The Stars and the Cookie Jar

The room exists. I have, in fact, found myself in it. It is in Oswiecim, Poland.

The Blue Room
 
Pocked walls, scored deep in the plaster by hands that tried and failed. A ceiling flat and low. A doorless door. No harm now, empty air at my back now, plenty of air. Under my feet the floor roughens, concrete, cheap, and I take steps forward, inward, small steps that half slide. My shoes carried mud into this place. Mud is everywhere here, outside. It must have clung to them, too, all that earth; splashed up on bruised shins, spattering bare hips. I feel the press of a hundred thousand, I feel the hitch of breathing. No prayer here, no escape here, no comfort here, no hiding your children against your breast, no, Mama, no, I want my Daddy I want my clothes Mama! And the air begins to burn. The walls were not blue, then; on the floor there was a metal grating, cold and cutting bare feet. Blood sluiced down. The walls were a high and perfect white, the color of winter cloud. There was a light overhead. A socket is there now, bare, and the ceiling like a borrowed sky is blue. Such a blue, such a color: angels would wear it, if angels came here.
 
Angels passed these doors, maybe; they came naked and crying,  too hot and too cold, if they did. They heard the sucking seal around the door; they saw the light black out; they wondered too. If they passed this way, they wondered too. The blue smeared over the lintel, the blue of the walls and floors, the blue it is: the colour of an angel’s searching eye as an electric light’s last flare is drawn down in it, the colour of wide-eyed drowning in breathed air. I know what made the blue, no, I know. Not the air burning down, not the downcast eyes of angels. I know. There is poison in the walls and the ceiling and the floor, and later, much later, when all had gone quiet, when the last of us paled and choked, the pure white blameless plaster bled out blue. Poison, seeping, blossomed this place the colour of asters and sky.
  I look up to the ceiling and try to find heaven; my arms go around me instead. I wanted to go in alone.
 
On my finger my ring I twist and the walls throb, blue, and they close