Amy

room

The room wasn't always a tomb of silence. Sometimes, in the dead of night, when the shadows stretched across the floor like grasping, skeletal hands, I’d hear them: whispers, fragments of conversations, echoes of secrets I was never meant to hear.

“She’s getting too big,” a woman’s voice, sharp and brittle, like shattered glass, cut through the darkness. Mama, probably, her words laced with a cold calculation that made my blood run cold.

“Just another mouth to feed,” Daddy’s voice, a low, guttural rumble, like distant thunder, resonated through the room, a chilling reminder of my expendability.

“They’ll pay more for her older,” a man’s voice, thick and oily, like the slick, dark residue left by a slug, made my skin crawl with visceral disgust.

They spoke of me as if I were an inanimate object, a commodity, a piece of furniture to be bought and sold, used and discarded. Their words, sharp and cruel, were like shards of ice, piercing the silence, chilling me to the core.

I learned to hold my breath, to become as still as the shadows, to disappear into the darkness, to become a ghost in my own prison. I learned to listen, to decipher the fragments of their conversations, to understand the unspoken rules of their twisted world.

They were selling me again, this time not for a single night, but for a longer duration, to a place far away, a place I couldn’t even fathom, a place where the men were richer, and the women were colder, their hearts as empty as the doll’s broken eye.

I didn’t fully comprehend the implications of their words, not in the way an adult would, but I felt the weight of their intentions, the looming threat that hung heavy in the air. I could sense it in the way Mama’s eyes flickered.