Entwined in This Infinity

25. Teddy Bear - Yew

The room is painted gray and is maddeningly tiny. Walking from wall to wall takes less than eight steps, and the ceiling is so low that it took you weeks to work past the urge to duck your head as you paced.

On the wall you’ve come to think of as the “front” there is a message scrawled in swirling black paint around a childish drawing of a door.

Everything you need to escape is in this room, loser.

It took a few days for that “loser” to sink, to get under your skin. After months locked in here, it’s all you can focus on. It winds and winds and winds around your mind without ceasing like you wind and wind and wind around this room.

Loser.

Whoever did this must have been petty. A lunatic, possibly. A bully of yours almost assuredly. You would like to insult the intelligence of those who bared their teeth and pushed you around, but more than a couple were as intelligent as you, if not more so, though that did not stop them from ridiculing you for your timid demeanor and the manner in which you spoke.

It shouldn’t get to you as much as it does, as the word has rattled around your brain ever since you can remember, but what else is there to do besides dwell?

Escape is futile. The walls are too solid to break through, and there is no magic word to turn the drawn door into a real one. And the prop sitting in the middle of your cage? It’s a mockery.

You have wasted your attention on poking and prodding the stuffed animal for far too long. There’s nothing special about it other than its expensive appearance. A loopy grin, soft fur, a translucent red bow around its neck. It has no use, no point in being there, and you’ve begun to hate it with vehemence. All you can hear from its stitched mouth is loser loser loser.

They put it there to ridicule you further. The poor baby who cuddles stuffed animals at night. The weakling who runs crying to his mother when things get a bit tough.

Well, they’re right.

Your mother is out there mourning – she must be – and your friends . . . they must have caught on you were missing, right? Someone must have pointed it out.

Unless they were the ones to engineer this.

You cry. You collapse to the floor, cradle your head in the crook of your elbow, and sob with all the pathetic energy you can muster. If anyone cared, they would have found you by now. If there was an escape, you would have found it by now.

Blindly, you reach out to grab the stuffed animal and clutch it to your chest. Nemesis or not, it’s what you have. A teddy bear and some cryptic words inside a dreary gray box. You cry, spectators be damned. If they want your weakness, that’s what they’ll get. That’s all you have to give.