I had been almost immediately punished for my curiosity. It is far from the first time. And if I were the betting sort (which truthfully, I am not), I would wager that it won’t be the last. Still, this seems an incommensurate punishment for what I deem to be a not-so-radical inquiry.
“Do you have a tissue I might borrow?” I ask my jailor, then shake my head and smile. “I take that back. What I meant to ask is, do you have a tissue I might have?” I blink at her, sheepishly. “I can’t imagine you’d want it back.”
“It depends on what you’re planning to do with it,” my jailor responds in her usual brand of bone-chilling monotone she’d mastered by the age of sixteen.
“I thought I might wipe my bum with it,” I say with a sly smile. Making jokes is good fun.
Anna, which is my jailor’s God-given Christian name, glances over her left shoulder. “Must you always be so prosaic,” she says with a sigh and rolls her eyes with equally impressive skill. “It’s disgusting,” she adds, scrunching her nose on the ‘gust.’
“I’d argue that it’s not disgusting at all,” I say.
Anna looks at me. Or really, it’s more that she looks through me.
“Poop is very natural. We all do it,” I continue, leaning back into the bean bag as far as the chains will allow. “In fact, African cultures feature the dung beetle in myths of the beginning as the creature able to bring up a piece of primordial earth from the watery abyss,” I say, in an attempt to impress my younger sister with my knowledge. Or, at the very least, my reading comprehension skills. “They carry poop, Anna,” I raise my eyebrows and nod.
“Yeah, thanks, Dr. Science. And they don’t carry it so much as roll it,” she responds in a way that indicates she is not impressed. “And I told you to be quiet. You’re forever prattling on about something… innocuous.” At last, she hands me a tissue. “Asking stupid questions is what got you in this situation in the first place. And I do NOT want to know what you plan to do with that,” she nods toward the tissue.
“Then I won’t tell you.”
Anna has chained me up before. Many times. When I was younger, it was a sort of game. Now it’s always ‘for my own good,’ I’m told. This is the first time it’s for asking a question, however. In the past, it was always the result of my spying on her. She’d had concerns that I would tell our parents about her transgressions; despite my countless proclamations to the contrary. I think the legitimacy of her concern is reasonable. Still, I truly didn’t care that she stole beer from the pharmacy when she was twelve, or that she was having a tryst with her English teacher when she was fourteen. Yes, I did care a little when she tried to set fire to our cat Boo Boo’s tail that same year. That seemed a bit extreme, not to mention foul-smelling. But still, I said nothing. I believe for her, my spying on her was a case of opportunity making importunity. For me, it was just a cure for boredom. Voyeurism is good fun. And I didn’t have a lot of other options. (One could safely argue that I still don’t.)
Anna paces around the room and keeps glancing out the window. I think she might be waiting for someone. It isn’t my parents; this much I know. They aren’t coming back. Mr. Alex made that clear after the “accident.” But for as skilled as I am at reading the written word, I’ve never excelled at reading people. They might as well be books with the pages out of order and occasionally upside-down. As such, I can’t tell if she’s angry, nervous, or excited. It may be none of these.
What I do know is that the chains around my wrists are beginning to cause me distress. I also know that the chains never come off until Anna says they do and to request their removal is futile. So I employ a breathwork technique to help ease the pain. I’m forever grateful that I studied the Upanishads at length that summer while waiting for my broken collarbone to heal. From that text, I grasped the sheer power of breath and this knowledge has come in quite handy. Especially over the past several years. It really is remarkable that we can alter the inherent rhythm of breath as it passes in and out of our lungs. I’m quite taken by the whole affair.
I close my eyes and am just beginning to move rather peacefully in and out with my breath when Anna suddenly nudges me. I open my eyes and she’s standing over me. I’d hoped she was going to unlock the chains, but no such luck. Yellow then red light claws its way along the walls behind her before coming to a halt.
“Stay here,” she whispers.
“I don’t really have an option,” I say, holding up my bound wrists. I laugh. Anna does not.
“Don’t be a smart ass.”
I shrug.
“Listen, I’m gonna go out for a bit,” she says. “I have to go take care of some business.” I want to ask her where she’s going, but my proverbial sixth sense is telling me to keep quiet. (‘Keep your trap shut,’ Uncle Shaun used to say.) She starts to walk away, then stops short of the door and turns to look at me. “Remember that book you read about insects?”
I nod.
“Then you know that sometimes you have to lure insects to pick up your pollen and persuade them to fly the precious cargo where…,” she pauses. “Well, where it needs to go, I guess.” Anna’s eyes are glimmering and her cheeks are flush.
“Oh!” I delight in the reference. “How wonderful! Is that a riddle?”
“Yeah,” she smiles. “Yeah, it’s a riddle. See if you can figure it out,” she says as she shuts the door behind her and locks it from the outside.
How kind of Anna, my jailor, my sister, to leave me with a riddle. Riddles are good fun.
