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Shazam always scanned our flats before he materialized, Roisin had nothing to fear.
But, for a time at least, she’d be worrying about a purple-eyed, emotional, very fat cat appearing, and the hours until she finally slept would pass more easily.
I learned young that moments of comedy during the horror show can be a life raft, enough to keep you bobbing in a violent, killing sea.
She sold me.
To the highest bidder.
Double-crossing Rowena, my mother sold me on the open market like a prize pig, I learned later, with a video of me trying to freeze-frame in my cage, of her making me crush various objects in a tiny fist, accompanied by a detailed list of my superhuman abilities.
They came late one night, and I was so excited to see someone besides my mother or, on the very rare occasion, one of her wasted boyfriends, someone who had surely come to set me free, that I began vibrating, moving so rapidly from side to side behind bars I became a mere smudge of white in the wan light of the TV.
I was so excited I couldn’t even talk.
No one had ever been in our home before besides my mother and those glassy-eyed, stoned men, and I was terrified she’d come back and prevent my saviors from releasing me.
When I finally found my tongue, I said over and over please let me out, please let me out, you must let me out in a stunned kind of daze.
These were Responsible Adults like the ones on the telly.
They wore dark suits and shiny shoes, and had neatly trimmed hair above their collars and ties.
These were the kind of people that rescued other people. Who came from places like the Child and Family Agency, TUSLA, another word I always saw in my head capitalized, the color of wide-open blue skies.
But despite my pleas, they stood in the middle of our shabby living room, with its sagging plaid sofa and scuffed wooden floors, and began to discuss me as if I wasn’t even there.
As if I was only super-fast and super-strong. But super-stupid. Or super-deaf.
Eventually I stopped smudging around in my stunted space and shut up.
I drew my knees to my thin chest and huddled behind bars, realizing that some people were born into Hell and just never escaped.
They said things like limit-endurance and stress-conditioning, they said things like eggs and artificial insemination and super-soldiers. They discussed how best to alter and control me.
Then they shocked me through those bars, again and again, sending extreme high voltage arcing into my small body, frying my synapses, reducing me to a quivering puddle on the worn, lumpy pallet that had once been a mattress.
They said things like surgical enhancement and discussed the regions of my brain, the possibility of dissection once they had sufficient stores of reproductive material.
They discussed the overdose they’d give my mother, erasing all ties between me and the world.
A person alone is a hard thing to be.
When I could no longer even twitch, they opened my cage.
They.
Opened.
My.
Cage.
Not since that perfect, magical-memory bubble of a night, years ago, that my mother had washed my hair and played games with me at the kitchen table until I’d been too sleepy to see, not since that night I’d drifted off in bed next to her with my tiny hands pressed to her cheeks, staring at her while I fell asleep, basking in her love, assured I was the most special thing to her in all the world, had that goddamned door opened.
OLDER and OUTSIDE awaited.
And I couldn’t move.
