The Glass

   You are always on the other side of the glass, watching me, watching us. I used to dream that you, the only other person I'd ever seen, would 'save' me. I was wrong. No matter how beautiful, a gilded cage is still a prison.

   Other than you, I have seen only one other person, carried in by two white, bulky monsters. They were screaming for them to let go, for help, to let them go home. They promised they'd be a good girl, just please let them go home.

   She's still here. She no longer speaks.

   I understood the words, this 'home' she spoke of. But I couldn't grasp the idea. What was that 'home' she spoke of? Was where I was my 'home', a room one and half time my width and just shorter than my length, with just enough room to crouch? Is that a home? I wonder. Is a home happy? Or is it sad? I don't know, but that girl never smiled, all she did was cry.

   Could you tell me what a home is? I would like to know. Do you have a home? If you do, please tell me. I've never known what a 'home' is.

   Sometimes I knock on the glass to get your attention and you'd look at me, write a few notes on tablet, look me in the eyes so intensely I would have to turn away. It was always hard to turn away from you; your face so beautiful, burning with a feeling I couldn't understand.

   I want to talk to you but you cannot hear the words coming from my frantically moving lips, lips that cannot move very well with the the string holding them together. Holding them together so I may not speak. 

   You are afraid of me, afraid of what I- what we, every single one of us, can do. We are abnormal, are we not? We can do what you, what every normal person, cannot do. And so your pitiful brains fear us. You may say you do not, but that is a lie. Why hide us, lock us up if you don't fear us?

   What is so wrong with my power? So what if I can understand any language? You misunderstood my power, you thought I could only speak, but I can read. You sewed my lips together out of fear, out of fear of my understanding.

   Why fear me? Why lock me up? I am innocent! What have I done wrong? Nothing! So why, why? Why lock me up? I'll repeat the words of the girl: I promise I'll be good, let me go- I don't want to be here! I want to be free! 

   But I can't be free- I'll never be free. I can feel it as well as the claustrophobia that sets in when lights go dark. There is no escape, there never was, there never will- i know it, you know, staring me down from the other side of the glass. There is no such thing as freedom. We live alone but surrounded on all sides, cramped in a wide open space. 

   Why would you want a room full of broken girls? Are we dolls? Things to play with? To ignore when we aren't interesting enough to keep your sight on us? I want to talk to you- the only person I've ever seen- I want to understand why you're doing this to me, to us. There are so many of us here, locked away, alone... I want to know why you desire a room full of us.

   We will die here, alone in this, shall we call it hell? That's what it seems to be, so why don't we call it that. We will never leave this place, never escape. We will die in these cells, unless you take us from them in order for us to die- I doubt that though. You can feel the oppressed souls of all the girls, you know they will be here until the end of time; the souls of the ones who have already died still linger here.

   Their sadness fills the air and makes it heavy, hear it in the moans of the ventilation system, feel them in the bitter cold of the walls that surround us. You can feel their loneliness in yours when your all alone.

   The fear of abnormality is what brought us here, will keep us here, and bring our lonely deaths upon us. And you have let it happen.

Author's Note

I'm sorry if it seems disjointed or needs a better ending. Tell me if you think it needs something, I might go back and work with it later if I feel it needs something.
Please critique me.

Reviews

[Delmar Cooper]

These two sentences are difficult to understand and would be better rewritten with the pronoun "she."

"They were screaming for them to let go, for help, to let them go home. They promised they'd be a good girl, just please let them go home."

As written it is confusingly plural.

The story is not disjointed but it does require a lot from the reader. The reader must accept unstated, unlabeled situations and self-construct the small world the writer has hinted. Some readers will find this onerous, others will like the challenge.

A further technical difficulty is the narrator's statement that she has only seen the one girl and the observer. That all mouths are sewn shut yet she knows there to be many girls imprisoned here. This impossibility of possessing information ruins the ending. The narrator needs to be shown gaining information before the reader will believe the narrator's conclusions.
I hope this is helpful.