Sometimes Love: sneak peek

People can only give what they can bear
And sometimes it’s not enough to share

Her head swam sluggishly, euphoria battling with nausea. Until she floated gently to the ground, she hadn’t realized she couldn’t feel… anything. At last the hard ground pressed against her hip, her shoulder, her cheekbone. She was curled up tight in a ball.

She tried to reach out an arm but the leaden limb refused to cooperate.

She tried to stretch out a leg. An avalanche of items rained down around her, bouncing off her bones with dull thuds. Her eyes jolted open. A slit of light illuminated a string mop, a dustpan, and the curved handle of an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner.

 Inch by inch, her fingers scrabbled along the floorboards to push the junk out of the way. There was nowhere for it to go. The walls closed in.

Someone had shoved her in here. A few seconds ago? A few minutes? An hour? A day?

Why had she been so pathetically weak? Why couldn’t she remember anything?

She lay still, swallowing bile, willing herself not to vomit, hoping to reorientate herself.

Shelves of shoeboxes and cleaning supplies crowded the tiny room. She was in a closet. The ceiling sloped sharply. She was in a closet under the stairs in a house…

Dinah’s house.

“Nan?”

Her throat ached in protest at the whispered word. She’d taken to calling Dinah by the same name her little sister used for their grandmother. The grandmother she’d discovered only a few weeks ago. The sister she never knew she had.

Ashanti.

Her sister was here in this house. Or had been. Something terrible was going to happen. Something. She couldn’t remember…

A tea party in Asha’s bedroom, a seven-year-old’s wonderland of fairy lights and paper flowers.

“Big cup for you, little cup for me.” Asha pours lemonade from a china teapot painted with daisies. Her freckled nose wrinkles comically as she takes a sip. She sets down her cup and nibbles on a cookie instead.

She managed to sit up. Her head whacked against a metal shelf bracket, gouging her skull at the temple. Didn’t hurt.

Nothing hurt.

Nothing mattered.

Wet warmth trickled down the side of her face. She sat huddled for a while, arms wrapped around her legs.

Asha mattered. Asha was in danger…

She managed to reach up and grasp the door handle. Twisted it. Rattled it.

Being locked in a small space was nothing new, and yet she’d never thought it would happen again. For over three years, it had never happened again.

The small door was solid, immovable. Panic rose in her chest, shutting off thought and breath. The ghosts of the past flooded the space. She was in danger of floating away. Her brain was barely clicking over.

An involuntary cry of frustration escaped her lungs.

Her little sister needed her. In all the world, she and Asha had no one but three brothers on another continent and a sick elderly grandmother in the hospital. There was nobody to help.

Her fractured mind drifted to another child, to the lesson they’d tried to teach her, but she’d always failed. Then, she’d been nothing. She hadn’t existed. Now, she had a reason to exist. She drew every ray of light into her, feeling herself fill up. The light became a focused thought, the thought became an intention: escape.

Now she just needed a plan.

Mind your step, love. The seventh one is loose.

Sometimes Love is coming soon. Listen to the song (written by Indio):