out at night, they’d put me in solitary.
I didn’t owe this strange man—Cypress—any explanation, but the words conjured on my tongue against my will. Was he a witch? Did he have the ability to pull the truth out of me? “I wanted to touch the moon,” I sang in a dreamy voice before slapping my hand over my mouth and staring at him incredulously. Truth conjurer. I’d only heard of them, never seen them in person much less met one. “What do you want?” I asked with a cough.
Cypress looked me up and down as if trying to understand me. I waited with my breath trapped in my chest for his answer. “Go back to your cell. Tonight, you’re getting out of here with me. I have to wait until the witching hour to perform the spells. Don’t do anything stupid. I’d hate to have to knock you out, Princess.”
Princess? That didn’t sound like a compliment coming from his mouth. His threat stuck out in my mind as my mouth worked to form another question. But as quickly as he’d arrived, he vanished. My arm burned where he’d held me still, the only indication he’d been there at all and that I hadn’t made him up. As I oriented myself and processed what had just happened, my chest tightened. I stood there completely dumbfounded. I began my night risking my life for thirty minutes of freedom, and now a strange man offered me an eternity of it. Could I trust him? My throat closed up from the panic.
That internal clock I’d come to rely on ticked by without rhyme or reason, and I cursed this Cypress person for ruining my rhythm. I wasn’t sure how much time I had left or if I could even make it back to my cell before the next guard shift change. My breathing continued to constrict from the stress of it all as if barbed wire was wrapped around my chest. I couldn’t walk to the bathhouses, even if I wanted to, in this condition. “Fuck,” I rasped before scurrying back to my cell. The moment after I slammed the barred cell door and turned the lock, I collapsed on my ass in the middle of my concrete bedroom.
Tears filled my eyes as I looked around the windowless tomb. One of the guards had once taken pity on me and given me some charcoal to color on the walls. I’d never seen a flower but had heard about them from a fairy that was locked up for stealing. I tried to imitate the stemmed beauty she described on my four corners of concrete. Roses, daffodils, and lilies covered every inch of space, making my home feel a little less dismal—a little less hopeless. I stared at the sketched hope while trying to calm my breathing. In and out. In and out. I held the stale oxygen in my chest before blowing at the dust collecting on the floor.
Part of me wanted to worry about the strange man who grabbed me in the hallway. He’d said so many things I didn’t understand. I wasn’t naive. I knew most of the people lurking around Nightmare Penitentiary were dangerous. Just because I was kept away from the hardened criminals didn’t mean that some of that evil didn’t spill over into my ward. But he said my parents had sent him.
I had parents.
Logically, I knew I had parents. I didn’t just appear out of thin air. I had many theories on the subject. Sometimes I wondered if I was a forgotten byproduct of one of the prisoners here. I spent most of my childhood sneaking into other layers of Nightmare, seeking out a woman with green hair like mine and blue eyes the color of pixie dust. There was a tiny mirror at the bathhouse, and sometimes I’d stare at it and mouth I love you, pretending it was her speaking to me. I daydreamed possibilities that felt out of reach like she wanted to know me just as much as I wanted to know her. I pretended this was all just a misunderstanding. And as more time passed, darker thoughts crept in. What if they were dead? What if they didn’t want me? What if the only crime I’d ever committed was that of existing?
As I got older, they assigned more guards to watch over me. My freedom felt like ropes wrapped around my throat. The older I got, the tighter they pulled. Pretty soon there would