FLICKER — NaNoWriMo 2016
NOVEMBER 12TH, 2016 — DAY 12
Well… There was always going to be a day like today. 271 words written.
Eu tasted battery acid when she stepped down from the cell. Phantom sensations caused by a hiccupping virt weren’t unusual. Pain of extracted fingernails. Hot stench of spew. Buzzsaw biting through concrete. They weren’t all as bad as that but they’re the ones you tend to remember. So she was getting off light with battery acid on the back of her tongue. Eu caught a glimpse of herself in the glass doors to her apartment. Face shiny with tepid sweat, jaw hanging slack, before she disappeared with the silent glide of the automatic doors. She stumbled through into the lobby, instinctively whipped her head to the optic on the wall, an ultraviolent ray blasted painlessly onto her retina before she continued on. It was late. But for the dull tremble of the cell stream that you’d never shake, the lobby was a welcome site of sonic respite. The elevator was open for Eu when she approached but she just needed a second, needed to slump her shoulder against the red granite that gilded the open doors of one of four elevators, needed to listen to the fragile lick of the fountain they surrounded. Eyes faultered shut. She was trying to hold the sound of the fountain over her virt scraping round her head. The water lapped with a welcome randomness, seemingly on its own whims, distinct from the rhythms of algorithms that dominanted the soundscape of the world. Her sheer exhaustion helped. The water’s play against the sides of the fountain would stay with Eu until she’d been taken up the eighteen floors to fall horizontal.
