See You at Breakfast
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 5: The Fourth Day
By the fourth day, Megan had stopped waiting for anyone to tell her what day it was and started keeping her own count, scratching a mark into the mudbrick beside the high window with a fingernail each time the light through the bars went from dark to pale to dark again. Four marks now. Four days since the field, since Ruiz, since the old man had crouched in front of her and handed her a number meant to break something in her that hadn’t broken yet.
The cold had let up slightly with the sun higher in the sky each day, though the room still held onto night’s chill longer than her body wanted it to. Someone brought rice twice a day now, sometimes with a scrap of flatbread, and she’d learned to eat it fast, without tasting it, because tasting it meant thinking about food, and thinking about food meant thinking about home, and home was a door she couldn’t afford to keep opening. Her shoulder had settled into a dull, constant ache — a bad sprain, she guessed, not a break. She could rotate it, slowly, if she gritted her teeth through it. One working joint. One small proof her body hadn’t entirely stopped belonging to her.
A second guard came with the food most mornings, older than Hassan, heavyset, with a limp that made his footsteps uneven on the packed dirt outside her door. He never looked at her directly. He set the bowl down, said nothing, and left, and on the third morning she’d caught him glancing back once from the doorway — not at her body, but at her face, something that might have been pity crossing it before he caught himself and looked away. She didn’t trust it. She couldn’t afford to trust it. But she noted it anyway, because some stubborn part of her needed to believe not everyone in this compound was the same shape of monster.
The scarred guard’s name, she’d gathered from the others calling to him across the compound, was Hassan. He came more often than the food required, and she’d learned the rhythm of his visits — he would set down whatever he’d brought, crouch near her, and let his hands wander her shoulders, her thighs, the curve of her hip through the thin cotton, while he talked at her in a mixture of Arabic and broken English she’d stopped trying to follow, because following it meant engaging with it, and engaging with it meant giving him something he wanted. She held herself still and absent, counting bricks in her head, and when his hand pushed higher on the fourth day than it had gone before, fingers sliding beneath the hem of her undershirt against bare skin, she flinched hard enough that he laughed and did it again, deliberately, to watch her flinch a second time.
“Scared?” he said, in English, close to her ear. “Good.”
He left with the empty bowl and the sound of his own laughter trailing behind him, and she sat afterward with her knees drawn to her chest, shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the cold, and made herself breathe until the shaking slowed. She thought, in the quiet after, of her mother’s kitchen back in Ohio — the yellow curtains over the sink, her mother’s hands, flour to the wrist, the radio playing something with too much fiddle in it. She let the memory stay as long as it would.
The fifth day passed slower than any of the others. No one came until late afternoon, and the waiting itself became its own kind of torment — every sound outside the door, every set of footsteps on the dirt, a fresh spike of dread that resolved into nothing, into silence, into the drone of the generator and her own heartbeat filling the empty hours.
The old man — Abu Talib, she’d heard the younger fighters call him — returned that evening, and without preamble said, “Hassan tells me you don’t scream.”
She said nothing.
“American soldiers.” He shook his head, something between admiration and contempt in the gesture. “You are trained not to scream. It is a kind of strength, I think. But strength like that has a cost. It builds up somewhere inside you, and eventually it has to go somewhere.” He crouched, unhurried. “I wonder how many days before it finds somewhere to go.”
He reached out and gripped her jaw, turning her face to his. “Sixteen days,” he said, and she felt something cold drop through her chest at the number. “That is how long we will keep you here before you are moved. Sixteen days for your army to find you, if they can. I do not think they will.”
He let go and stood, and when he left she cried for the first time since the field — silent, full-body, emptying something out of her and leaving something harder in its place.
Sixteen days. She held onto the number the way she’d held onto Ruiz’s memory, turned it over, made it belong to her instead of to Abu Talib. An end point was more than she’d let herself hope for since the desert.
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