Bennie opened her eyes into pitch blackness. The vision was gone. Her mother had vanished. The good feeling had evaporated. She wasn’t sure if she was alive or dead. She felt sick, broken, confused, like she was falling to pieces, her very self shattering and splintering, the center flying apart. There was no sound. The blackness around her was as empty as space. She would have imagined she was floating but for the pain in her body and the stench that brought her back to earth.
She moved her hands, and they hit something hard. She moaned. She was alive and back inside the box. She felt for the wood sides, and they were still there. She was dizzy and faint. Her chest heaved, and a weird sound came out of her, emitted from starved lungs, and she was hiccupping, then spasming until she finally got a breath.
She had to get out of here. She had to save her own life. She slammed the lid with her palm, but it felt different. She raked it with her fingertips and touched something new. There was a ridge in the wood of the lid, that hadn’t been there before.
She ran her index finger along the line, tracing it like a route on a map, her sense of touch more acute because of the dark, the pain in her raw finger making it more sensitive. The lid now had a definite crack, running lengthwise, maybe from the shaking. She started banging on it with all her might, and she didn’t stop, even when the scratching noise started again.