Marlene Walker

The Girl Down Cellar Marlene Walker

Painter Kory Stamp is looking forward to nine days alone while her family is out of town. She is anxiously finishing up her household duties when, for reasons she cannot understand, she is locked in the family's dirt fruit cellar. First she attempts to escape, then to figure out who imprisoned her and why. Reviewing all the possible reasons anyone she knows might want to restrain her, she wonders everything from the possibility her husband might be playing a trick on her to her in-laws punishing her for proposing to right a wrong they performed decades earlier. She had recently discovered that the Stamps had in effect stolen the land of local Japanese American farmers, the Nakamuras, when they were interned during World War II. Kory's desperate attempts to figure out who has locked her in is superseded by the need to find food and warmth as the weather turns cold. Sometimes, her self-confidence improves as she manages to deal even minimally with her basic needs. But as her physical condition worsens due to the scanty sustenance at her disposal, she drifts into a long habit of finding comfort by recalling myths she heard a local Native American woman tell when she was a child. Kory's art work begins with the creation of what she calls "mind-paintings" of these and other myths about repressed women. Thus, she tries to fulfill the happy task she has set for herself by creating detailed plans for art work due for her upcoming gallery showing. But, after days in the cellar, her deteriorating physical and mental condition, the mythical characters in her paintings come to life for her in that small room underground. She may imagine one of the figures in her favorite myths might come to save her, but the voices of her family in her head ridicule that hope.