Comfort Food by Kitty Thomas Page B

something, and it let me know I was still real.
    Not long after that, the door opened. My usual bathing necessities were slipped into the room, along with a tray with bandages and ointment for my hands.
    “Thank you.” I couldn’t stop the words. And somehow I knew any attempts at escape now were just denial and an unwillingness to accept reality.
    I scooted the pail of water, soap, and bandages to the drain and first worked on my hands. I was sobbing by the time I’d finished bandaging. It was like that moment when you know you’re going to die and it’s too late to do anything about it. You just have that sickening knowledge that that’s what’s about to happen, that apprehension.
    I knew what had happened, I just couldn’t stop it. I wouldn’t scream for help; I couldn’t. Not anymore. I couldn’t scream because he was taking such good care of me. He’d gotten me bandages.
    The rest of the day I didn’t make a fuss. I did what I was supposed to do. I ate my chicken soup, and I slept in my corner. I scratched off a day into the concrete behind the toilet and ran my fingers over all the other days I’d spent there.
    I don’t know why I still hid the marks. I knew he watched me and had probably at some point caught me doing it. But he’d ignored it. He didn’t seem to care about my crude calendar. I repeated the date over and over again in my head because it was important for me to know what day I was on.
    When I slept that night I dreamed of the good cell, bubble baths and music, rows and rows of books and CDs, blush pink nail polish, and fuzzy slippers. And I dreamed of him. His eyes boring through me, seeing all my secrets, his hands on my body, and his voice whispering in my ear.
    When I woke up, I was bleeding.

FIVE

    In the master bathroom of what I had come to call the good cell , in the cabinet had been tampons and pads. Both. I hadn’t thought anything about it at the time. If I was going to rebel and potentially fail, I should have thought about it and picked another date.
    Now I was stuck in a bare cell bleeding like a stuck pig. It was disgusting. Still, he didn’t change the routine. Whenever he opened the door I begged him for something. All he had to do was go down the hall to the bathroom and get it, but he didn’t acknowledge my request. Instead, he let me bathe twice a day.
    Finally, I stripped off my clothes and went about the cell naked. I knew he did it just to punish me. Feminine protection in his book was a luxury not a necessity.
    I spent a lot of time in the corner thinking, trying to analyze my captor. I wondered what his background was. Surely he had to understand psychology at least a little to be able to do this. Maybe he was some type of quite literally mad scientist, using me as a study in behavioral conditioning.
    That’s the thing about conditioning. You can know it’s happening all you want; it doesn’t change the results. Eventually you break, reduced to something less than human. I felt like an animal as I crouched in the cell, blood dried on my leg. I felt wild.
    I reacted like an animal. I found I listened for every little sound, watched every movement he made. I read body language and communicated through touch more than I had in my entire life. I spoke to him, mostly when I was scared, begging. But I hadn’t spoken any words of substance in over three weeks.
    He opened the door again and brought in my food. It was the first meal since I’d decided to hell with clothing. I wondered if he would be repulsed by it, if he was the type of man who was deeply disturbed by a woman’s natural cycle. But he seemed neutral on the matter.
    I spoke then, not my normal begging or pleading, but something more meaningful. I wanted to fight this degradation of communication and not forget how to talk.
    “Are you a scientist?” My voice sounded strange to me when it came out at a normal volume and pitch, not through tears or panic.
    He had been on his way out the door when he