BETH and Violet stirred as we entered our fourth period of light.
It passed through a crack in the stone and slanted through darkness-a dusty shaft of daylight come to illuminate our miserable faces for an hour.
We sat across from one another in a cold stone room, our wrists manacled and chained to an iron D-ring, bolted to the rocky floor between our feet.
A doorway opened into a dark corridor, through which spilled the disconcerting sounds of hammering and drilling that had been ongoing without respite for what seemed like days.
I raised my head.
In the twilight I could see that the women were also conscious.
A stream of water trickled down the stone beside Violet.
Two roaches crawled through the oval patch of daylight at my feet.
A strained and hopeless silence bore down upon us.
Beth wept softly as she always did when the light appeared.
Violet sat stoical, a line of dried blood streaked from her scalp across the left side of her face.
There was nothing any of us could say.
We just stared at each other, three souls in hell, waiting for the darkness to come again.