Untitled Short Story II

She whispered, “…the road is smooth,” recognizing this when we stopped hearing the usual sound of rocks and their dust shedding skin on the underside of the trailer where the other girls slept. They slept, mumbling inaudibly, occasionally stirring to exhale a muffled cough from their lungs, which where discernibly scarred. They slept. Frail bodies bent across the wooden boards and bleak hay that stifled splinters from the dehydrated floor. The floor seemed to bounce, quaking with desire when wheels of the trailer ducked in and out of valleys in the pavement. In the same, we were thirsty; throats compressing in between breaths. Engaged in keeping my mind awake, my dirty fingernails become integrated with the wooden beads that hung from my sister’s tattered bracelet as our shivers orchestrated a silent rhythm.

 

Sounds of vehicles passing pierced the aluminum that supported my bruised back. The skin of my hands felt raw when combing through my sister’s hair. I no longer knew softness, and the constant dark made me weak. I felt tired, reflecting on the first night when the others gave us the advice which we would follow once they fell asleep.

Remembering, pulses of panic snaked my spine, and cold blood filled the veins in my neck. They said to ration our energy. They said to breathe shallow and slow; words mangled and inattentive. That night I spent, what seemed like, hours focused on counting the lights that wavered from between a small crack separating the back gate and the floor boards.

 

Teeth fixed firmly on the fear that I might grow as weak as the others, I counted until I lost track. I counted to numbers that became incomprehensible. My eyelids fluttered before I found my body being thrown forward from a hard stop; chest first, as if being frayed from my limbs. My stomach intently cradled my defiant bladder, but my frantic urine burned my chaffed legs.

I prayed that the gate would rise and reveal the same sugar cane fields that my sister and I had just been working. Yet, my sister and I shrunk. Retreated in the corner furthest from the gate, we held each other. The others seemed trapped in a sleep so deep that a stop like that didn’t even provoke them; they stayed silent. We waited, unsteady in anxiety. The trailer that imprisoned us cast a thick, sour taste as the air grew increasingly stale. Our tears were stuck, frozen behind tired eyes. Our skin bound collarbones that played catch with ideas of what lie ahead.

 

The engine turned and the pick-up was sharp. We were moving forward, still. Lights gained on the back end of the trailer, flooding through the crack as if to offer some type of resilience to the interned girls in an opaque trailer. But we were moving forward, still. Concentrating, I made myself count the lights. I counted until they started to blend together. I counted until they became too dim to discern from the moon light.

 

My eyes eventually grew too weak for light, so I counted seconds. And I kept counting seconds, because we kept moving forward. My sister’s head rested on my shoulder, heavy. My mind eventually grew too weak for counting, and I found myself swallowing my fear. It was dense and tasted bitter like acceptance. I twitched. Surrounded by thin muscles, encroaching on an empty stomach, my bones ached. I could hear the hum of sleep invading my conscious when I realized I, too, had become weak; the type of bounding weakness that invites acceptance of the dried blood on the inside of your thighs as an embracement of uncertainty. A confinement so fitted that even Death’s ambition becomes inadequate.

Author's Note

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