Keti took me to her bedroom to change our clothes. In my experience with houses, it seems bedrooms on a multi-level house sit at the top floor, but Keti’s and Brigg’s room was on the ground floor. It was an odd room, to say the least, as a circular central point to the building. The strangest feature was probably the fact that, though there was a door, half the wall could be completely folded like a drawn curtain, gathering the borders of the room into a half-circle encompassing the furniture. Should they choose, their bedroom would be an open space, visible fully from the sunken living room across the grand open spaces of the ground floor. It was some proper high tech, too, because it could be operated by a switch near to the bed. Sometimes the sound of a train rumbling through a tunnel could be heard, and that was simply Brigg exposing his bed to the rest of the house. I’m still not entirely sure of the motivation for that feature, because of course it seems to be something installed to better facilitate orgies, but I witnessed plenty of those in my time at The Glass Hollow, and I can assure you that they rarely involved that bed at all. Everyone usually just fucked on the sofas.

The room wasn’t exposed that day, which wasn’t necessarily better, and Keti told me to wait while she went up to my room—which was on the top floor—and got me some clean clothes. I got snagged again, basically the second she left the room, and was enthralled in the folding cascades of the silky silver sheets on the bed. I was actively taken by it, I wanted to touch it, to run my hands along the peaks and valleys and hear the gentle swish of my hand gliding over the fabric.

I couldn’t have been doing it for very long, because it couldn’t take that long for Keti to get an outfit and come back down the stairs, but even so, Brigg arrived before she did and ruined my concentration with violence.

Up until I was old enough to gain muscle, he always clamped his meaty fist around my upper arm and squeezed hard enough to make my wrist go numb in greeting. At three years old, I believed that his fist was as large as the whole of my being, because if he grabbed my arm, it was my entire arm, and if he pushed me forward, it was my whole body that fell to the ground. Those had been our only interactions as far as I knew, all accompanying the angry sound of his shouting.

That interaction started off the same. I was grabbed, I was shoved, and I was shouted at. He used the new word I had learnt, but with absolutely no mirth behind it. I had gotten mud on my clothes, I’d trailed it into the house on my shoes, and when he found me, I was shedding dried bits of dirt onto his sheets. I only understand now that that’s what he was angry about, because my childhood was never again allowed a sense of earth. Brigg wanted to watch the mud form through his many windows, he didn’t want to ever experience it up close.

I started crying, because I still did foolish things like that when I was three, and I also shouted back at him. It should have been more clear to me throughout my life that I had met him years after my birth, because these early memories I have of him are marked by defiance and confidence. I stood my ground against him, as tiny as that ground may have been, because I’d known a world already in which his word was not law. 

But, the world I’d known before him had been devoured completely by his shadow, and the first true lesson I got that I was no longer on my home planet was when that enormous fist which had grabbed me and pushed me wound back and struck me hard across the face.

It hurt, much more than my knee had hurt in the garden, and it stunned me for full seconds of pause while my existence creaked and reformed to fit in the world Briggham Jones was the king of. I looked up into the haze of his crystalline blue eyes like I was waiting for something more. Did I even know what an apology was back then? Was that what I wanted? Or was I just waiting for him to do it again? I just know that I was searching for something in his glance and the image of his disgust is ingrained in me.

When I started to cry again, he hit me again, like I had activated him again with the sound of my horror. I wasn’t moving my own body at all and yet I was moving vastly throughout the space of that room. He was like a machine, putting into action all of the physical interactions he’d unlocked from the vault for me: grabbing me, shoving me, striking me over and over again, and drenching me in his spit as he shouted in an incoherent language. It was nothing like the rain, it was nothing like falling in the mud.