I try to keep a note for the days passing: Day 1 in the Cream House, Day 11 in the Cream House, Day 21 in the Cream House, Day 33 in the Cream House – but I still cannot put pen to paper, and I’m not sure these are separate days marked by the sinking and rising of the sun. The sky is so overcast it’s hard to tell day from night, and sometimes it feels as if three minutes have passed when it’s been three days, and three nights pass like a shiver of wind through the trees. I can’t tell shadows from bodies, voices from spirits. Mama sits at the end of my bed and tut-tuts in her ineffectual way. She reaches out every so often to brush my hair back off my clammy forehead. Luca’s face becomes an unknown man’s face, me under him, then the man’s face becomes Luca’s, and I want to reach out and smash it.

Sammy seems permanently fevered although her energy is low, her batteries, as she says, in need of charging. She talks of the sea still, but not of the future, even when I try to make her. I can still see a glimpse of it, sometimes, a halo of light above my head. Somebody might push the lid back and see us, somebody might rescue us, someday. I can see that possibility, sometimes, but for Sammy it is too dangerous even to think of. I tell her of my mama, my village, Luca, Maria, the dog, and yet she cannot speak of her home. I think for her the future is tied up with the past. Sometimes, she laughs still: big and hard and empty. She sits in front of the TV, which seems to get louder every day, and waits for the nights to come. I have not heard her sing or dance or curse since before we were forced to watch the disappeared sister and the group of men. She has not tried to run away since the day of her injection. I don’t know if she swallows much of the food she eats; I see her cough it back into a napkin and put it in her pocket. Maybe she flushes it into the sea.

We have not seen the sister since that night. All I could think, as I was watching, was thank God it’s not me. Something bad has taken up space inside me, and I want to turn away from it, and me.