THE GIRL opens her eyes and within a moment regrets it. What a beautiful dream she has had. Why must she be awakened from it?

          A ray of sunlight dances on her cheek, warm and promising, yet taunting and its source concealed, inaccessible. Its intensity tells the girl that it is over a little past six.

          The girl attempts to sit up but is restrained by her fettered arms. She looks up at her hands to find them still tied to the feet of her bed, nylon packaging rope chinked around each wrist. Thereafter, she realizes that she still lies on her bedroom floor, where she has obviously fallen asleep; and recalls the events that had recurred a while ago, in the wee hours that have passed by: another fresh chapter of Pentecostal bunk in her life, officially initiating the series of incessant howling in the Spirit and chanting of unintelligible words, most notably “halamensuuuus!” and “shangalangalaaaah!” Her guardians (a paternal aunt and her husband) had rebuked and [M1] screamed at her again.

          For the first time she had attempted to fight back, to escape; but her guardians held on to her arms, the Chains of Spiritual Liberty, and when she tried to wrestle with them and break free, they called for one of the male ushers from their church congregation to help her aunt’s husband tie her down. They then fastened her hands to the feet of her bed, and stripped her off her shirt and shorts so that her aunt could pour and rub oil all over her body, on every inch of flesh. The girl wriggled on the ground, almost naked, as the men clutched her feet to the floor. She screamed back at them. Cursed them. She did not deserve this. No one did. Yet the religious cuckoos she had been forced to live with for the last five years thought otherwise.

          Now that her head has cleared, the girl easily cuts the ropes by twisting and grinding them against the sharp metal edge of the bed; they loosen[M2] , eventually break; and the girl rises from her prostrate position, alternately massaging her wrists with either of her thumbs. [M3] 

          With bones aching, the girl stands up and quietly rushes to her cabinet. Her guardians are probably exhausted and would sleep in till [M4] noontime. She must act quick.

          The girl does not bother closing the door for locking it would be comprised of pushing the bed against it. Her bedroom door has no doorknob of its own anyway, much less a lock. As though privacy was not a right for her to be had. “Hell,” she hisses.

          It was the very reason she was caught last night. She was changing into her sleeping clothes and just before the girl could pull down her top, her aunt barged into [M5] her room. The captious old woman instantly caught the kiss mark tattoo on the girl’s right hipbone clandestinely acquired three weeks ago. The aunt summoned the husband, and though the girl explained otherwise, the couple mused that the tattoo looked very much like a woman’s vagina, subsequently concluding that the girl was possessed by Jezebel, the demoness of promiscuity.

          Not that the aunt and her husband approved of tattoos in the first place, or that not having any design that resembled the appearance of any kind of genitalia would guarantee a punishment of a lesser degree[M6] . She had learned bodily ink markings were on the top of her aunt’s Most Taboo list the first time she got a tattoo roughly two years ago, when she was fifteen. It was just a little star on the back of her right ear. (A boy from the church’s youth group had assisted her in getting it, eventually telling on her. Needless to say she no longer trusted anyone from the congregation since.) The girl’s transgression was met with an identical sanction by her aunt: exposed on the ground, drenched in “holy oil,” being yelled at to “come out! Come out in the name of Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Rackakakashuramiwapueshuminabuuuuuuu!”

          Those passing retributions are history, though. Because she will make sure that the most recent one would be the last.

          The girl opens her closet and grabs [M7] whatever clothing she can get her hands on— an indigo shirt and a maroon skirt. There is no time to be critical. The girl then bends over and pushes aside the other clothes to access the secret compartment underneath. But when she lifts up the cover there is nothing. Not a centavo from her lifetime savings from doing voice-over commissions. Shit. Her aunt must have confiscated it.

          The girl snatches a pair of sneakers, which she slips on hastily, and her small body bag, which contains nothing much. Just a small phone she had managed to buy for herself in secret (since her guardians forbid and took gadgets as channels of Satanic influence); a used kerchief; a roll of tissue; a gray jacket; what little loose change she has left in it; and a watch, which she immediately wears on her left wrist, the case on her pulse.

          The girl takes a hairpin from under the cushion of her bed and hurries towards the window. She unlocks the padlock; and once unfastened, opens the grilled fire escape. She glides through it, not bothering to reclose it. This is her permanent escape.