Free You Are My Only by Beth Kephart Page A

sour pans, their sheets thrown to the floor, their moaning, a sound like a tunnel through my ears. Days now. Weeks? How long?
    When the tall one smiles, her mouth makes an upside-down U and the blonde beside her smiles, too, except that her smile goes side to side and stops short. “Scoot along, now,” the blonde says, and now she says it again, as if I don’t understand scoot , and they both of them reach in and pinch me up under my arms, scrunch me toward them.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” I demand. “Leave me be!” But they are busy—hauling and pinching and lifting, and the chair rides on the wheels. “Won’t do you any good, this fighting,” the tall one says. My eyes go in and out of blur. My head is dizzy. When I’m into the chair, they turn me, and I am going to be sick, the way I once was sick on the up-down swirl of a merry-go-round.
    I hear the sounds of tossed sheets, and moans. I hear the ricochet of words across this room that is bed after bed after bed, and the milk light is streaming through. It’s the blonde who makes the wheeled chair move beneath me, who takes me bump bump bump over the broken tiles of the floor, my bones breaking all over again at each slam and pop.
    â€œWhere are you taking me?” I ask.
    â€œTo privileges,” the blonde says. As if she says that every day. As if it means something.
    â€œPrivileges?”
    â€œThat’s right?”
    â€œWhat’s privileges look like?”
    â€œA room with a door.”
    â€œWhat kind of room doesn’t have a door?”
    They laugh above my head. Ha, ha. The other one, the bigger one, stops laughing. “You earn your privileges,” she tells me. “You earn them, or you lose them. Privileges is obeying. It is excellent good behavior.”
    Excellent good? What is excellent good? One of the wheels on this chair is a flat squat lump. The chair goes bump bump bump, and my ankle’s angry. The stitch up my arm feels like a lit stick of something. We’re through the door of the long room and out into a hall, and the hall is longer than the long room was and the ceiling is low and the bulbs are orange. On either side of the hall are benches, and from the benches murmurs mist, and down the hall, a thin man with a pail mops dirty water into a corner, smelling like lemon and bleach.
    â€œYou understand, Emmy?” the blonde one asks.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œPrivileges is obeying.”
    â€œMorning, Miss Granger,” the mop man says.
    â€œMorning, Julius,” the tall one with the egg head says.
    â€œMorning, Bettina.”
    â€œThat’s a nice shine you’re putting onto the floor,” Bettina answers.
    The hallway is linoleum, a used-up yellow. The tiles go bump. The women walking or waiting or sleeping on the benches wear their dresses loose at their shoulders, their hair in knots. Now with my good arm and hand I reach up to touch my own, to smooth it down. I wear the same dress as the rest of them. I wear it pale blue and thin, and I wonder where my Levis are, where my comb is, Baby’s sock. “Tell me the what for,” I say.
    â€œExcuse me?” the one called Granger answers.
    â€œWhose rules? What country?”
    â€œYou’ll get the hang of it,” Bettina says, as if I’m to get used to this, like this is not some mistake, as if Baby isn’t out there, waiting for me, trusting me to find her. I feel the swimmy whoosh like the early days of Baby being tucked inside. “I’m going to be sick,” I say. The bad tire goes smack against the upped tile of a linoleum block and my ankle bangs.
    â€œIf you were well,” Granger says, “you wouldn’t be here.”
    â€œI mean it,” I say, but Granger pulls a file from her pocket. Rounds a nail, chews back its flesh.
Sophie

    The moon is shrinking. The stars lie low above the thread of clouds. Cicadas talk in the grass and the crows