23

I mentioned that I wanted to hold out to my absolute limits, and the next day those limits were reached. Admittedly not in the way that I had planned, but it was bound to happen eventually.

The morning of the third day was essentially a repeat of day two. I woke up, U announced, “Good morning to you,” and, “I am leaving now,” and I responded in kind. I watched her leave for school in the sliver of a gap that I had access to, and then I was home alone.

All alone. With no sign of any parental return.

U never came back to get the plastic bags she had put the food in, or even the knife she had left behind. She didn’t open the closet door at all, which meant I still hadn’t eaten other than the one time. The meal had hardly been enough food to sustain me, so I was right back in the same place I had been the day before, but even worse off. Rate of starvation is linked to stress, incidentally.

I guess you could say the hunger wasn’t all that bad (at that point). It was tolerable if I looked at it like some kind of challenge. Or maybe a strict diet. At the very least, it wasn’t so unbearable that I just had to call the police.

So I remained tied down in my mind, unable to take a single action. Nothing was changing, and everything was repeating, so I kept putting it off, putting it off, putting it off.

But I finally hit my limit in an unexpected, if not inevitable, way.

I’m not trying to be vulgar here, and perhaps several readers have already guessed my plight. On the third day, I absolutely had to go to the bathroom. Naturally I had no such facilities in my closet-cum-prison.

That made it objectively worse than a prison cell.

From my position looking out the closet door, I could barely make out another door that seemed to lead into a restroom almost right in front of me. But I had no way of getting in there, other than warping. Maybe a warp spell? Teleportation? Instant transmission? Any of those would be great, and it’d be a piece of cake to get in there… then again, I wouldn’t be locked up if I had any of those powers.

I suddenly found myself in a situation. I cursed myself for not thinking ahead about it earlier. It was so sudden that I had no idea what to do.

The desperation in me cried out to call the police, but after all the trouble I had gone to… okay, I hadn’t actually done anything, but I had put a lot of effort into finding a peaceable and low-key solution. Was it worth undoing all that and calling the police over a simple biological urge?

But no matter what I thought it was worth, the reality was I needed a solution, stat.

Looking back, I think that was the only time I would’ve actually been able to follow through, to actually act decisive and call the police for real. As in, resolve the situation like an adult. It really was my last chance, a golden opportunity that would never come again if passed up. For such an indecisive person as myself, it was almost like a godsent excuse to call the police, though I admit that’s a weird way of putting it.

But instead, I kept thinking of other possibilities and options. I don’t know why I was going through all that unnecessary effort at that point. I genuinely can’t say if it was a refusal to give up, or something else entirely.

First, I considered the possibility that U had forgotten to lock the closet door. It probably wasn’t worth consideration, since the last time the door had even been opened was the day before, when she delivered the school lunch and threw a knife at me. I had very clearly heard the click of the lock, and she couldn’t have screwed it up. But my brain told me that surely there was a slight possibility I had misheard.

I suppose that technically speaking there was a very slight possibility, but when I tried to slide the door to the side, it firmly stuck in place after only budging a tiny amount.

A waste of time and energy.

But not a complete waste. I hadn’t tried opening the door until that point, and I learned that there was just a slight amount of play with the frame. It may have been locked, but it wasn’t fixed in place; in fact, it was rather loose as doors went.

The gap in the door had widened to almost 1/4 of an inch.

I was reminded yet again that the closet was not a safe or a prison cell. It wasn’t airtight, and it certainly wasn’t designed to lock someone inside. That gave me an unexpected idea.

I was pretty sure that I could use the hammer and saw from the toolbox combined with U‘s knife to destroy the sliding door, which couldn’t have been much more than an inch thick, but I wanted to try something else before resorting to that.

Nothing too out of the box, just lifting the door slightly. Rather than opening the door, I wanted to try dislodging it from its track. Such a feat would be impossible on a well-attached and locked sliding door, but that certainly didn’t describe the closet door. It was only constructed for convenience, making my idea ever so slightly possible.

It was like an escape trick where you had to open a hinged door the opposite way. That’s a pretty classical magic trick, but maybe trying it with a sliding door was a novel concept. If it worked, anyway.

Fortunately, it did work, and the sliding door easily lifted off its track. I couldn’t say if it was a long-term benefit or not, but I had at least escaped the closet without damaging the lock or the door.

I left the door leaning against the wall for obvious reasons (it was pretty unwieldy, given that it was still locked, so I could only make enough of a gap for one person to get through), and immediately dashed to the entryway toilet to relieve myself. The urgency of the situation far outpaced my desire to not use someone else’s restroom, so my motions were determined.

So, not only did I manage a brilliant escape from the storage shed, but also from a physiological crisis that far outstripped hunger. Of course, that victory was only another strand in the web that kept me trapped there, but I couldn’t have known that at the time.