Too fast, and the plastic collapsed against my lips.
Too slow, and panic rose in my chest until the dirt seemed to tighten around me.
I focused on the smallest things I could still control.
Inhale.
khli doz gha nhar
Pause.
Exhale.
Listen.
Our baby shifted low inside me that first morning, a slow pressure beneath my ribs that stopped before I could be certain it had happened.
I pressed my tongue against the straw and waited for another movement.
Nothing came.
The silence inside my body frightened me more than the laughter behind me.
I tried to remember the last time the baby had moved before they dragged me outside.
I remembered standing in the kitchen with one hand on the counter while my husband spoke to his mother in the hallway.
I remembered the refrigerator humming and the freezer bag folded inside my pocket.
I remembered the baby pushing once against my palm as though answering me.
Then I remembered my khli doz gha nhar husband telling his mother that embarrassment was the only language I understood.
That was when I knew the argument was no longer an argument.
They had already decided what they were going to do.
When my husband leaned over the porch railing and asked whether I was ready to behave, I lowered my eyes toward the dirt.
He mistook silence for surrender.
That helped me.
Beneath the loose soil near my right shoulder, my phone sat inside a freezer bag with the microphone uncovered and the screen dark.
I had slipped it there before they dragged me outside.
It was not a perfect hiding place.
It was only the hiding place I had been able to reach.
My right hand was buried too, but they had left enough space around my wrist for me to move one finger.
