Tile, Echoes and Frosted Glass

The word, the word he didn’t know, never heard before, became an animal.

A finger, an outstretched arm came with the word.

The physical gesture was meant to be welcoming. It seemed to be like the chain the dog was tied to, a chain in a sweater, the sweater with a name tag.

She had said her own name, out loud, but his brain was attentive to other things.

Smells.

Sounds that weren’t words.

She began to walk, hand on his shoulder, again, an attempt at welcoming comfort that landed like hot grease on skin.

He didn’t wish to be touched.

He knew he should be listening to her words and not doors closing and footsteps.

His ears tuned to this woman.

Everything was all unknown already.

He had been spanked and slapped and burned,but never taken anywhere outside the house to be punished.

The handcuffs, the cop said, were so he would not harm himself. He had never harmed himself. That’s what other people were for.

He heard a voice in a room, a voice that sounded like a kid his age.

He couldn’t understand the words, but he understood, he felt anyway that the kid asked a question.

The cop, the second cop, asked if he had any questions. He had so many, but not the ones he thought a cop could answer.

This woman seemed like she could answer a question.

A question that would slow the walk.

He did not want to ask if he could ask a question because that was a question. He did not want to be told no.

Not now, not ever again.

He was scared by this word.

“What,” he blurted, “ is a corridor?”

The woman stopped.

Her heels clicked as though they were meant to stop right in that place, snapped, somehow, to that exact piece of scuffed tile floor.

She had been trained in measured responses.

Saliva went down her throat the wrong way.

She did not want to cough or clear her throat.

There was fear in this boys eyes.

Fear, of course, of the unknown.

She wondered what he had seen, what he had done beyond what was in the small file stored on her phone, the same phone with which she texted her daughter to remind her about gymnastics practice.

The word “corridor.”

This little boy had been frightened by her errant use of a word beyond his vocabulary.

“I’m sorry…hallway… the place we’re in now.”

She began to assure the boy that no one would hurt him and stopped, mouth open but silent.

In March she had assured a boy no one would hurt him shortly before he had to be restrained and his wrist was broken in the process.

The woman looked at the boy.

Had this child, afraid of the word corridor, really stabbed his own mother?

He had.

That part of this case was not in question.

She said “follow me,” in the pleasant, soothing tone she had learned in seminars at resorts.

The boy stared past her, down the corridor.

She walked,and he followed next to her.

Soon a therapist’s door would close between them and she would go back to the office.

Above the door of the office there was a cheap plastic sign that said “Intake Processing.”

She understood those words, and for the first time their broad sterility frightened her.

She swallowed wrong again, choked, coughed, cleared her throat, and though her eyes were closed, she saw the boy flinch and shiver as the noise echoed down the hallway.

*****

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