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I’d knelt down so my face was at the same height as the baby.

“Is it dark in there?” I asked the tummy. I pressed my ear to my sister’s skin, waiting for an answer that never came. “Do you have any light in there?”

My sister pushed me away.

“Come on, get off,” she said. “How’s there going to be light inside my stomach? Where would it come from?”

“We don’t know where the light that comes in through the crack in the ceiling comes from.”

She blew out behind the mask. “Doesn’t Dad know?” she asked.

I shook my head.

I put a leg in the bathwater to test it. I snatched it out with a spasm.

“What?” asked my sister. “Is it cold?”

“Freezing,” I replied. Although the water in the basement was never hot, turning the faucet all the way to the left made the temperature reasonable. My sister had now turned it all the way to the right.

“Why did you fill it like that?” I asked.

“Get out,” she said to me.

“I have to take a bath, too.”

“Get out,” she repeated. “Or I’ll take my mask off, if you want.”

“Dad will tell us off if we take separate baths.”

“You can come in afterward.”

She surged forward to push me out with her giant belly. She got me out into the hall and poked her head out, looking both ways.

“Count to ten then come in.” She closed the door, leaving me naked outside.

I began to count.

One. Two. Three. On four, I heard my sister’s body go into the water. On six, I heard her let out air through her mouth, and she gave that special cry of pain. On nine I heard her teeth chattering. And on ten I opened the door. I saw my sister struggling to breathe, submerged to the neck in the freezing bathwater. Just her belly rose out of it like a mountain of flesh.

I stepped in the puddles that’d formed on the floor.

I dipped a leg into the water, but I pulled it out with another spasm. The cold cut through my skin.

“It’s too cold,” I said.

My sister’s mask, soaked, turned to look at me.

“It’s perfect,” she replied. Her teeth chattered as she spoke.

The wet mask and her teeth making that noise was something I never forgot. For the first time I understood the reality of what’d happened that evening in the bathroom. It was the same thing my sister had tried to do now with the poison. Get rid of the baby.

The sound of a dry, rough retch reached me from the bathroom. My grandmother was still forcing my sister to be sick.

My bedroom door flew open.

From the doorframe to my bed, a rectangle of light appeared on the floor. Inside it two long shadows were cast, those of my father and my sister. He was holding her by the shoulders, her back to me. A piece of pink material from the blouse emerged like a handkerchief from each of my father’s fists. My brother’s face was floating somewhere in the background. It was him who turned on the light. My mother appeared with the mask. “Put it on,” she told my sister.

Mom held it to her face, but she pushed it away. “It hurts.”

My father shook her using those handles of fabric. He gripped them hard when her legs bent. Her head danced on her shoulders, the hair moving from side to side.

“I’ve barely touched you,” said Dad.

“You’re fine,” Grandma added from somewhere in the hallway. “You deserved much worse for what you’ve done. To a poor defenseless baby.”

Mom held the mask to her face again.

“Come on,” she said, “your brother’s in the room. You can’t sleep in here without this.”

She managed to get the mask on. She stretched the strap until it was around the whole head and then let go of the elastic.

“You’ll sleep with your sister from now on,” Dad said to me. “We can’t risk leaving her with the baby.”

Dad pushed her into the room. She twisted her body to stop herself, and then let herself fall. She hit the floor with her backside. I felt the vibration in the bed frame. Dad was left with her blouse in his hands, with my sister’s arms stretched upward, her face hidden behind the material. The garment’s neck was turned inside out at the chin. Her breasts, naked, fell in opposite directions.

“Do what you want,” said Dad. He let go of the material. The buttons hit my sister on the head. The blouse partly found its way back onto her body.

She sat there for a few seconds.

Then she dropped to one side.

I jumped out of bed to help her, but my mother and grandmother were there first. They knelt beside her. “Is it the poison?” Grandma asked.

“It can’t be, she threw it all up,” replied Mom.

“What’s wrong with her?” Dad broke in. “Is she breathing?”

He put his hand on my sister’s chest.

“Of course she’s breathing,” he said. “She’s just fainted. Again.”

I couldn’t remember her ever fainting in the basement.

“Wake up, girl!” my father yelled.

She moaned.

“Ha, there you go,” added Dad.

My sister was lying belly-up. Her white face prayed to the ceiling like the empty mask had done from the table the night of her nosebleed. She murmured something I didn’t understand. She moved her head from side to side.

My father stopped the movement, grabbing her by the forehead. “Try doing something to the baby again and—” Although he didn’t finish his threat, his fingers pressed against the orthopedic material. My sister bent her legs and twisted her waist.

“I hope I’ve made myself clear,” Dad added.

She nodded.

He pulled her up by the armpits and took a few steps back to keep his balance. Then he checked that she was keeping herself up on her own feet. Her waist buckled, and it looked as if she’d fall again, but in the end her legs straightened.

“Help me get her into bed,” he said.

My mother approached, going around them and looking like she didn’t really know what to do.

“Come on, out of the way,” my father said to her. “Pull the sheets back.”

Mom climbed two rungs of the bunk’s ladder and peeled the cover off my brother’s bed. Dad pushed my sister forward. She dug her feet into the floor. Her toes wrinkled up. They shrank as they offered resistance.

“Not in his sheets,” she muttered.

Dad pushed harder. She resisted by skidding on her heels.

“Not in his sheets,” she repeated in a tiny voice, still drowsy from fainting.

Dad blew out to get her hair away from his face. He spat out a lock.

“This isn’t necessary,” Grandma cut in.

“I’ll fetch some other sheets,” my mother said.

When Dad continued to push, my sister let out one last scream. “Not in his sheets!”

Her body relaxed. Or rather, it deflated. As if the scream had taken away the last of her strength.

“Not in his sheets . . .”

My sister fell to one side. Dad bent his legs trying to keep her up. When he found himself unable to hold her dead weight, he let her fall to the floor. Lying on her side at the foot of the bunk bed.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

He rubbed his palms together as if he’d relieved himself of an annoying burden. And it was that simple gesture that set off an explosion of sadness in me, a sadness made by everything that’d happened that night in the basement. Because I imagined my dad could’ve made a similar gesture a few nights before when he got rid of my sister after she’d had to defend herself scratching his back. I thought about how Grandma had described the baby as a shameful sin. And how my sister had tried to poison him so he wouldn’t live with me in the basement.

Right then an unknown emotion was set off inside me. A spark that fought to catch fire.

I felt tears well up in my eyes. My family moved around the room as blurry blobs. Dad’s slippers dragged on the way back to his room. Mom changed the sheets on the top bunk. She gave the pillow a few final slaps to fluff it up.

“Come on, back to sleep,” she said to me.

She left the room without noticing my state. Two streams of snot flowed to my mouth. I resisted the urge to sniff because the sound would’ve alerted my grandmother. She was last to leave the room. She felt the air until she found the top of my head. I opened my mouth so I could breathe, tasting the salty flavor of my snot. My throat felt blocked by the effort I was making not to show that I was crying.

“Tomorrow I’ll tell Mom to make you a special breakfast,” she said. She ruffled my hair and added, “What do you want? Eggs or toast?”

I moved my tongue inside my open mouth. I couldn’t speak.

“Eh?”

“Eggs.” I pronounced it with no
g
.

“Eggs it is, then,” she said. “And don’t worry about your sister. What she did was much worse.”

She ruffled my hair again before leaving. The smell of talcum powder vanished with her. At last I could relax my throat. I dried my snot with my forearm.

My sister was no more than a heap of clothes by the bunk bed. She was making a strange snoring sound.

The spark inside me caught light.

I knelt in front of the drawer.

I swallowed saliva.

I took out the firefly jar.

“I need you to glow,” I told them. “I need to see the light from outside.” I held the jar in front of my eyes.

It stayed dark.

“Please . . .”

I looked into the emptiness between my hands, wishing I could see the rays of sun they’d brought me from the world up top. Even if that wasn’t really what it was. Even if their light was no more than another artificial light in my life, a load of chemicals in the abdomen of an insect.

“Take me away from this darkness.”

A tear rolled down my cheek to my mouth.

I shook the jar.

“I want to go to where you come from.”

I blinked, preparing myself to be dazzled. I closed my eyes. I waited. I wanted to give them time to light up. I opened them again, expecting the room to be colored green.

But I found the same darkness.

I shook the jar again. “Come on,” I begged them.

The clinking of the pencils against the glass grew louder as I increased the speed of my hands.

I shook the jar until the tiredness in my shoulders made me accept what had happened.

I rested the container on the chest of drawers. This time I cried freely, remembering the magical moment when the first flash of green light had appeared on the other side of the window. The first firefly that arrived from the world outside. Just after I discovered I couldn’t visit that world even if I wanted to, because the kitchen door had always been locked.

It was the first of all the fireflies that had come to die in my jar.

The glass basement to which I’d condemned them.

For the first time I felt lost in that darkness that had always been my world. Unused to it. A stranger in the basement.

The unknown spark that had caught light inside me became a little flame. A flame that burned.

“I want to get out of here,” I said into the dark. I breathed deeply, accepting the truth. Giving in to the desire for a new life.

“I want to get out of here,” I said again so I could listen to myself.

The heap of clothes that was my sister moved. The different materials brushed against each other. Some of her bones clicked.

“Do you really want to get out?” Her tired voice floated in the room’s darkness.

I stroked the cold glass of the jar that would never glow again.

“I want to get out.”

“I can help you do it,” she then said. The mask rose up among a tangle of hair. The voice reverberated against the orthopedic material, which had been knocked out of place in the last struggle. “If I don’t die first.”

“You’re not going to die. They made you throw it all up. Like the baby.”

She groaned.

“Why don’t you want the baby to live in the basement?” I asked. “Why don’t you like us living here?”

“I don’t care where that boy lives. I just don’t want to have to look after him. And I want to make your father suffer. Do you not see?” She adjusted her mask, and I covered my face just in case.

“Don’t be silly, you can look.”

I took away my hands. She finished putting her blouse back on. As she sat up, her hand went to the mask. She stroked that barrier that stopped her from reaching her real skin.

“It hurts,” she said.

“What did Dad do to you?”

“It really hurts. I have to loosen it.”

She swayed under the lightbulb. She pulled at the mask’s strap, and then laid a hand on her artificial face, inserting three fingers in the three holes. I heard an elastic slap when the strap was freed behind her head.

“You can’t do that,” I said.

My sister pulled the mask forward. “Didn’t you see what your father did to me? I just want to stop this plastic pressing against the cuts. You don’t have to shut your eyes. I just need to loosen the strap.”

She groaned when the orthopedic material came away from her face. From where I was, it looked like the mask was still in the same place. She was holding its chin with one hand, and with the other she was playing with the elastic strap to loosen it.

She let her shoulders drop, breathing all the way out.

“Do you really want to get out of the basement?” she said. “At last?”

I looked at the unlit firefly jar.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Do you know how?”

“Course I know. But first you have to make me a promise.”

“What?”

“That you’ll only listen to me. And you’ll open your eyes from now on.” She made the vowels long when she spoke. Her waist made a circle, as if dancing with an imaginary hoop. “Do you promise me?”

I said yes with a sound in my throat.

“If you don’t open them, you’ll never find out what really happens in this basement,” she added. “You don’t know anything yet, and—”

She let the mask fall before she finished the sentence.

I saw her face for an instant before I could react.

And after that instant, my eyes refused to close.

Because the face that appeared behind the mask changed everything.

My sister blinked. She was as overwhelmed as I was that we could look at each other without the barrier of white plastic that’d always been there. On her face there was no disgusting hole instead of a nose. There wasn’t a single burn. Apart from the marks from Dad’s recent slaps, my sister’s face was as smooth and pink as mine. Under one of her eyes I could even make out two moles identical to the ones I had.