Room

by Emma Donoghue

I count one hundred cereal and waterfall the milk that’s nearly the same white as the bowls, no splashing, we thank Baby Jesus.

Ma knows everything except the things she doesn’t remember right, or sometimes she says I’m too young for her to explain a thing.

It’s weird to have something that’s mine-not-Ma’s. Everything else is both of ours. I guess my body is mine and the ideas that happen in my head. But my cells are made out of her cells so I’m kind of hers. Also when I tell her what I’m thinking and she tells me what she’s thinking, our each ideas jump into our other’s head, like coloring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.

Nothing makes Ma scared. Except Old Nick maybe. Mostly she calls him just him, I didn’t even know the name for him till I saw a cartoon about a guy that comes in the night called Old Nick.

I love five the best of every number, I have five fingers each hand and the same of toes and so does Ma, we’re our dead spits.

“Hey,” I say, “let’s measure Room.” “What, all of it?” “Do we have something else to do?” She looks at me strange. “I guess not.

If I was made of cake I’d eat myself before somebody else could.

Ma plays with Tank too but not as long. She gets sick of things fast, it’s from being an adult.

I should be going to sleep but I’m counting fights. That’s three we had in three days, one about the candles and one about Mouse and one about Lucky. I’d rather be four again if five means fighting all the days.

“Where are we when we’re asleep?” I can hear her yawn. “Right here.” “But dreams.” I wait. “Are they TV?” She still doesn’t answer. “Do we go into TV for dreaming?” “No. We’re never anywhere but here.

“Jack, you’re wonderful.” “Why I’m wonderful?” “I don’t know,” says Ma, “that’s just the way you popped out.

“Didn’t God make everything?” Ma doesn’t say anything for a minute and then she rubs my neck. “All the good stuff, anyway.

“I drove myself crazy looking at my watch and counting the seconds. Things spooked me, they seemed to get bigger or smaller while I was watching them, but if I looked away they started sliding. When he finally brought the TV, I left it on twenty-four/seven, stupid stuff, commercials for food I remembered, my mouth hurt wanting it all. Sometimes I heard voices from the TV telling me things.

Before I didn’t even know to be mad that we can’t open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it. When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything.

“You’re the one who matters, though. Just you.

I wait for Ma to roll me up. Instead she just looks at me. My feet my legs my arms my head, her eyes keep sliding over my whole me like she’s counting. “What?” I say. She doesn’t say a word. She leans over, she doesn’t even kiss me, she just touches her face to mine till I can’t tell whose is whose.

I’m not in Room. Am I still me?

“Gimme five?” His plastic hand is up and he’s waggling his fingers, I pretend I don’t see. I’m not going to give him my fingers, I need them for me.

We have to be in the world, we’re not ever going back to Room, Ma says that’s how it is and I should be glad. I don’t know why we can’t go back just to sleep even.

I remember manners, that’s when persons are scared to make other persons mad.

“‘Little Jack, you wonderful boy, enjoy every moment because you deserve it because you have been quite literally to Hell and back!

“‘God bless you and your sweet saint of a son, I pray you discover all the beautiful things this world has to offer all your dreams come true and your path in life is paved with happiness and gold.

If I want Ma to listen to me not some person else I say, “Excuse me,” sometimes I say, “Excuse me, Excuse me,” for ages, then when she asks what is it I don’t remember anymore.

“You know who you belong to, Jack?” “Yeah.” “Yourself.” He’s wrong, actually, I belong to Ma.

“They say you’re beautiful.” Ma laughs. Actually she is. I’ve seen so many person faces for real now and hers is the most beautifulest.

I think about all the kids in the world, how they’re not TV they’re real, they eat and sleep and pee and poo like me. If I had something sharp and pricked them they’d bleed, if I tickled them they’d laugh. I’d like to see them but it makes me dizzy that there’s so many and I’m only one.

“Before—I was so ordinary. I wasn’t even, you know, vegetarian, I never even had a goth phase.

Jack was everything. I was alive again, I mattered.

“You breastfed him. In fact, this may startle some of our viewers, I understand you still do?” Ma laughs. The woman stares at her. “In this whole story, that’s the shocking detail?

I mean, of course when I woke up in that shed, I thought nobody’d ever had it as bad as me. But the thing is, slavery’s not a new invention. And solitary confinement—did you know, in America we’ve got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells? Some of them for more than twenty years.” Her hand is pointing at the puffy-hair woman. “As for kids—there’s places where babies lie in orphanages five to a cot with pacifiers taped into their mouths, kids getting raped by Daddy every night, kids in prisons, whatever, making carpets till they go blind—”

“People are locked up in all sorts of ways.

It’s not so bad touching people on purpose, it’s worse when it’s them touching me, like electric shocks.

I think buddy is man talk for sweetie.

I lift the free weights, I don’t know what’s free about them. I put one on my tummy, I like how it holds me down so I won’t fall off the spinny world.

The sea never stops growling and it’s too big, we’re not meant to be here.

“It must be terrible to not have any,” Grandma tells her. “Any what?” says Ma. “Pictures of Jack when he was a baby and a toddler,” she says. “I mean, just to remember him by.” Ma’s face is all blank. “I don’t forget a day of it.

“Will you be dead before I do?” “That’s the plan.” “Why that’s the plan?” “Well, by the time you’re one hundred, I’ll be one hundred and twenty-one, and I think my body will be pretty worn out.” She’s grinning. “I’ll be in Heaven getting your room ready.” “Our room,” I say. “OK, our room.

“Tell you what, we could—we could turn her bones into ash and sprinkle it under the hammock.” “Will she grow again then and be my sister?” Ma shakes her head. Her face is all stripey wet.

It’s like a crater, a hole where something happened.