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my flesh. But then a strange thing happened. Realizing that my struggles were fruitless, I’d surrendered and simply gone to sleep. I remember thinking of this as an actual solution, that if I could somehow will myself into unconsciousness, then perhaps what was happening would cease by virtue of my not, in a sense, being there to witness it. While I didn’t recall putting that plan into effect, I must have, because here I was, awake again, my ordeal apparently over.
    Gradually I became aware of two things: time had passed, and I was alone. The sliver of light was now gone, from which I deduced that night had fallen and, from the complete silence outside the trunk, that my captors had vanished. Instead of being terrified anew, I felt an exhausted, inexplicable, yet very real sense of well-being. Through some act of will, it seemed I’d made my tormentors, their laughter, the ripping of the saw, all of it, disappear. But if true, this begged an important question. If I’d banished the boys by falling asleep, would I now bring them back into existence by awaking? Would the whole process start over again? Somehow I thought not, and just lay there quietly, sleepily content for each moment to pass without additional terror. True, I was curious how much time had elapsed and whether my mother and father were out searching for me. These considerations seemed remote, though. I was locked in a dark trunk, and it was possible, even likely, that I’d never be released, which should have terrified me but didn’t. Rather, it seemed I’d simply entered a new, quite natural phase of my life inside the trunk, breathing the heady mixture of stale air and urine, some of which I understood to be my own, where I would await further developments. About these I felt more curiosity than fear, as if I’d already expended my entire store of the latter emotion.
    I may even have drifted back to sleep, because when my eyes opened again, I heard singing, first far off, then nearer, and I remember not wanting the singers—for there seemed to be two voices, a man’s and a woman’s—to find me. Then, when their voices suddenly got louder, I realized they must have entered the covered structure.
    The woman was laughing now, and there was a slapping sound. “Stop, stop, stop!” she urged her companion. “You don’t know the fucking words.”
    “I know the words,” the man said, then started up again.
    Another slap. “Stop! You don’t know—”
    “Here’s one thing I
do
know,” the man said. “You hit me one more time and I’m going to knock you right on your ass.”
    “You wouldn’t hit a lady.”
    “I don’t know why you’d think that,” the man replied. “I really do not.”
    “Give me.”
    A pause. “It’s gone.”
    Some scuffling, and then the woman’s voice, rich with disappointment. “It’s all gone,” she said.
    “The fuck did I just tell you?”
    Then the sound of glass breaking somewhere on the rocks below.
    “You don’t know the words,” the woman repeated.
    “Jesus. This again.”
    “It goes like this,” she said, clearing her throat. She sang in a surprisingly pretty voice: “Then I kiss…your lips…and caress your waiting fingertips…and your heart—”
    “And I kiss…your tits,” the man warbled, “and caress your nipples with my lips—”
    “No! No! No!” the woman objected, and there was another slapping sound. Two, actually, because she’d no sooner slapped him than he must have slapped her back, hard, I could tell, and then there was just the sound of her weeping.
    “What’d I tell you?” the man said.
    “You hurt me.”
    “Didn’t I warn you not to hit me again?”
    “That was just playing.”
    “Me, too.”
    The woman snuffed her nose. “You play too rough.”
    “You want nice, go back to that fat stupid fuck you’re married to.”
    Kissing sounds now. They had to be standing right next to the trunk. “I don’t want him. I want you,” the woman said. “And I want you