4. Why The Caged Bird Sings
986 Words
Why The Caged Bird Sings
DANI
Another sleepless night.
My brain, seemingly a part of life’s plot to torture me, threw curve balls my way while I tried to sleep. During the night—all night—I dreamed of men… and not in the way that any normal, mentally stable woman could even imagine…
These men… they were not dreamboats, but angry strangers with permanent scowls for faces. Hunters. Hungry for their next prey. Unfortunately, the prey they’d picked this time just so happened to be me… The exit from the fancy party had turned into a nightmare.
Through the sidewalks of unknown streets, they tracked me, chasing me past thick crowds of people in a city that I couldn’t even recognize. I tried to lose them in a throng of faces I’d never seen, places I’d never traveled, hoping I could blend in with this symphony of anonymity playing everywhere, all around me, in the background.
Where was I? Who was I? And why would no one help? Could they not see these hunters? Could they not see me?
A cloudy sky turns the faces around me into shadows. A subsequent rain changes them into blurs. And I keep on running… Ten feet. Twenty feet. A hundred. And still the rain, the raging crowd and the persistent hunters will not let up. I beat my feet against the pavement until I can’t beat them any more. Limbs useless, lungs on fire, I inhale breaths that seem soaked in gasoline. No one out of the crowd really notices me. No one—not a single person. A sea of people… and no one willing to save me. Then, out of the swarm, he emerges like a tidal wave amidst a calm ocean, splitting the multitude into two.
Bishop.
Out of thin air, he arrives when all hope seems lost. Looking Hell-sent. Lucifer in the package of a Greek god. A fallen angel in an impeccable suit. He is every bit as diabolically handsome in my nightmare as he is everywhere else. And he is rushing towards me in a tie and jacket blacker than midnight air, his countenance darker than any hero’s should be.
And yet I crave him. I am desperate for his touch, for his comfort, but he is too far. So far. I reach my hand out for him and feel nothing but air. My savior… too far to save me from the trailing men. And I can’t spare a breath to call out to him. But he sees me. He waves. His eyes, wild and searching, meet with mine, and he heads in my direction, his arm raised in some sort of greeting. Maybe he’s pointing…? I’m not sure… and I don’t care. I just run for him. I run to him. I am too relieved to even notice that his “greeting”… is nothing more than another threat. Because I am not being embraced by Bishop.
I am being trapped by him.
He isn’t waving a hand at me. He isn’t waving to me at all. He’s raising his hand to point. With eyes the color of fossilized amber (and just as hard), he holds his muscular arm above the bridge of his nose, pointing a gun—muted silver and black—right at my head. Right at me. And then without hesitation, without an ounce of empathy in his eyes, he shoots. And I don’t even blink. Somehow, I want to watch it happen. I want to capture every moment…
But I can’t…. because the sound of the shot shatters the thin veneer of my dream world, and I wake up in a panicked sweat, reaching out with one hand on the couch for God-knows-what and raising the other hand to strike.
Bishop’s curiosity about my faith in him wasn’t too far off base. Even my subconscious doesn’t know if it trusts him. And my mind has nowhere to go but into panic. What’s even worse is that there’s no TV, no books, no entertainment in the loft. There’s one phone line, no laptops and if there’s WiFi, it’s no use because I can’t find any electronic devices. This whole place is like a pre-historic museum. And no books?!? How the hell doesn’t he have any books?
Locked up like a prisoner, caged like a bird, I start to get restless by midday. Showered, teeth scrubbed, I wander back into the bedroom through the upstairs bath.
I get dressed, putting on real clothes, for the first time in two days. I begin to rifle through the rest of the bedroom dresser drawers, looking for insight into my life. And that’s when I hit pay dirt.
A little black book.
The instant I pick it up, I know exactly what it is. Couldn’t remember my middle name if you told it to me, but for some reason, the little notebook holds memory. It’s old, yellowed along the edges. The cover is pure black leather, and the pages have been roughly dog-eared. Some are ripped. I open the first page… and look at the first name in Bishop’s ancient little phone book. I read the text, thinking…
What an odd first name.
I place my index finger under the first line of the notebook and recite it to myself again. It’s been crossed out, re-written so many times that I can barely read it, but the phone number to its right is fully in tact. The handwriting is illegible, notwithstanding the fact that the script is actually really beautiful.
It’s just that these markings get in the way. Angry strikethroughs have been made to the name on the page, creating indentations, and I can tell that Bishop has raged against this person, this someone in the phone book, in his mind. I learn the person’s number just by reading it. I commit it to memory, feeling relieved to be able to commit anything to memory at all.
It’s the first new thing I’ve learned as the new me, and I say it out loud.
Ace Delaney
Phone number: (212) 555-1214
- Writer
