Unique Snowflake

You awaken to total darkness, all memories of who you have been scraped away from your grey matter. Your prison is ovoid in shape, just over two metres in diameter at its widest point, flattening out at the bottom, tapering at the top. As the days have passed, or perhaps it’s only been hours, a sloshing viscous fluid has incrementally risen up above your ankles and over your shins, and then your knees. It is now aligned with your stomach.

You do not need to eat or drink or sleep or defecate. At one point, you taste the sluggish liquid from your fingertips, but its extreme bitterness forces you to gag and spit it out.

It is inescapable that you will die in this place, your lungs filling with fluid. Whether your internment is punishment for a crime committed, or merely a cruel cosmic joke, is beside the point.

A calm settles over you. You scratch at the walls of your prison, not out of desperation, but in an effort to leave behind a message that you’ve existed at all, your fingernails scraping patterns that you imagine look like snowflakes or pine needles: art committed for its own sake.

As you take a break and massage your fingertips, you hear similar scratching from all around you, muffled. You are not alone; others exist, and make their marks in solidarity. You smile, heartened, and return to your work.

(Originally published in Twenty-Four Flavours: Century Egg, July 2013.)