See You at Breakfast
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6: The Weight of Days
The eighth day, Megan woke before light with her body aching in ways she’d stopped bothering to catalogue separately, one long continuous ache instead of a collection of distinct injuries. She lay still for a long time, watching the square of sky through the high window shift from black to the deep blue that came right before dawn, and found she didn’t want to move yet. Moving meant being awake in a way that felt dangerous. Stillness, at least, was something she could control.
Hassan didn’t come that day. She spent the hours flinching at every sound anyway, her body braced for him long after her mind had started to understand he wasn’t coming, and the bracing itself exhausted her more than his actual visits sometimes did — a whole day spent standing at attention for a blow that never landed.
The limping guard brought her food twice, morning and evening, and on the second visit he lingered a moment longer than usual in the doorway. He said something she didn’t understand, gestured toward her shoulder, and mimed a slow rotation with his own arm, watching her face. She understood, after a moment, that he was asking whether it still hurt. She nodded, once, cautious, unsure what admitting weakness to any of them might cost her. He made a small sound, something between sympathy and frustration, and left without another word, but that evening the rice came with a strip of cloth folded beside it, and when she worked up the courage to test it, found it made a passable sling.
She didn’t know his name. She thought of him only as the guard with the limp, and some nights, lying awake, she found herself constructing a whole life for him in her head — a wife somewhere, children, a man who’d been a farmer before this war made him something else, a man who hadn’t chosen to be a monster the way Hassan seemed to relish it. She didn’t know if any of it was true. She built it anyway, because a story where not everyone in this compound was equally lost was easier to survive inside than one where they all were.
Abu Talib returned on the ninth day, and this time he didn’t crouch or grip her jaw or offer his particular brand of philosophy about strength and its costs. He simply stood in the doorway and studied her, and after a long moment said, “You are still counting the marks on the wall.”
She said nothing, though her stomach dropped at the confirmation that he’d been watching, that even the one private ritual she had wasn’t entirely private.
“Nine days,” he said. “You believe someone is coming. This is good — hope keeps a prisoner disciplined, obedient, easy to manage. Despair makes prisoners unpredictable. So I will not take the hope from you.” He paused. “But I want you to understand what hope has cost women before you. There have been others. Not many — you know this, you told me yourself there are only eighteen — but there have been others, and I do not think you would enjoy hearing what became of the ones who were not found in time.”
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