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Stitches

I couldn’t see. I felt around my eyes. My lids were sewn shut! I screamed, but no sound came out. My lips were sewn shut too. I started to run, hands out in front to ward off obstacles. It was night, I felt sure, because no tiniest bit of light came through my lids, and it was silent. I stopped and felt my ears. They were folded forward and sewn shut too. I hugged myself. I’d have wet my pants but for two things: I was naked and I couldn’t pee. What’s happening to me?! I screamed silently and ran again. I struck something and flew backward. I felt wooden planks beneath me. There was no knot on my forehead—there was a crack. But no blood. I huddled on the floor, blind, deaf, mute, and naked. A sudden suspicion made me feel my nose. Sewn shut, just like my other orifices. Dreading what I would find, I felt again. I now knew why I couldn’t pee. Misery overcame me and I bowed my head.

I started violently when a hand firmly grasped my shoulder. A small pair of scissors cut the thread binding my right ear. I could feel lips there, and I could hear breathing. A woman whispered:

“It’s alright, I will free you.” She snipped the thread binding my left ear and my eyes. She was a dusky young woman dressed in a black body suit. I touched my lips, my nose. She smiled and shook her head. Then she whispered again. I listened for a long time, shrinking from the sibilance of those antediluvian words. I shouldn’t have understood them, for she spoke the language of the dead, which is the second oldest language. She told me what I must do. If I succeeded, then she would free me.

I strangled the judge. When it was over, I left the message she had dictated, and returned to the tumble-down warehouse where she’d found me. She cut the threads from my lips and I told her how it went.

“Free me,” I begged. She smiled and I knew fear again. “You promised!”

“I will,” she said, and spoke again the language of death. I collapsed like a masterless puppet. I could not move. She went away then—I heard her footsteps. I endured a kind of living death for such a long time. Weeks? Months?

A long time later some men came and wrapped me in a bag. They picked me up, threw me in the back of a pickup truck, and drove for at least half an hour. Later, they threw me down in a hole and shoveled dirt on top of me. I think they have buried me alive.

Publ. Drowning Atlantis, 2007