ceiling strap

In 2000 the council built an extension, providing a fourth bedroom, a shower room, an extended kitchen, overhead hoists and ceiling straps, plus patio door access to the garden.

You can imagine the "atmosphere" in my car, with most of the riders having one arm up as they clung to the ceiling straps. Suddenly, my seat choice--a boon on most days--turned into a bust, as I struggled to make my way toward the exit and a much-needed breath of flesh air.

then I didn't start to scream, I didn't get away, I didn't even unhook my hands from the ceiling straps, I let him do it, I responded to the violence with a stillness filled with fright and then made more complete because beyond that threshold there was something untestifiable, a tale that could never end up on the pages of Cioe, something I could never tell my friends or fit in to my parents' emancipated worldview, something mine and mine alone, the only freedom that the monstrously free world in which I was born could not tear away from me.