Pitiless

6. Girl in a Room

6. Girl in a Room

Tiffany laid on her stomach studying the flaking nail polish on her right ring finger.  It was a deep purple, almost a plum.  It was chipping and flaking off, not just on her ring finger, but all eight of them and both thumbs.  She’d just put the polish on a couple of days ago.  It was one of the things that she and Sarah had done together.  Before the van.  But she’d been biting and ripping at her fingernails since she’d been tossed into this room.  Now the sleek polish was chipping and flaking, exposing the pink nails underneath.  She held her right hand palm up with the fingers folded over and studied her four fingernails at one time.  On the index and middle fingers, the two she’d chewed on the most, she had developed hangnails.  Compulsively, she’d taken the shreds of flesh between her teeth and pulled them back, practically flaying the nail beds.  As they’d bled, Tiffany had wiped them on the sheets, licked at the bleeding areas, and blew on them to ease the pain and heat.  Now, as she inspected them, she saw thin reddish brown lines along the nails where the blood had dried.  She put her index finger in her mouth and sucked at it.  She felt like a baby, but was also comforted from the sucking sensation, like a baby.

Her arms and legs were bare.  The only pieces of clothing she had on were a white cotton tank top and a pair of simple cotton panties.  The tank top was more like a man’s tee shirt.  She didn’t have on a bra underneath. She had been so uncomfortable when she awoke and found herself dressed like that.  She’d taken the sheet off of the bed and draped it around her shoulders like a big shawl and searched the room to see if there were peepholes.  There weren’t any peepholes, at least none that she could find.  After a while, she’d gotten over it and had left the sheet on the bed and just padded around in her bare feet and the minimalist clothing. 

The flashbacks to the van, the underpass, the men were vivid. Her head throbbed still from where he’d dragged her by the hair to the van.  She could still see the side door gaping open like the mouth of a cave ready to swallow her down, down, down into a pit of blackness.  And, never far from her mind, were the hands and the mouths and the rest of it.  Tiffany had awakened a few times in the midst of screaming out.  One time, when she awoke in the middle of the night, she realized her pillow was damp where she’d been crying in her sleep.

And then there were other images, like half-memories, that were on edges of her mind.  Grainy moving pictures that were monochromatic like something on an old black-and-white TV that hovered on the periphery of her mind. She’d slept fitfully, awaking as she heard harsh names like ‘bitch’ and ‘whore.’  She wasn’t sure if these grainy images were actual memories or just from nightmares.  But if they were memories, Tiffany would much rather no know that they’d actually happened to her. 

She felt like she’d lost a day or two out of her life. 

As the boredom seeped in, she’d played games in her mind, like “I Spy” with herself.  She did 20 questions, though she knew the answers.  Tiffany tried everything to keep the images at bay that haunted her.  She’d drowsed off at one point. 

Then Tiffany spent time searching, cataloguing in her mind the characteristics of the room.  She lay on a small single bed.  It had a metal headboard and footboard with thin spindles.  The metal was painted white with shades of gray that created a deliberate aging effect.  There were two patches on the headboard that were rubbed down to the bare metal.  In the middle of the bare patches hung two pairs of handcuffs.  One side of the cuffs were locked around the cross-railing of the headboard.  The other side of both cuffs hung loose and gaped open like a broken jaw.  Tiffany was positioned on the bed with her head pointing away from the cuffs, because they were menacing to her.  She ignored the fact that her wrists were sore and bruised, because she was also cuffed in the grainy images that flashed through her head.