The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Secret Space  
by Elaine Pascale 

The piano in the house reverberates even though no one is playing it. No one can, with the damage it received.

The oven in the house stands tall and proud even though the gas was never reconnected after the storm.

The bed is now blanketed with dust; the dampness replaced by mold, then concealed with detritus.

I know all of this despite not being able to see any of it. It is nature’s way of hiding mistakes and I had played at hiding for far too long.

His bringing me to the house had been a way for me to hide from my public persona—the me I liked the least. It had been a game; the game I played with strangers, the metaphorical dice I rolled when life became too real. Contained in a closet, in a shed, in a box under the bed; I blindly trusted my partner to pick the best spot. I surrendered myself to the blindfolds and handcuffs and chains of men that I did not know and that I would never see again.

It was exhilarating.

He had proudly showed me the house before leading me to the crawl space. I liked that the secret space matched my mental space. The crawl space was dark and confining, exactly what I needed to prevent my mind from running to daily aggravations.

The storm had been projected to pass us by. The risk of the storm added a level of thrill to the game. What if the power goes out? What if the cell towers go down? It would no longer be a game of pretend confinement; it would be the ultimate trap.

The game ended when the storm made a surprise visit over the house. I could hear an emergency warning issuing from a cell phone above me. This was followed by a large crash. The crawl space was littered with tree limbs, dry wall, and heavy beams. They missed me, but they made an exit impossible. The man I had been playing with had either run away or died. I like to assume he died, as no one has come to look for me and he was the only one who knew where I was.

Because I had spent so much of my life hiding; no one will realize I disappeared.

Fiction © Copyright Elaine Pascale
Image courtesy of Pixaby.com

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