CHAPTER SEVEN
Kathleen woke the next morning to the unmistakable aroma of food cooking. Someone was cooking up breakfast just on the other side of the green door. Kathleen could smell the distinct scent of bacon frying. She normally didn’t care much for bacon, but, this morning, the smell of the cured meat was driving her nearly insane with a nearly animalistic craving for the fatty meat. Her mouth was salivating heavily despite being so thirsty. The glands in the back of her throat ached for the taste of food. Her stomach growled hard and emphatically. She was starved. She wanted to eat. She needed to eat. She wondered if perhaps the compassion her kidnapper had shown when she had a fever would continue with an offering of food. Kathleen didn’t have to wait long for the answer. The green door opened. Her kidnapper walked in with a heaping plateful of bacon and scrambled eggs. He walked up to Kathleen’s cage so she could get a good smell of the delectable dish. Kathleen saw that the scrambled eggs were covered with ketchup, just how she liked them. Was it a coincidence her kidnapper had prepared the eggs just like Kathleen prepared hers? No, Kathleen answered herself. How she liked her eggs, how she liked everything in her life, was posted on social media for everyone to see.
“You’re looking better, Princess. You must be feeling better.”
Kathleen nodded her head while keeping her eyes on the plate of food.
“I bet you’re starving.”
Kathleen nodded her head again and swallowed a mouthful of saliva.
“Oh, before I forget, I need those blankets back.”
Kathleen handed her kidnapper the two blankets.
“Now, do you want to eat?”
“Yes, please.”
“Then you know what you have to do. Are you ready to end this?”
Kathleen immediately became disheartened. The kidnapper’s compassion was no more and she realized she wasn’t going to get to eat. She didn’t say a word. She just turned around, walked to the far corner of her cage, and sat down with a resolute look given toward her kidnapper, letting him know she had made her decision.
“Fine. But you can’t go without eating forever. Sooner or later you’ll give me what I want. I’m a patient guy. I can wait for as long as it takes.”
As her kidnapper walked out the green door, Kathleen’s stomach began to cramp violently and growl loudly, protesting her decision not to eat. Kathleen felt nauseated as her stomach screamed at her defiantly. It demanded substance and it was determined to make Kathleen suffer until it got what it wanted. Her stomach churned and convulsed and felt like it had a fire burning out of control inside, but Kathleen refused to let her stomach intimidate her. She was ruler of her own body. She was in control.
It took a few hours, but Kathleen’s stomach eventually settled down, quietly sulking in its defeat. Kathleen looked around her cage, a cage that was seemingly getting smaller. The cage bars were closing in around her. The cage ceiling looked lower than it was the day before. A strong feeling of claustrophobia began to overwhelm her and she had to quickly stand up and start pacing around the inside of her cage. She needed to get out. She needed to run. Run as fast as she could. Run until she couldn’t run any more. She needed to feel a breeze in her face, the sun on her skin. In a desperate and futile attempt, she tried to squeeze her body through the cage bars, but was stopped by her shoulder. The space between the cage bars was just too narrow. She began pacing back and forth again and was suddenly hit with the image of a lion inside his cage she saw at a zoo she had visited years ago. The distressed lion had also been pacing back and forth inside its cage just as Kathleen was doing inside of hers. She now knew exactly what that lion was feeling, what he was longing for…freedom.
A frustration wailed up in Kathleen. A frustration with herself for allowing herself to be locked up like an animal. A frustration with her captor for locking her up. Even a frustration for the abandoned factory for providing a place where her kidnapper could hide her. This inanimate factory seemed to delight in the fact it was chosen to conceal Kathleen’s presence. Its windows watched her day and night like an ever-present sentinel. Its walls surrounded her with a suffocating hold. Its bowed rafters smiled down on her from the ceiling with a sinister grin. Kathleen could taste its smug air on the tip of her tongue. She glared at the green door and her frustration began to boil. She took ahold of the cage bars and began rattling her cage as hard as she could. She then started screaming.
“Let me out of here! Do you hear me? Let me out, now! I want to go home! I just want to go home!” Kathleen slid down the cage bars and onto her knees. She began to cry softly. “I just want to go home. I can’t take this anymore. Just let me go home.”
After Kathleen stopped crying, she began to think about the conversation she had with Josephine. The question of whether Josephine was actually inside Kathleen’s cage, if the young waitress was a ghost or simply a figment of Kathleen’s imagination, wasn’t really the issue. What was plaguing Kathleen, and had been ever since the encounter with Josephine, is that she was now questioning the way she handled people. The way she treated people. She had always felt she was doing a person a favor by pointing out their flaws or their shortcomings, but now she wasn’t so