Page 75 of Ash and Poison

“Let-let go. I-I won’t talk. Le-let go. I can’t run anymore.” She shuddered. “I CAN’T RUN.” She clawed at her closed eyes as if it would somehow stop the nightmare.

“Listen to me, Millie. Hold my hand, and I’ll get you out of that place. You trust me, right? I’ll keep you safe.”

She looked so young right now… so fragile. Not thirty-two. Like she was still sixteen.

Maybe she never grew out of it.

I gently touched her shoulder, making sure not to startle her, and her eyes fluttered open. The vacant look she gave me made me want to hunt down the man who did this to her, and hang him by his own fucking entrails.

“Millie? Millie. You’re with me. Look. You’re safe.”

She blinked, touching her cheeks wet with tears. She looked confused, staring at her fingers. “Doctor Sharma.”

“Millie,” I said, relieved she was back, and angry he was still out there somewhere, living, while she died in nightmares.

Millie’s kidnapper kept her locked up for three days—the whole town searched for her and didn’t find her. After three days, she somehow escaped, and walked all the way home, her body beaten, and when she finally reached home, her mind broke too.

Millie retreated into a prison she made to protect herself from the horrible memories. She never came out of it.

The PTSD after the incident erased parts of her memory, but she was left with shadows of the horror she couldn’t fully remember, and could never fully escape.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine, Doctor Sharma.”

She was never fine. She’d never be fine.

She was me, and we were all her at some point in our lives.

I wanted to kill him. Not quickly. No. I wanted to hurt him, inch by inch, savoring his suffering. I wanted him to feel her pain, her suffering. And yet, it would never be enough. He’d never understand what it was like to have your soul torn apart while the world carried on, indifferent to your pain.

It was unfair, but fairness was only a myth.

The world had always been stacked against women. Men with feeble egos had spent millennia ensuring we were kept in a cage we barely fit into, to protect their toxic souls, their own insecurities.

Because they believed their dicks made them strong, made them powerful.

But they were never really strong, and their power hinged on our silence, our unwillingness to fight back.

I learned the truth about how truly helpless men were the moment Layne, Trina and I said, Fuck it.

When we fought back, they all cried before they died in the end.

Our foster father snuck into our rooms some nights. He’d run his hands over us as we pretended to sleep. He knew we weren’t asleep, but why would he care?

And, in the morning, our foster mother would tell us it was our fault as she fed us breakfast.

After months of enduring it, I knew we had to stop being afraid, stop begging for a moment of kindness, of relief, a moment of sleep that wasn’t haunted.

We knew it wouldn’t come unless we fought back.

“Kill him,” I whispered. “We must kill him.”

Trina was crying. She was still too young, and we had to protect her.

“If we don’t… he’d do the same to her,” I said to Layne.

Layne nodded, her eyes determined, and in that moment, she looked older. We all looked older.