Graphic depictions of torture
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I can focus on only two things, the sound of my heart, and the memory of my arms. 

Waves of cold air nip and peck at my skin, shaving off the beads of cold sweat I’d accumulated. Eyelids clamp down. My lungs rest, buried under solid bones entwined in wire and cramped muscle too cold to give slack. I listen for the sound of my own heart, the pulses in my arteries as it force feeds oxygen to my nauseated muscles. 

Then it starts

Quiet at first, the bellowing of metal sheets as they’re struck. Lead tonsils snap together and scream. Then it grows; the ringing echo vibrates across the ground until my teeth shiver. I hear the shrieks as it’s steel body drags across the floor, the jaws now snapping together at a different pace. I am jolted forward, reminded of my legs as bloodied stumps scrape the floor beneath me. The steel wire tightens around my chest in a web that tourniquets and controls each breath, all the while my ears filter what they can, listening for my heartbeat. It appears in the space quiet, iambic tetrameter. 

The snaps begin arrhythmically at first, but it screams once more, sending tremors through the floor and up my skeleton. My cage rotates, turning my haze dizzy. I go into a spin as my bloodied limbs jolt out in sudden inertia, and like a centrifuge I feel my blood pooling out at the leaking extremities. Phantom hands appear in my mental space, a deep throbbing pain wrestles itself within my muscles, as the echo wracks the bones of my arms, sawed at the elbow prior. Clotted blood and platelets slap the floor as plasma begins to sputter out, and the snap begins again, this time at intervals I notice sound at half beats between the tetrameter of my heart. All the while my own heartbeat picks up. I hear a crack like wood combusting, as it twitches. 

I have the sneaking suspicion it’s listening to me. 

I remember piling myself under a wooden crate resting my head against a rolled blanket stained with dried spirits. I remember how abruptly that crate was torn up, tasting the gloved hand against my lips as the other jammed a tri-pronged needle into my neck and paralytic pain exploded down my spine. I collapsed and laid down as my muscles seized, drool pooled in the space between the concrete and my cheek, and numbness invaded my lips to spread like wildfire. Bloodshot eyes strained upward to see his own, that rotate and dilate. I can tell they have been replaced. 

I don’t know how many years of my life I spent asleep. That part terrified me, as I snapped back to consciousness, puking. I was doubled over, my stomach and abdominal muscles retching, as I looked down to see a boot lodged in my side. In a dizzy state I began to turn, bile leaking down my chin, eyes trying to make out my assailant, but he now turned and walked out through a door with a brass frame and handle. I tried to move, to support my weight beneath my hands, but instead stumps wrapped in bandages slipped painfully across the tiled floor. My cheek met with a splat against my vomit, as in disgust and denial I tried to push myself up again, only to collapse again. I slid myself, using the ends of my elbows, and rolled onto my back. 

My eyes widened as I stared in front of me. Latched to the ceiling, was a mirror. It took me some time to process the disfigured girl in the ceiling to realize it was my own reflection. Bandages adorned what remained of my limbs, a blackened purple mark where the man had kicked me began to swell in my diaphragm that protruded painfully outward with each breath. 

My eyes rolled across the room, along empty white walls, unadorned with the exception of a single number in serif font “37.” My discomfort grew as whatever they had injected me with began to wear off. My breathing approached machine gun pace, as panic wrestled my muscles, then his voice – 

Crawling into my ear folds, the word “focus.” 

I rotated, eyes straining against the corner of the room. 

His voice sounded off again. The pitch low, the timbre soft. “Survive.” 

Not a day had passed before they came in, blindfolded me as I screamed in protest. I was bound as I am now, though my memory failed me afterwards. Whether by sheer will or the effect of my continuous drugging, I looked for the sound of my heartbeat. It was the case, after some time, where it was my only way of knowing if I was still alive. 

My sewn cage launches forward again forcing my thoughts from my head once more. The iron flecks and chewed bits of lead saliva scattered across the floor catch on my kneecaps, that jut out at points from my legs, tears burn into my eyes and leave trails that highlight the dirt on my face, and it begins to snap together again, this time it aligns. It matches the sound of my heart, overshadows them, where all I hear are its jaws, but this time the sound changes. It minces the air and spits, burning flecks land on my face, as I feel its breath against my nose. I can taste the smell of iron and dried oil on its lips. It tilts my body forward, into its convector. Hot liquid drips down my face and 

I can’t figure out why the shutters over my eyes are paralyzed. 

The snaps stop. It grows quiet. The blood in my veins has stilled. I search, eyes narrowing to the backs of their sockets. My breath stops. Where my heart continued its song in my chest before, now empty air resides. A single rest note stretches on; my eyelids shoot open. Mirrored eyes stare back at me in the pool of molten metals. They rotate and dilate. The word formed in a whisper on my lips, “replaced.”

For the first time in those months, I screamed.

I emptied every inch of those memories I could contain from my cracked lips, and it returned only one sound, familiar. My ears could not be made to hear anything else, the cry of two steel bones snapping together. What tired voice remained turned percussive, and from the furnace blood poured into my wounds, and solidified like bone, and all sound collided into one strike that bellowed and whirled throughout the walls indefinitely.