Glimmer

I’ve been in this cage for 30 days. Or so the strokes on the wall tell me. 30 days of the same dim light. Enough to see by. Enough to cast the same dingy pallor to me, the palette on the floor, the bucket, the stained white walls. I try not to think too hard about the varied streaks and stains, a faded iron red, a deep gouge, a jagged slice. I note but do not delve. I categorize and catalog. The wall, the floor, the ceiling. The window, too high to see out except the thin rectangle of light tucked up away from me. A tease at a life and world outside, beyond, out of my reach. Sometimes sunlight will trickle in to reach the top of the opposite wall. I spent one afternoon balanced on the palate, the overturned latrine bucket, reaching up, fingers outstretched, just trying to touch that brief hint of sunlight. Trying to let some of its golden glow touch me and infuse me with the same lightness, the warmth of touch, like you could almost pretend a hand was caressing you. I couldn’t reach. I fell and slammed against the wall, then smacked into the floor, now covered with my own stinking refuse.  

This is my life. These are my companions. I count, I breathe, I close my eyes and try to imagine myself somewhere, anywhere else. But when my eyes open, they always come back to this same wall, the same streaks and patterns revisited hundreds of times. Always the same.

Yet today, something feels different. When I stare at the wall, at the gouge that runs like a child’s idea of a lightning bolt, two feet from the floor, I see a faint glimmer. I blink my eyes, push at them, but the glimmer stays, intensifies. 

This is no good.

I look around me. Alone as always, drab, gray, washed out. 

I close my eyes and turn away and sleep takes me.

When I wake again, my gaze rushes unconsciously back to the wall. My jaw clenches, teeth grinding into one another. The glimmer, a faint luminous iridescence, ripples, trembling down the wall.

My breath pushes out in a long frustrated sigh and I turn away once more.

She said this would happen. The walls of my mind would begin to bend, to find new doorways, new escapes I didn’t know were possible. I said, “No. Not me.” I would remain firmly grounded. Here. Present. 

And yet here we are.

I resist. Three more cycles — light, dark, awake, not — before I push myself up to standing. The stone feels cold against my bare feet, slick almost. I cross the room until I stand before the ripple. 

It’s as I left it. As though a soap bubble has encased the small crack in the wall. I breathe out and then lift my fingertips. I stretch them out and gingerly tap the surface. A tingle shoots up my arm and I pull back, hissing at the warmth. I cradle my hand in the other and avert my gaze, scared of what I might see. I half expect it to be scorched or blackened, transformed by some nightmarish contortion. I flex my fingers twice and then force myself to look down. 

They’re still just fingers, same as before.

I lift my eyes and hand once more, frowning at the mortar. There’s something about it that pulls me forward, and without thinking, I reach out my thumb and forefinger and pinch at the small gap between the two edges of the gouge. It has a rubbery resistance, as though I’m grabbing at the skin of a half inflated balloon. I rub my fingers together and gasp as I see the wall come towards me, shift and twist with my movement. 

I let go and step back from the wall. 

This cannot be happening. Should not be happening. I will sleep. Sleep will fix whatever is wrong with my brain. And tomorrow I will map every mark and scuff in this cell. I will count as high as I can and then back down again. I will breathe and root my feet on the ground and feel every rise and fall of my chest.

I go back to my palette, lie down and cover my head with my arms.

But when I wake again to the pale strip of light above my head, I do none of those things. Instead, I calmly get to my feet and cross the room. My hand reaches out of its own accord and grasps that persistent glimmer. I pull.

The wall comes towards me, folding in as though nothing more than a thread-worn bed sheet. I scrunch it into a ball in my palm, the stone and mortar rasping against my skin but no more durable than chalk. 

Before me lies the dark corridor. I traveled it only once, on that long walk from the courthouse, to the van, and then through doors and passages of the prison. Then I had an escort. Now I am alone. No one is here. No one is coming. 

The shimmer has expanded. I see it now in the pathway in front of me. 

I drop the wadded up wall of my cell and it clangs, hard, and high, and brittle.

I don’t hesitate now. I reach out and grab the glimmer. I pull and the darkness comes with it, folding again, disappearing into my fist, a scrunched version of reality with no more resistance than a spiderweb. 

I pull again and again until the dark gray confines of mortar are gone and I’m standing in the yard, the wide sky above me, pavement below me, the cool air on my face.

Here I’m not alone.

Guards stand at attention. They are stiff, angry, immovable. They have guns strapped to their backs and batons at their waists. Most days, their gaze goes right through me as though I no longer exist. Sometimes I believe them.

But they see me now. They stare. And I stare back. No longer contained. The walls of my confinement crushed between my fingers.

They shout and pull the guns from their backs, level them at me, confident in the power of pain and violence. 

But they don’t know that they too shimmer.

It is nothing to me to reach out and close my hand around the space they occupy. To crumple them up and toss them over my shoulder. And so I do. I wad them up like a discarded love letter, a first draft. I pull down the fence, the guard tower, and there is nothing holding me in now.

I am loose, but everywhere I look, there are still walls. Buildings, factories, warehouses. Empty, dead boxes blocking out the sky, cramping my lungs, darkening my eyes. 

I need them gone too. It is but a flick of the wrist to erase them, to see what lays beyond. 

I pull down building after building. I go through neighborhoods and towns, consuming, destroying, crumbling them all in my hands, and letting the pieces slip between my fingers like grains of sand. 

I crumple until I find myself in a dense stand of trees. There is dirt under my feet, and the sweet twittering of songbirds around me. I’m alone again. Somewhere new and safe. The broad, open sky sparkles above me. 

No one and nothing can touch me here. I’m free like I never thought I’d be again. 

And yet the iridescence ripples along the tree trunks, rolls over the dry, overgrown meadow grasses. The glimmer pulses against the ground and flitters across the expanse of blue sky. It’s there, taunting me. It wants me to see what’s next, what’s beyond. To pull the world into my fist and cast it away, layer after layer after layer. What lies beyond the blue sky? What lies beneath the earth? And how long will I wait to find out?