Free Gretel by Christopher Coleman

her head and muscles, she was eager to get up. Anticipating a rush of pain to her head, Anika lifted herself gently to a sitting position in the bed and pulled the wool blanket off of her lap. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much protest from her body, though her head hurt badly, both inside and on the surface. But Anika was now confident she could get to her feet.
    She swung her legs toward the floor and immediately felt the jolt of resistance on her right foot. Anika shrieked, immediately thinking someone had grabbed her from beneath the bed. But as she looked down to her feet she saw the black oval links running between the wall and the mattress before ending in a thick metal tube around her right ankle. She was chained.
    She kicked her foot once, but there was little slack in the chain, and the effort was feeble. Now in a panic, she quickly cleared the blankets entirely from her legs and grabbed at the metal around her ankle. The clasp itself was fairly loose, but the metal was thick and appeared impenetrable to Anika.
    She followed the chain from her ankle to the balled up quilt that had collected at the wall by her feet. She moved the quilt aside, looking down through the gap between the wall and the bed. There she could see a large metal plate with six thick bolts connecting the chain to the floor. She scooted down toward the foot of the bed, gripped the chain tightly with both hands and pulled up, again having no success as the length of the chain offered little leverage. The cold dark metal in her hand conjured thoughts of slavery and brutality, and only some primal sense of survival kept Anika from screaming again, though it was obviously no secret to her captor where she was being held.
    A rush of pain shot through Anika’s head, and she lay back down, supine, again feeling her wound and the mushy substance that coated it. It then occurred to her that she was indeed being nursed, but she was also a prisoner.
    Suddenly the sounds outside the door—’kitchen sounds’ is how Anika would come to know them—stopped, and Anika could hear the approaching rap of light footsteps followed by the creaking of her door as it opened slowly. The knob on the door rattled as it turned, and when the door finally opened, Anika could see the flat edge of something black and heavy—cast iron perhaps—emerge through the portal, followed by the white deformed hands that gripped either side of the object.
    With only one good eye, Anika first marked the object as some kind of blunt weapon, different than the one that had put her in her current state, but just as medieval and menacing. Her heart began to gallop, and she instinctively got to her knees, raising her arms to shoulder height and width in defense, fingers spread, as if prepared for a Roman wrestling match. And then she began to scream.
    Anika’s one working eye stayed fixed on the shape in the doorway and, as it began to focus, she realized the object being carried was not a weapon after all, but was, in fact, a tray. With food. A large plate of food.
    It was a meal.
    With some effort, Anika forced herself to look up from the tray to the face of the person carrying it, but his head was shrouded in a dark hood that was much too large for the figure underneath. He looked like a monk, she thought, and the slow, silent movements through the room only reinforced the image. Anika could only see the tip of the nose and lips—she couldn’t identify a face—but as she studied the shape in full, there was no doubt about it: the figure in the robe was a woman.
    Anika let out a sigh, if not of relief, at least of the pressure built up in the previous few seconds over the prospect of being raped and tortured. Something bad seemed certain to be looming of course, but at least a sexual assault and murder didn’t seem to be in the cards. At least not for now. Instead, it appeared, she was about to be fed.
    “Where am I?” Anika asked as sternly as possible, “Why am I chained?” She