In Stasis Part One: The Cell
Her breaths came in short staccato bursts like machine gun fire. She tried to slow them down, but couldn’t manage it. In truth, the more she tried to regulate each intake of air, the more ragged and choppy each breath became. Her lungs wheezed like broken exhaust pipe. The cement walls closed in over her head. It made her feel cramped and squeezed like she was caught in the palm of an old, sickly giant. She felt a panic attack coming on. They rolled in like waves. She could almost see them coming as if she was sitting along the beach. They usually swelled up when everything felt so enormous and all-consuming outside of her little cage.
To escape the ominous feelings rising around her, she turned her gaze to the small window on the far side of her eight-food-wide cell. It was too high up on the wall for her to see anything but inky sky, but oh what wonders laid beyond that tiny pinhole opening. For a few moments, she visualized the golden-brown hills sweeping endlessly out into the horizon: Then a cerulean ocean heaving violent waves melodically onto an obdurate rock strewn shore.
She felt the power of opposing forces making war. The sea tirelessly pounded away at the stones, who refused to make way, even as they were slowly but surely eroded into their composite parts; the slowness of the reduction somehow making it more devastating to witness. Everyday the rocks became less of themselves, even as they remained standing in the breach. To an untrained eye, it appeared as though nothing about their gloomy presence had changed. But for those who knew how to see, it was obvious that the shorelines would never be the same. That one day the rock’s vigil would end and they’d end up back in the sea, back in the melting pot, back where it all began.
For a moment, she wondered if they felt like she did?
Hopeless. Desperate. Alone.
Most people say rocks can’t feel anything. But she knew better. Anyone who spent as much time on them as she had would tell you the same. Everything on Earth can feel, in one way or another.
Restlessness rattled through her body like the popping of a heated corn kernel. She ran her hands down her lower extremities. Her calves and thighs had withered away into something like dry cornstalks. With her fingers she traced her shins as they curved out in slight arcs away from her ankles. She traced her legs all the way up to her bony knees. They each consisted of knobs that protruded in all kinds of odd angles.
Where there had once been thick, corded muscle there was now soft flesh covered in flaky, pale skin. The tan of her skin had faded quickly, once she was put inside. She hadn’t seen direct sunlight in weeks. Well, it must’ve been weeks, time tends to bend when you are alone in a room that you never leave.
Her captors hadn’t provided a mirror, so she couldn’t be sure of what she looked like. She brought her fingers all the way up to her face. The points of her cheekbones jutted into her fingers like the seams of a baseball. The sockets around her eyes sank into her skull like sodden pits of mud. The surface of her face was a rotten apple. She must have been damn near skeletal.
It wasn’t a surprising discovery. She had refused to eat for over two weeks. She hadn’t refused out of protest, as much as out of apathy. Why did she need to eat? She simply lay on a threadbare cot for days on end. No need to fuel up for a purely static existence. There was no need. She would remain in that spot until, well… until it ended.
She could the wasting away most pointedly in her hands. They retained now power, and were brittle and cold. Her back ached from resting on such a tiny pad. She grabbed it in her hands. Squeezing it as tight as she could. It was no more than three inches thick, but she could make much of a dent. She put a hand underneath it and felt the cold unrelenting presence of cement. For a moment the thought hung in her mind like a spider crawling down its web: She was laying in her tomb.
In a way, she felt relief. In that way that only truly hopeless person can feel solace at the ugly sight of death. It’s relief in the knowledge that whole game would soon be over. At that point, she was just waiting–waiting for the day when the end finally came to greet her with black finality. Her world had come to a halt on the day she was caught. The captors had simply reached out and stopped the movements of heaven and earth.
So there she was, and here she would remain.
Obdurate. Obsolete. Obliterated.
During the day, at least, light from the window crept silently along the wall like a swallow in flight. That was the only symbol of the movement of time that had been left to her.
How long had it been since they put her here? How long had it been since she moved since?
The answers wouldn’t come. They were there, in her mind, she thought, but swimming around somewhere under the murky water of her consciousness.
Whatever, the answers to those, and any other questions, didn’t matter anymore. She let the query float away from her like a child letting go of a balloon. The questions drifted off into the blackness of space–into oblivion.
She rolled away from the coal black sky that crept throw the darkened window. She closed her eyes.
She waited for oblivion to come for her too.
This part one of a multi-part story. To read part two “Voices” go here.
