinding white light. A girl was taken, seemingly at random, and pulled away.

And no one ever saw her again.

The door opened other times too, to deliver handfuls of food that tasted awful, and buckets of water that left a metallic taste in everyone’s mouth. They were all girls, girls who could not remember their names, ages, where they were from. They knew nothing except the darkness, and those brief, terrifying flashes of light.

There was no measurement of time, except for the light when the door came. All they knew, all anyone knew, was that the girls didn’t often stay here long. It was she, the one leaning against the wall hugging her knees, that had been there the longest.

Of course, that was all about to change.