Every Day: Part III

He tucked the skeleton key safely back into his inside pocket and made his way across the main hall. The sound of screeching nails rang through the prison yet again. He watched as the table appeared in the center of the hall. He could hear the prisoners coming. He reached out and plucked a grape from one of the grape-filled vines. Upon hitting his tongue the grape dissolved into nothingness. Feeling a strange sense of partial satisfaction in achieving what no prisoner had managed to do—getting the food to his mouth—he sat at the head of the table.

He watched again, as he did every night, as the prisoners fought over the food that they could not eat. He watched the pushing and the shoving with a feeling of detachment. One by one each of the prisoners gave up as they did every night. The chain reappeared around their ankles and he guided them back to their cells, locking each one inside with the same skeleton key. He finished locking everyone up and began his way back to the main hall. He paused outside the skeleton’s cell. It was curled in the corner weeping.

He continued to the main hall.

Reaching his hidden room at last, he removes his cloak and fell to his knees. The weight of human tire seemed to drag on him as he fought the urge to close his eyes. It was that figure. The figure would haunt him whenever he became so tired that he closed his eyes. The moment his consciousness began to slip, the figure would appear. That figure was one of the only things, if not the only thing that he truly feared. She had done something terrible. What she had done was unknown to him—he did not actually know the reason explaining why anyone was locked in the dark—but it was terrible. She would lie in the corner of her cell, moaning, almost weeping, her knees pulled up to her chin. Every time he passed her cell she would scream and leap at him, clawing at him through the bars. It did not take long for him to realize that he should never, under any circumstance, release her from her cell. It made no difference, however. She was the only prisoner ever to have escaped from her cell.