An Unexploded Shell Inside a Cell [Open]

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She thought her life would be different by now, but she's a prisoner again. Voluntary, she guesses, which makes it a little bit different than the first time. At least she can blink on her own this time. Not that she's using her body to do much good.

Ironically, she almost always looked better when she was a more total prisoner. Without her makeup and hair clips and changes of clothes to arrange herself into some approximation of health, without even a mirror to confirm her suspicions, she looks a wreck. Dark circles line her reddened eyes; her hair is unbrushed and falls in tangled clumps over her face; chapped, bloodied lips and fingernails bitten down to the flesh speak to her uneasy transition back into captivity.

Eva's given up all attempts to look 'okay'. She ripped a man's face open with her bare fingers. She's been a long road away from 'okay' for a while now, but she spent too long mistaking her anger and stubbornness for strength and resilience to recognize it. She's wised up now.

She really wants a drink right now. Instead she has some books - selected poems by Pablo Neruda and an anthology of poetry by women poets in the Andes - and a pillow and blanket. She's curled up on the cot with the former book in her hand, but drifting in and out of sleep. Her breath comes lazy and heavy as she alternately reads, dreams, and watches the door to the brig with heavy-lidded eyes, looking for nothing.

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"If you have an option you can think of, I'd love to hear it. I mean that honestly. It's not as if I haven't tried to be normal and alright and not crazy, Daniel, so give me a sensible alternative and I'll try it."

She's looking at him the same way she did that day in the library. She's looking for him to direct her, make a decision for her, because the decisions she's made can't possibly hold up to scrutiny. How is she supposed to make choices in her life when the past has proven that they're the wrong ones? They got her infested and reinfested, and it was bad enough that that was happening to her, but her choices have inflicted pain on others too.

And it occurs to her that Daniel was much different than her even before Stacy, even before the war. There's something about him that's inherently sweet-natured, while she knows that somehow, there's something in her that has always been sadistic. Something that was spiteful, that liked power even in small scenarios. The ability to make a threat and back it up. She was like that even as a child. Maybe it's been in her all along.

Then again, she can't see herself ripping someone's face off fifteen years ago. But she can't really see herself that far back anyway. Her life as it is now started twelve years ago, and everything before that is a dim tale with other people who share her same name.

"Good. Because I'm not. I've spent the last five years of my life avoiding that."