Evening of the Third Day

His hand was wrapped tightly around my neck, nearly breaking it. He stood behind me, an impossible wall, bringing me down to the basement.

The funeral had ended and the crowd dispersed. I said goodbye to my uncle’s house and moved with him “far away to here,” descending down into the lowest depths of reality. Fourteen steps was all that separated me from the world.

My heart lurched with every step down, seeing the damp blotches spreading across the wall’s surface, the green mold peering at me menacingly from the cracks. It was pitch dark and the smell betrayed the slow decay of a place that had died long ago and was decomposing at its leisure. Saqr pressed some switches and the blue lights of the long neon bulbs trembled. There were wires fixed to the wall with tape. The place looked like it had vomited its guts out. The vast desert of what he called my room spread before me, and he gently pushed my shoulder into it, a mouth that opened to swallow me up.

“You’ll live with us from now on,” he said. “You can be my daughter instead of my sister. You’re too young to be my sister anyway. You can be a sister to my children.”

My heart filled with anguish and I closed my eyes. This basement is my room? I’m afraid of basements. We have no choice, he’d said. They didn’t have any extra rooms. There was a spare room on the second floor but he had decided to fill it with sports equipment.

I looked around. The carpet was dark olive; walking on it scratched the soul. On the ceiling above my head, yellow stains spread out over a white wasteland. The air conditioner droned incessantly. He turned it off and five minutes later the room smelt musty. Since it was a basement, there were no windows. The room looked out only onto its own ugliness, and knew nothing of the world other than the musings that sprouted from its dark woods. The air was heavy with the smell of the little white mothballs scattered here and there. This meant I wasn’t alone. I’d entered a utopia of rodents; generations upon generations of cockroaches and mice had established countless civilizations here before I came, with the rapping of my sandals and spasms of fear, crowding in to fight for space.

I would spend seven years of my life in this place. Compared to my pink room at my parents’ house, this basement was a cowshed. I cried for days, hugging a picture of my parents. I wept not just over their death but over the death of the carpet in my room, my little chandelier, the floral wallpaper, of how the room smelled of strawberries, many things. I didn’t know why, having suddenly lost my parents, I had to lose these things too.

“Where are my things?”

“We got rid of some of them,” he said, nodding toward the small pile that remained. Most of them, he meant. I didn’t ask why; I was still afraid of his big belly and red skin. But he was generous enough to explain. He went into great detail, telling me why it is forbidden to buy dolls, because they are images of man that keep the angels away, especially “depraved Barbie” that plants debauched ideas in girls’ minds. Two new concepts entered into my vocabulary: depravity and debauchery.

With the exception of my bedspread and clothes, I wasn’t allowed to hold on to my life. All of the beautiful things departed at once: my mother, my father, my toys and my room, my teddy bear and my big wooden dollhouse. Everything died; everything except me. I was now an orphan, and a pit opened up around me ready to drink from my soul. He said, “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to the place,” and put his hand on my shoulder. His hand was heavy, like the emptiness pulling me under.