A New World

She couldn't be sure how long she had been sitting there. Seconds seemed to bleed into minutes, minutes into hours. She sat in fetal position with her arms tightly guarding her face from the gusts of cold that came with increasing ferocity in through the gaps in the stable's shoddy walls. The other women were talking to one another once again. When she first arrived, the women hysterically screamed and trashed against each other like wild hens first threw into a coop but as time went on they had grown more and more quiet. Occasionally, some strange force would seem to take hold of some of the younger girls and they would begin talking rapidly. When this happened, the older women would take turns subduing the girls with soft, resolute voices. Sometimes, she wondered what words of comfort or scolding they offered in their strange foreign language. To her, it sounded deep and guttural, completely antithetical to the singsong language that her mother would use to calm her. The only voices familiar to her were the bleats of the lambs in their pens.

Suddenly, she heard the latch of the door lift and a rush a light entered the room. A stocky man with a gray gray beard shouted at them and she watched the row of women as they slowly stood and marched towards him. She stood back for a moment. For days, she had prayed to leave the cold, shit-infested room but unsure of what awaited her outside she suddenly prayed to stay.