They say men will only take a free woman to put her in a cage.
I used to run free in the fields behind my home, let the grass stain my light-coloured dresses, let the wet soils taint my bare toes and let the only thing touching my skin be the rays of the golden summer suns. I would run and run until my legs gave way. Then I’d find myself in the woods, the fresh smell of morning dew and the sound of calling birds welcoming me.
I liked the way the darkness of the greenery enveloped me, canopies acting like shields for all that tried to harm me, be it wind or storm or watchful, hungry eyes. Have you ever tasted on your tongue the humidity of the forest, the richness of the earth, the crunch of the branches fallen? It was a wild medicine to me. No matter how many times I’d be yelled at for the way the elements infused themselves in my hickory-brown, curly hair, turning it into an unruly mane, I never regret it.
I used to rush to the train in the rain every end of the week, watching as the monstrous locomotive thundered and squealed passed me with a wondrous anticipation glimmering in my russet eyes. The smell of the sour smoke was pleasant to me. I remember being breathless with my pale cheeks flushed, innocent and naive.
I looked forward to every weekend. My nerves were electrified with delight because I knew the coming train meant he would arrive, bringing summer with him. It meant seeing his beautiful face. It meant hearing the alluring promises he wove for me like fairytales jumping out of their pages. I was so, so excited.
Was.
They also say to love is to change, and sometimes love isn’t enough.
“Anya. Is the food not to your liking tonight?”
I open my eyes once more to see the silver ones staring at me from the end of the darkwood table, between us a row of golden candelabras overtop a maroon table runner, little flames dancing on top of the candle wicks illuminating the shifting emotions on his face. With every flicker of fire, the shadows twist his worry to frustration, to anger and finally to a placid, unwaveringly cold glare.
I used to love this face too. His silver eyes remind me of mercury, shining and always reflecting the colours of the outdoors within the quicksilver. His pale complexion is like that of a porcelain doll, so fragile yet smooth to the touch, easily painted with a rosy blush. Easily harmed. But it wasn’t just his face.
Since we were little, Mikhail has always had long, straight, inky hair which he often let me braid as a little girl; long hair that draped over his shoulders now and made his sharp face appear thinner, clashing against his high cheekbones. When I first saw him, I thought he looked like an angel. Ethereal, without cracks or imperfections unlike the dolls I’d played with when I was younger. Unlike anything I’d ever touched before. Unlike me.
“It is more than lovely, Mikhail. Especially the wine. Is it new?” I respond, giving him a light smile, tilting my head down and to the side in order to look up at him. I know my eyes light up reflecting the fire’s embers, making the colour glitter sweetly and with a practised innocence. Just how he liked it.
It’s hard to tell now how I feel. The warm, dim lighting makes him look so pleasant, and the wine sloshing inside me numbs the fire within yet makes the candle flames brighter, blinding even.
I thought loving him would change him, but he never did, and I stopped being able to tell the difference between love and hate a long time ago.
Maybe I still loved him. Maybe when I realised it wasn’t enough, I only focused on pleasing him.
Maybe it was his love that changed me. Or maybe I’d always been this way.
I’ve said I used to run free, but now that I think about it…are those memories or just silly dreams?
Mikhail lets out a low laugh. It’s a beautiful sound, it always has been. It sounds like taking your first deep breath out of the ocean when you’ve been drowning, head to the sky like in a thankful prayer. A wondrous feeling after you’ve been lost in a numbing uncertainty, like this dinner and this room.
“You say that so often, yet you know I have an extensive collection of these liquors. You helped me pick some of them out yourself. Are you sure you’re alright? You’re barely eating, my dear.” He says, and his voice sounds like silk as he speaks to me. Anyone else would have thought it simply enchanting. A husband talking to his wife out of a gentle, endearing concern over a fancy dinner table provided all by him.
I knew better.
There’s a warning in his tone and his questions are not questions, but demands.
Mikhail stands up from his chair, not abruptly by any means, but not silently either. He wanted me to notice. So of course I noticed.
In this domed room he commands the light and the shadows, especially at night where the gilded, lancet windows looping around us shed no luminosity. Not even the moon’s. The floor is teak wood and tiled without flaw, the walls are a smooth stone, along with the roof. It’s a spectacular room, but when he stands in it, it looks like nothing but a cheap dollhouse compared to his presence.
“I even had the cooks make you your favourite cake. Strawberry layered, with extra cream.” My husband tells me as he walks towards me, his loose, white blouse swaying with his arm movements, dark pants outlining his tall, thin figure. A ruby pendant hangs from his neck, and it reminds me of my own, cold against my chest.
“I know. I promise I appreciate it all.” I assure him as he reaches me and I turn to look up at him, my head twisting until he’s behind me and I can’t reach him any longer.
“Do you?”
“I do.”
“Anya, you forget I’ve known you for forever. You’re upset. Why are you upset?” Mikhail pleads with his questions. I feel his slender hands wrap themselves around my shoulders, one hand letting go only to push my hair away from my face, caressing it, holding me like I were glass.
“I’m not.” I insist.
“Then why aren’t you eating?” Mikhail repeats, and suddenly his grasp over my left shoulder tightens and he bends over me just slightly, staying behind me as his right hand extends for the cake on my plate I hadn’t yet touched.
I watch it all happen in slow motion, the way the spongy cake is squished between his fingers, white cream dirtying his hands and little, red strawberry slices wiggling about as he scoops out a piece of the cake. The rest of the piece is rather destroyed on the plate, oozing out its insides just barely holding on to its carefully created structure. The piece in his hands is no more appetising, but then Mikhail brings the cake to my mouth and brushes his fingers against my lips to part them, and I listen.
The sickeningly sweet smell of it reaches my nose before the cake is pushed into my mouth rather slowly, intimately, the sugary taste hitting my tongue immediately. The cream melts and makes my mouth water, the juice of the strawberry pieces squirting against my cheeks off my teeth.
It tastes like the summers I would enjoy with Mikhail such a long time ago, when we’d lay in green fields of bright red poppies; when the sun scorched our skin but leaving such a satisfying tingling sensation, more so than the fleeting touches of our fingers against each other’s. He had looked just as beautiful then, black hair shining, silver-white eyes taking the red of the poppies and reflecting its colours back in swirls in the summer sun. He looked at me so lovingly in those shared moments. He had assured me I’d know true freedom in his arms.
I fell asleep in them then.
The cake tells me to wake up and remember who my freedom belongs to. There are no more poppy fields. The summer strawberries aren’t wild but locked away by my jaw.
“Isn’t it good? Won’t you have some more?” Mikhail whispers in my ear and he leans over me again, this time to take the napkin beside my plate and wipe his hands on it. Once he does, he lets me go.
Though he lets me go, I still feel his touch on me, his weight and his hands. No matter how many times I try to forget, the memories are replaced with new, fresher ones.
Always.
I close my eyes once more as he walks back, but I find that I suddenly can’t breathe. The walls around me feel like they are closing in, the golden windows look like thick, caging bars, blocking even the stars. My hands grip the table as I double over, my head suddenly in searing pain.
“Anya?” I hear Mikhail’s voice calling out for me. I feel nauseous at the way it flutters my heart and causes a tsunami of anxiety that drowns out all my other senses. His voice turns to static, white noise, and my body suddenly feels so very hot. Like a fire is trying to consume me.
I want to make it stop.
A thought flashes through my mind. I imagine myself getting up and grabbing the nearest candelabra, looking Mikhail in the eye and watching his expressions change as I drop it. How would it look as the wood catches fire? As our table runner turns from crimson to a burnt, ashy grey, his perfect, porcelain face shattering against the heat. If I burn, I want him to burn too.
“Anya!” Mikhail snaps. My eyes flash open with a frenzy dying within them as he lifts me out of the chair and takes a hold of me, his silver eyes upon my face with a furious agony displayed in them. His hands press tightly against my face, cupping my cheeks.
I concentrate on his hands. Slender, calloused and strong. Chipped and carved like they were created by Michelangelo himself; that took such a liking to finding their way through my hair and tracing my lips, often lingering over them, haunting me.
My husband’s touch used to be gentle. Then autumn came. Birds no longer called for me. With the changes of the leaves, the bright orange and yellow shades blurring out the green until nature mirrored the evening sunsets, he changed too. No longer was his touch a gentle summer breeze, but a cold, eerie wind with the threat of winter; the threat of a beast created of violent flurries and freezing rain. The hands that caressed my face so tenderly left red marks that burned, and when they ran through my hair, they pulled at it like it was a punishment and I was the crime.
“Anya. You must be sick. Come my dear, let me take care of you. This is what happens when you don’t listen to me, don’t you see? Aren’t you so glad I found you all those years ago?” Mikhail drops his hands from my face to the back of my head which he holds tightly, like a puppeteer placing his hand inside his puppet to gain control over it again. He then presses me against him, and my head collides with his shoulder, a soft kiss placed on my crown.
They say men will only take a free woman to put her in a cage.