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She waited for her thoughts to still in the same way, as she might wait to fall asleep on a hot night she longed for it, as an escape from the fear and the pain. At last she could not move even her eyes. She waited until she felt her breathing become harsh and regular and her tears stop. She waited while the creeping numbness took her fingers and her toes and her heart. They said it was like dying, and she wanted to die. In her village, when the children had talked about the ghosts that took people over the seas, they had said that your mind fell asleep under the spell. When they gave her the food that would spellbind her, she swallowed it. The metal was cold, and sticky with someone else’s blood. She cried and fought not to go down, but one of the men cuffed her hard so she was dizzy, and before her head could recover she was lying in a tiny, filthy space with shackles about her wrists and ankles. It was dark in the belly of the ship, and the fetid stench was worse than anything she had ever imagined. It was the last time she would hear her name for a very long time. Her brother crying out to her as she was torn away from his arms wrenched her heart in two. They took the men and older boys into the ship first. They would feed it to her on the first day. They only wanted her to work for them in their own country. They didn’t want to feed her to their hollow world-which was called a ship and was used for traveling oceans. The ghosts were men, white men, and they were from a country over the sea. The man who sold her told her that it wasn’t true. The people brought to them were placed under evil magic, so that their minds fell asleep and their bodies belonged to the ghosts. The ghosts lived in a hollow world, they said, that roamed the sea and swallowed people up. Her brother and his friends had told stories about the ghosts that came and took people away. When she saw the blanched white faces and pale eyes of the men to whom she was to be sold, her attempts at bravery broke, and she burst into tears. She never knew what happened to her parents. Her brother yelled to her to run, but she stumbled on the ground outside, and a pair of hands seized her. She and her brother were alone in the house when strangers broke in, armed with muskets and knives.