Read an extract from I Am the Cage by Allison Sweet Grant

10th January, 2025

Read an extract from I Am the Cage by Allison Sweet Grant. An emotional coming-of-age story about a young woman’s journey to find herself.

Hi.
My name is Elisabeth.
That’s what I call myself now.
What I mean is, that’s who I am now.
That’s who I am.

Most people don’t like coming home to an empty house, but it’s the best part of my day. Leaving it is the hardest. The walk to the store is long and cold, and I wrap my arms around myself. It’s early and the fresh-laid powder is untouched. It snowed overnight just enough to make everything beautiful but not so much to make everyone miserable. The sky is a tranquil washed-out blue, and the streets are coated in a blanket of stillness. Icicles drip beneath snow-lined branches. The sun, so brilliant against the snow I have to shield my eyes, forms the shadow that is my only companion on my way to work.

Each step I take leaves a crunching footprint behind me. Approaching the end of the street, I pass the only house that could be considered my neighbor, though there’s a huge plot of land that stretches between us, barren except for a small oasis of trees. The town’s sheriff, Sheriff Harmon, lives there, though we’ve never met. I’ve seen his headlights, like tiny fireflies in the distance, pulling into his driveway late at night and pulling out again early in the morning. But catching glimpses of his police car from my window has been the extent of our interaction. As for anyone else who might be living nearby, they’re all strangers to me. I come to the end of the street and turn left at the stop sign onto the single-lane highway. Here, the narrow road has already been plowed, so I find a stretch of exposed pavement and quicken my pace. There’s not much to see—a few large warehouses in the distance, a run-down barn and a decaying fence, vast expanses of snow-covered fields. It doesn’t really turn pretty until I get closer to Main Street.

I turn left again at the corner and pass a small specialty market. Across the street is a two-story gallery with thickly framed watercolors and colorful beaded necklaces hanging in the window. I pass the flower shop with its latticed storefront and its lights already on. Steam rises out of an exhaust pipe above the little diner at the end of the block, and I can smell the flour in the air. There’s a bakery with what must be decrepit fondant-covered boxes piled high in the front display, not having changed at all since I arrived in this town. There’s a used bookstore, its aisles so narrow and jammed with books it feels like a life-sized maze. I’ve ventured inside a handful of times but refuse to visit too often. I don’t want the owner to start referring to me as a regular. I walk by one of the many souvenir shops, which really aren’t any different from the shop where I work, but which my boss, Mr. Ito, insists on calling convenience stores. I turn right on Cottage Row another block down and cut across the empty street.
I pull the key from the inside pocket of my parka and let myself in with a ding of the bell. I lock the door behind me and flip the switch, watching each row of fluorescent lights come to life in succession, like stadium spectators doing the wave. There’s a small storage room in the back where Mr. Ito keeps all of the business’s paperwork, and I hang my coat on a hook on the wall. It’s just before eight o’clock. On Saturdays, the store opens at ten. I sit down in the office chair behind Mr. Ito’s desk. And I wait. 

Mr. Terry Ito and I are the establishment’s only two employees. The wooden sign above the front window reads THE TREASURE BOX, but we just call it the store. I wandered in the week I moved to Fish Creek, a small town near the northernmost point of a serrated peninsula off the east coast of Wisconsin. I was looking for basic necessities—you know, like scented stationery and dream catchers. Mr. Ito was alone behind the counter and let me saunter around uninterrupted until I approached him to pay for my selections. He rang up my beeswax candles on an old-fashioned cash register, silently but with a smile. I paid the fifteen dollars I owed in cash. I was about to exit the shop when I stopped and turned to him. I knew I’d have to find a job eventually, and this looked like as good a place as any, so I asked if he was hiring. It turned out he had grown up in Fish Creek and moved away to raise a family but had returned after becoming a widower. He bought the store to keep himself busy, and he’d been running it alone for the past ten years since his wife’s death. But now that he was getting older, he thought taking on some help wasn’t a bad idea. I didn’t disagree.

I started coming in a few days a week, doing inventory and straightening shelves. Mr. Ito lets me go about my business at his business without much interference. He likes to sit at the register and read the local newspaper, and if there’s nothing for me to do, I keep myself busy sampling perfumes and testing candles and deciding on a daily basis which ones I like best. Fish Creek is a pretty small town. Although it gets plenty of tourists in the warmer months, the little bell on our shop door doesn’t ring too often. Most of the time it’s just Mr. Ito and me.

Mr. Ito pays me a pretty decent wage, considering I really don’t do anything. It’s not hard to order more stock when we run low on something (usually it’s the lavender soap, which Mr. Ito says is favored by the more finicky families in town) or to dust the wicker rocking chairs lining the back of the store. I like Mr. Ito a lot, though I don’t tell him so. Better not to become too invested. Better not to become too close. Mr. Ito’s kind of like a houseplant—he adds life to the space but doesn’t demand a lot of attention. He generally sticks to his side of the store, and I generally stick to mine. There are days when we say hello in the morning and goodbye when we close up and not another word in between. I think that’s okay with both of us. I think he just likes having someone there.

And although he’s never said so, I think he knows that for me this arrangement is not just okay—it’s ideal. Because I can tell myself I’m not a weirdo—I have a job in town. And I’m not a burden—I’m nineteen and a contributing member of society. And I can tell myself I’m not paranoid, because I nod and wave as I pass people going to and from work every day. I’m just an introvert. A loner. A solitary person. And I can tell myself that everything is fine. There’s nothing wrong with spending my days decluttering the dank corners of an empty souvenir shop. There’s nothing wrong with spending every night alone in my little cabin. There’s nothing wrong with making myself a little dinner, listening to a little music, reading a little book, and wishing for a little peace. And never letting anything out and never letting anyone in. And doing it all over again the next day.

I am fine.

I Am the Cage comes out in paperback original on 20th February.