By now, her muscles have come near to atrophying. She has no way to tell the time, but it has been what feels like an eternity since her daddy left, and he has yet to return. An eternity that she has spent sitting, staring at the metal door, paralyzed by a fear of moving. Of moving from where her daddy last touched her.

She has grown tired of looking at the door, but a part of her is scared to look elsewhere. If she were to look elsewhere, everything may come crashing down on her frail soul. She doesn’t want to pay attention to the tugging feeling in the pit of her stomach that feverishly begs to be acknowledged. She doesn’t want to think about the cut on her arm, the wound on her finger, the red smudge from the syringe, the dots below her wrist, or her empty room. Her loneliness. The sound of her daddy slamming the door. It is all too much. She is too vulnerable. Too filled with pure, untainted emotion to deal with the circumstances. If she tries to make sense of it all at once, she is afraid that her insides will break. She is afraid to know what it would feel like if that tugging in the pit of her stomach finally got to rip. So instead, she thinks about the bandage and her daddy and how he fixes her and . . . and . . . the green pill!

Ah, yes! The green pill!

The green pill that fixed the banging in her head that once came, maybe even similar to how the creatures bang. The banging that crept into her head so subtly, she could barely sense it coming until it climaxed in her brain. How it kept her from sleep and crunched her thoughts, making her skull feel as though it were shrinking. (Although she knows skulls can’t shrink, bones don’t shrink!)

And the big green pill her daddy handed to her.

In the midst of her pain, she still managed to laugh at him and at that pill. She thought it was so silly. No way a weirdly shaped ball that fit so easily between her teeth could help her. It was so small! What could it possibly do? But he demanded she swallow it. So she did.

It felt like a lump caught in her throat that would never go down. He assured her she would not choke on it, and she struggled to keep from gagging it back up so she wouldn’t upset him. She managed to get it down and keep it down, but it did nothing to fix the banging.

She laughed some more.

“I knew it wouldn’t work, Daddy!” she declared.

“Give it time.”

So she did. She waited. And waited. And he was right.

“What did we learn from this, Vanilla?”

“To never doubt Daddy!”

He always knows how to fix her. How to stop the banging. Does he ever get the banging? Is he ever in pain? If he were, she would fix him. She would be glad to fix him. It would be like magic, doing something herself she never thought possible. But he never needs fixing, at least from what she can tell. There never seems to be a banging in his skull. Never an eruption in his body that makes him curl over in pain. He is always standing tall and proud, filled with invincible power. But she wishes she could fix him all the same, if just to return the favor. Just to show him how much she would do for him.