PART 2.
This is a short story of sorts that might or might not be part of a larger cycle. If it is, then it is towards the end — part 4 of 6. Maybe. We’ll see. Anyway, rather than dump the story into one large post, I’m going to chunk it up and let it be consumed over a couple of posts. Enjoy.
Pump-pump.
She heard a heart beat. In the inky black, she heard a heart beat and breathing.
Pump-pump. Gasp. Pump-pump. Gasp.
Then she sputtered back into oblivion.
***
Pump-pump.
Pump-pump.
She could not see. Everything was pitch black. She could feel that she was sitting with her feet tucked under herself. But the darkness was so thorough that she could not see herself. Through her clothes (a doctor’s gown?) she felt the coolness of a hard floor. Blindly, she lifted fingers to her face, and felt them push against the flesh of a cheek. She slowly let them pass over the smoothness of a forehead. Then she lowered her hands to the floor in front of herself, and, kneeling now, crawled herself forward. The ground was smooth. Stone perhaps. Or concrete. She worked in a tight circle, and in all directions that is what she felt. Stone, smooth and cool. No walls.
Her eyes began to play tricks. A patch of light floated across her vision.
“Hello?!”
She crawled forward. Shapes seemed to rise up, flowing and pulsing across her vision. They snaked up, writhing in all directions.
“Hello?! Can anybody hear me?”
She paused. Her ears rushed with the silence.
Pump-pump.
Pump-pump.
She lowered herself gently to the floor, lay on her side and brought her knees up to her chest. Deep down inside she heard a small voice say, “I always knew they would abandon you. Why wouldn’t they?” And then she fell asleep.
***
How many times she awakened and slept she did not know. At first she crawled, patting her hands in front of herself, but eventually she stopped. What was the point? Nothing ever changed. The cool stone. The drenching blackness. And silence, except for a heartbeat — a breathing. These sounds of a body were not connected with her thinking. They existed elsewhere. And so sleeping became waking, and waking became sleeping.
Dreams coursed around her. She was flying over green trees. She was walking next to a boy, and he looked into her eyes. She was buttoning a shirt, only to find the buttons coming undone even as she moved on to the next. She was in a cellar, and something was coming down the steps, coming down to kill her.
