2025 Golden Ox Awards: 2nd Place
I’ve been trapped in this place for longer than I can remember. My sneakers walk a strange hallway, rubbing the carpet raw. At first, my body burned from the exercise, but now I’ve become used to the pain, which I’ve always known to be an accumulation.
The hallway jackknifes, dark and light in turn. A sign on the wall reads come and get it.
Texas? I think. In my mouth, it tastes like home, that familiar inhale and exhale.
I hate you the same as I love you.
Something comes to me, then escapes my brain’s grasping fists.
***
Before I was here, I lived in a barely converted garage, hiding under the bedcovers, mostly from the children who banged on the metal door with childlike glee and menace. Technology made it possible to stay mostly inside, where it was dark and warm, like the pocket of someone you love. Sometimes my phone buzzed, but mostly, it didn’t.
***
Up and down the hallway I walk. Other than the sign, there’s nothing to look at, just blank walls and rectangles where windows should be, light coming through the ceiling in some manufactured and unrecognizable manner. Where am I? I think. What is this place?
Sometimes it’s a question, other times a sob or a scream.
Every time I try to approach the sign, I find myself walking down the hallway in the opposite direction.
So I walk. I try to remember.
Come and get it.
What is it? And why don’t I already know?
***
I’d like to leave this place, only I can’t find the way out. I hope it’s one of those situations where if you stop looking for the thing, it finds you. But exits are rarely like that.
***
All I remember of my childhood: blankets warm from the dryer, a garnet necklace hanging from a rearview mirror, a hole in the bathroom door.
***
Something opens beneath my feet and then I’m falling. Before I know to be scared, I’m relieved to go somewhere other than here.
My body spears through a wooden floor, dust spewing. For a moment I feel the pain but then I’m back to feeling nothing at all, my body framed by the space it made through something seemingly impermeable.
I don’t know what contains me, but I can’t get free.
Let me go back, I tell the gods of this place. I’ll take pacing over this. Anything over this. I just don’t want to see it coming and do nothing.
Nobody answers, but a question fills the nothingness.
This too is a windowless room, but it’s not lightless: across from me, a TV blinks.
The TV makes me want to remember.
Look at me, it seems to say. Don’t I remind you of something?
A series of pixels creates a looped scene—two young men in military uniforms climbing a set of stairs and shaking another man’s hand—this one on a podium. The military men remove their hats, place them over their chests, and bow their heads. The podium man reaches for something off camera.
***
A woman’s voice speaks from the shadows, voice dim.
“If you want to get anywhere in here, you’ll need to use this,” she says. It’s obvious she means the TV but in what capacity, I have no idea.
“You can use this to travel through this place,” she says.
“I don’t want to go through it,” I say. “I want to get out of it.”
“What’s the difference?” she asks. She doesn’t offer to help me out of the hole I’m stuck in and send me on my way herself. Instead, I see a long finger emerge from the dark, directing my attention back to the TV.
“You’ll see,” she says. “But you should hurry.”
Then she’s gone. A noise sounds in the distance. Something is on its way. I can’t see it, but the fear gathering low in my belly confirms I don’t want to wait around to find out the details. Man or monster? I ask myself, knowing which I’d prefer.
I lock my gaze on the TV. The men bow, respectful before the podium man.
Soon, they begin to climb the stairs again.
How horrible, I think, to be doomed to seek recognition and gratitude only to be denied it?
Footsteps thud beyond the outlines of a door. The fear is the worst kind of pain.
I know he saw my footprints, how long I walked only I never made it anywhere I hadn’t already been. Something is pushing through my chest, wrenching me open.
Father or stranger?
The image on the TV shifts. Wheat shakes in the wind, reminding me of an angry summer storm, except the skies are clear.
Before I was here, I used to love the feeling before a storm, the air growing warm and heavy with the expectation of violence. Nature’s wrath, they sometimes called it. But nature knew no anger, only destruction that sometimes broke apart and sometimes cleansed.
The door rattles.
I watch the waving wheat, trying to empty my mind, the slivers of movement that make up some wild unpredictable thing.
If you always feel large, you’ll never know what it’s like to feel small.
It’s important to know how it feels to be small.
My mother’s voice.
The sky’s blue stings but I continue to stare at the TV as the door opens. I don’t turn to see what fills the doorframe. In the back of my mind, a question: what if I have to look at the thing I can’t bear to see?
Then I’m reeling backwards, into some gap between this reality and another, the space warm and dizzying and encompassing all at once. As it sweeps me under, I remember something else: my hands gripping the cool metal chain of a swing set, the juice of a purple popsicle dripping down my arm, my father’s ringed fist shooting for my face, out for blood.
Amanda Hays Blasko’s work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including storySouth, Little Patuxent Review, The Tahoma Literary Review and West Trade Review. Find her at amandahaysblasko.com