All Alone

By R.J. Tennyson

Maggie paced up and down the tiny room she lived in. Her home.

Up.

Down.

Up.

Down.

She had almost no memory of her life before she lived in that tiny room. Fragmented memories of her past still lingered in her mind, but she found it too painful to piece them back together to form a picture. Although that picture was something Maggie longed to experience again, it was something too difficult to remember. (If you have ever missed something so much that just a fleeting memory of it dragged you into a darkness that seemed to trap you within its depths forever… then you know exactly how Maggie felt).

Up.

Down.

Up.

Down.

It had been a week since her son had left for a university on the other side of the country; she missed him dearly.

She was all alone.

She had given birth three times, and he was the third child who had left her. Her eldest child died shortly after birth. She never knew its sex because no one felt that she needed to know.

She was all alone.

Her middle child disappeared the same day as his father. For a while she wondered where they were, but eventually she had stopped wondering. There wasn’t any point, so she pushed the memory of their existence as far out of her mind as she could.

She was all alone.

Up.

Down.

Up.

Down.

Maggie had no faith. She didn’t even have a concept of such a thing, but even if she had she wouldn’t have known what to do with it. The absence of faith didn’t stop her from sensing that something greater was controlling her destiny.

Watching.

Up.

Down.

Up.

Down.

Stopping suddenly, Maggie leaned her back against the cold wall and slipped down to the ground slowly. Although she made no sound, she didn’t need to, the despair she felt could be seen on her tired worry-etched face. With a rhythm slowly building, she beat her open palms against the hard floor.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Her eyes fixed on the rectangular mirror on the opposite wall, and she stared.

* * *

Tim stood on the other side of the two-way mirror, just as he did everyday at this time; staring at Maggie. With his leather bound journal in his hand he noted –

4:37pm: Subject A-8398: Chimpanzee: Maggie: Displays normal behaviour