Folio Two, Page Four (svegra mos dros)
The next morning, I awoke in a cupboard with prickly rope tied around my hands and feet. My sweaty fingers writhed. I beat my back against the door.
This new situation baffled me. Legal isolation capsules needed cushioning, and most contained view screens that played soothing beach noises or images of smiling people who could behave appropriately. My cousin had left me with nothing. Instead, the closet smelled like the pheromone perfume she wore. I suspected that she had confined me in the one where she kept her blankets.
Locks in old houses usually have tricks. As the smallest seven-year-old girl in my school heat, I had explored many small cavities in a myriad of settings, perhaps to prove that I had a personality. “The shadow girl can turn herself into smoke and pour through locks,” I whispered, shifting my body around so my fingertips rested against the cupboard's floor. “She is a ghost, a namgisjata, and she sends her fingernails out into the night to devour the ancestral shrines' milk, to make the household dead ...”
At that point, I had successfully lifted the door so my thin fingers could fit underneath. My family's cupboards required lifting and jiggling to loosen the locking mechanism, followed by a quick pull—breaking out of a cupboard would require a thrust. The lock clicked and whined. I stopped moving.
My cousin had replaced our metal locks with the new voice-activated safety ones and I hadn't even noticed.
Most adults don't read the operating manuals for the voice-, fingerprint-, or fingerprick-activated locking mechanisms on the market. Thieves and seven-year-old troublemakers do. While uncertain which model my cousin had chosen, pressing the inside of the lock and crying for help would automatically release the door and send a ping to the local police station. Pressing my head against the inside of the lock, I yelled in Narahji, and when that didn't work I tried again using my rough Tveshi. It opened and I looked down at my second problem.
The distance from a standard blanket cupboard to the floor is as towering as an average seven-year-old, or high enough to make a much-smaller-than-average girl somewhat apprehensive. Most home storage models use the lower space as a small wardrobe intended for hanging things like gyenya, monsoon ponchos, and winter jackets. With my wrists and ankles securely bound to prevent movement, landing on my cousin's beautiful tile floor could easily have given me a fractured skull, but children who don't take risks never develop personalities or do worthwhile things with their lives.
When I hit the floor, I couldn't breathe. I tried to scream, but my lungs wouldn't expand and each inhalation hurt. Still, I pulled myself up and snaked along the ground, feeling the tingle where a bright bruise would make its way across my back and right arms only a few hours later. My vision swirled.
Distant sirens broke through the house's thin silence. Unless a miracle happened, the police would reach me before I unbound myself.
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