Content warning: violence.
My whole life, I've been coming back to this room. I DON'T WANT TO BE HERE, I don't want to be here. I lie down and sniff the floor that was my home, the piss in a pool again, someone else's but the memory is unmistakable and I shiver. My own smells embedded in the walls, I remember the electric socket, blood leaking with surprising speed from my ears and my thighs, crawling and wondering if I will lose that eye. "Bitch," I remember and bits of me staining the walls, and the oblong object that I will not
I will not further describe
HELP ME I remember saying calling on the walls, the chair, the door, the people hidden in whatever rooms must have been stacked on top of us and beneath us. Unexpectedly, the walls helped me, they supported me when I could not support myself. I could clutch them and it was as though they were saying to me that there was no requirement even here except to be. They sustained me when I was cold from being drenched in my own mess and they nourished me keeping my spirit tethered to my shell and they kept me alive
I remember being so thirsty I would do anything, sand in my mouth, I was dryness itself I was dirty dull dryness and they brought me a woman from the next room she was covered in scabs and they wanted us to hurt each other
I would not do it of my own
volition but
they wrapped my hand around a knife and with their enormous hands on top of mine they forced it into her side
but she looked at me and her eyes said Bless you
and my eyes said Bless you My Beautiful Sister
and I knew she wanted everything good for me and they'd cut her in the belly
her teeth were out of her mouth knocked on the ground
but she was upholding me her fellow
person
and I gave her my love all the warmth I had my sense of how precious she was
and that is all that one person can give to another
Author's note: This entire piece, but especially the encounter between the two women, was inspired by Sister Dianna Ortiz's memoir, The Blindfold's Eyes. She was an American nun who was tortured in the 1990s by the military in Guatemala, for teaching Maya children to read. She later founded Torture Abolition And Survivors Support Coalition International.
But I also wrote it in response to the photograph above by Margot Kingon for a 2023 event in Wappingers Falls, New York called Twice Told Tales, where 12 writers read work inspired by six photographs by Kingon. Thanks to Margot and to Linda Pratt Kimmel for organizing!