“Shut up, please.” I turned on my side and toward what I knew was the wall only because my fingers had traced it so many times. My breath was sour in that space. I used a ragged nail to scratch plaque off my fuzzy teeth.

“A tooth is not a bone. Did you know that?”

I paused, hand near my mouth. Could she see me in here? I pulled my knees up toward my chest. No. No one could see anything in here. And she wasn’t real, I reminded myself. “You’re not real.” I said it out loud so the facts would stay straight.

I opened my eyes, slow and without hope, and besides the physical push of air against eyeball, there was no change in sight.

“A tooth can’t be a bone. It’s just a sharp thing that tears and rips. Because it has no marrow.”

“Neither do you.” It came out weepy, wavering under another surge of panic. I tried to breathe through it. “Your marrow is gone, s’been sucked out. So all you can do now is rip me to bits.”

Tinny laughter from the corner of the room. I stood up and paced. It kept my mind off the hunger. I had water from the sink and a toilet, but so far, there’d been no food. It was getting desperate. The last time I’d bitten a broken fingernail off, instead of spitting, I’d swallowed it.

“Hey, Ma, you got any grub up there in my head?” I laughed at my own joke. There was no answer, which was even funnier to me. I laughed until tears squeezed down my cheeks, until there were no sounds coming out, until I had to hold my sides to keep from busting wide open.

I was losing my damn mind. And then it hit me: the only people I knew who couldn’t control themselves, who did things like scream at nothing and have conversations with the dead as if they were sitting beside them, were the ones who couldn’t dream. I tried to remember the last time I’d had a dream, but everything was one continuous sigh in the dark. Then I remembered waking up in the bed, getting my head shaved, the man in white writing on the clipboard, the man hanging that bag, tubes going into my arm. Maybe the liquid wasn’t going in…maybe it was being sucked out…

“They took it.” I was sure of it. They’d taken my marrow. And without my marrow, how could I dream? That’s where they said it was hidden, in our bones, like sleepy bees in a hive. “I’m empty.”

I had to go, one way or the other. I had to get out. I searched the room again, looking for anything loose or sharp—a broken brick, a bed spring, a cup I could smash into a cutting edge. All the while, the tears I’d laughed loose kept falling. I would get out of here, even if it meant leaving in a body bag.