Rona Vaselaar

I scrambled to my feet, swinging the backpack onto my back, leaving the flashlight – which had turned back on – in the dirt. I lunged for the rope and pulled myself up with a strength I didn’t know I had. A few moments later, I was out of the chicken coop, gulping in gallons of fresh air.

I saw the hole in the floor. I got closer and realized that there was a door in the floor, with a ladder leading down underneath the locker rooms. I tried to shrug it off, thinking that it probably just led to some electrical shit. But this weird feeling was nagging at me.

“I don’t like this box. It’s pink and it’s creepy.” She held it up in her left hand, her right poking at the ballerina on top. “And why is she so SKINNY?” she huffed. “She looks dead!”

My breath hitched in my throat because somewhere in the back of my mind I had seen enough to know what it was. But the rest of me was still clueless. Fighting this internal battle, I turned slowly towards the table.

Out of the thirty-two pictures in the album, we identified twenty of them. All of them infants, all of them dying within a few months of being born. We might have been able to identify more, I suspect, but some of the stones were so old that the inscriptions had been rubbed away and were unreadable.

Pain is a very strange thing. It can sharpen your senses, make the world seem clearer, if applied in the right dosage. But if there’s too much, then it begins to blur everything and you find that your world no longer makes sense. That was how the world seemed to me, a soupy mess of nonsense. There was pain, of course, thick and ever-present. But I couldn’t tell where it began or where it ended.

I’ve never much liked psychologists.

And those eyes – oh, God, those eyes.

I took a deep breath before I spoke, praying that this would work, please, God, let this work.

It’s been a while. I don’t know if anyone can read this. It’s my most desperate hope that this somehow finds its way online – and that someone can save me from reality, because reality has become too heinous to bear.

At seemingly random times, I would become completely catatonic. Someone would call my name and I wouldn’t respond. I wouldn’t blink. I wouldn’t move. Sometimes, it was even hard to tell if I was breathing or not.

I liked Ben, I really did. I mean, he was a nice guy. We had some fun times together in college, messing around the dorm, going to parties, all the dumb shit that college guys do. He was cool and all, but he was a little… pretentious. Well, I guess the word he used was “artistic.”

With time, I forgot the nightmare. Or, rather, stopped thinking about it. I don’t think I can ever forget a sight that awful, but the image dulled over time. But that coldness always stayed imprinted on my mind. The farm was never a warm place again for me.

When I grew up, all I knew about my birth family came to me in the form of a small box.

“Hey, Charlie, how about we play hide ‘n’ seek? I’ll even count first.”

It was a high whistling sound, somehow human, somehow tragic. You could hear the pain in the voice, a dreadful melancholy punctured through with agony. It was the sound of someone wailing for something long since lost, but never forgotten. Unable to be forgotten.

When was the last time you locked your car?

It’s funny that I didn’t notice it sooner.