Free In the Red by Elena Mauli Shapiro

cat’s eye. Put in some deed to a new property. Count flawless, investment-quality diamonds in a little velvet pouch pulled from the bottom of the box, under all the other priceless gems you keep in there. Look over documents certifying, after extensive genetic testing, that you are the true heir of the Romanov dynasty, and fantasize about the revolution that will put you back in power.
    This is what Irina thinks you might be doing in there, as she mills around outside the stall waiting for you to come out with your mysterious box closed again, ready to slide it back into the wall. But today, while she waits, she is not listening to the shuffle of your unseen papers. She is not thinking of you or your box. There is another box. She follows the numbers along the wall to find it. Here it is: 21012. It is one of the big ones along the bottom. When someone pulls one of those out of the wall, it is sometimes heavy enough that Irina has to help the customer carry it into the stall. A blank innocuous little metal door among thousands of blank innocuous little metal doors, snug between 21011 and 21013. If Irina opened it, would it give her the explanation she is looking for? What explanation is she looking for, anyway?
    They haven’t come for her. Fine. But how is it possible that they haven’t come for the contents of this box?
    She can hear you closing your lid. You will be out soon. Certainly, if you knew what she is thinking, you would tell her to stop running her finger along the smooth edge of the little metal door while smiling sadly to herself. Be reasonable, you would say. That box is not rightfully hers to open. It doesn’t belong to her. It would be better for her to throw away the key.
    It’s not so much that she is suffering terribly; it’s that she is waiting. Waiting in the same way that an elderly patient on a morphine drip waits in his hospital bed: too much pain, time to go. Waiting for it to come get her, the queasy suspicion growing that it will not, that she is the one who is supposed to let go and surrender to her own death.
    Of course they won’t come. All this waiting around is stupid. It’s pure masochism. She should throw that damn key away and forget the whole thing, or she should open the box and take whatever is inside. Instead, she indulges her slow decay.
    After Andrei sent her away, she started to lose her hair. She did not even notice until the day the barrette she used to clip it into a ponytail every morning slipped right off because there was no longer enough hair to hold it there. The jarring, tinny sound of it hitting the tile—only then did she truly see the serpentine black strands circling the drain in the shower all this time. All those mornings she had glanced over them without understanding what was happening. She is not in her body. When Andrei withdrew, he must have taken her away with him.
    Will her hair come back? Will she?
    Irina doesn’t believe her identification papers when they say she is young. And yet when she looks in the mirror, she sees a smooth jaw, an unlined eye. Her face does not match the leaden weight of the sluggish blood stagnating in her veins.
    Before she met Andrei, she suffered from a peculiar kind of female amnesia. She would come home from class bone tired. So weary, in fact, that her eyes were closing of their own accord before she could get through dinner. She would make her way to bed in underwater slow motion, sometimes falling asleep still fully clothed. The sleep was a hood pulled over her mind. When she woke up soaked in clammy sweat, she could not remember what nightmare had shocked her eyes open in the darkness.
    This would happen for two, sometimes three nights in a row. She’d puzzle over herself, wondering if she was getting sick, and then in the morning her breasts would be hot, sore, heavy. Some small punishing monster roiled in the pit of her belly. It paced its tender chamber and tore down the wallpaper.