Grab Some Air
They promise you a window but instead they shove you into a room and slam the door and throw away the key and the walls are weeping and the floor is damp concrete and it’s too dark to tell if you’re in over your head and the only light comes from the keyhole which isn’t there on account of it being a modern lock with a card or a fob or a self-driving car ramming through as you drop your head into your palms and cup your eyes until you see nothing except for grainy blackness jumping against your ripped retinas
and yet you insist on the charade and peek through the fake keyhole without finding the light as you listen to muffled groans from next door where they’re kicking or smacking an alien critter with no sound effects and you can’t tell if the sound you don’t hear is fabric scraping against the rough concrete floor or skin or a Bigfoot wannabe stamping on a spider and you step back wondering if those delivering the blows are coming for you and as you back away you fall onto the concrete against the wall and you sit there on your haunches facing the door
and in the jittery blackness you can see thick dark liquid seeping in under the door and gaining speed ever so slowly like it’s never gonna need any kind of key when it suddenly gushes into the room and rises fast with a force that defies time and gravity and shows you with the clarity of the sky over a never-ending desert what it’s like to get in over your head and even while you’re overthinking it you know you gotta get outta there seeing how you don’t know if the remaining oxygen would last long enough for help to arrive
and you jump to your feet and start hammering at the door but the only sentinel on the outside is a thuggish silence who screams back at you to shut the fuck up while the rising dark liquid is ready to pounce on the last air bubbles in your lungs and the door gives and you get swept with the torrent into a feverish red pool laughing up and down the hill before you get your bearings and make out the sky and dive to the muddy bottom and dig out the missing key as a battery of machine guns sprays radioactive bullets across the pond side to side back and forth but they know to stop to reload the instant you break through the surface to grab some air
and as you swim ashore the screaming media and the clicking cameras tell you that you gotta congrat yourself on how you’re meant to be alive and poof they’re gone by the time you stumble out of the blood bath and shed your dripping red skin and stretch back on the warm sand and dream about a trove of keyholes on a treasure island which is gonna be drowned by the rising ocean and you’d like to move there when the tide is high and everybody is leaving so housing is free and you look around the beach for someone to share with and you try to forget how they promised you a window when they grab you by the arms and the legs and throw you on the damp concrete and slam the door and throw away the key and it’s too dark to tell if it’s the same room and if you’re in over your head
Join us for more weird & dark tales, we’re posting every day between now and Halloween: here on The Mad River and on 13 Days of Dark & Weird.
