I woke up on the floor in darkness.
There was no moonlight. No starlight. No dim light. Nothing reflected.
The darkness caressed the tiny hairs all along my back… as it tried to suffocate me.
I wanted to scream.
Ignoring the crawling of my skin, I closed my eyes tight… tighter… still tighter and was rewarded with red and white patterns. Though I knew it changed nothing, I was better for it.
Where had I learned that?
I opened my eyes, but the patterns were still there.
Something wasn't right.
My chest was tight and burning.
Something in me was stopping me from breathing, from taking a single breath.
It didn't want to let the darkness in.
It was a struggle, but I took a breath… and then another.
The patterns disappeared, and the darkness returned as if it had never left.
I had to learn to breathe all over again despite the darkness crawling all over me.
The air was cool but not cold, damp but not drizzly.
Seconds passed, then minutes.
Nothing changed.
Something was changing. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. It was subtle, barely perceptible.
I felt the floor around me. The wood was rough, almost splintering. The boards were long and wide.
I found a small gap and let my finger wiggle through. It was maybe a knuckle thick with nothing underneath.
I ranged out, letting my hands crawl along the floor.
My fingers brushed something cold.
I poked it to learn it was hard, metallic.
I couldn't see it.
I reached out and grabbed it. The thin pipe came out of the floor and went straight up through a bracket parallel to the floor. The bracket went to the left and right, not back to a wall. There were more pipes parallel to the first, two widths of my hand apart.
Suspicion and fear nagged at me.
There was no wall behind the pipe. The floor ended several inches past it.
Suspicion gave way to desperation.
I scrambled around to find more and more pipes.
They weren't pipes…
They were bars.
I ran my hands along the bars, counting frantically, clinging to the task to anchor myself. Forty-five bars—then a corner. Another forty-five. Again, another. My hands were trembling by the time I finished. One hundred and eighty bars. Cold. Unyielding. Trapping me. There was no way out.
Beyond those bars, in every direction, the floor ended. I put my arm through the bars and could feel nothing but dank darkness.
That left only one direction: up.
Using the bars for balance, I reached up on my tippy toes and felt nothing. I jumped. My fingertips brushed something rough.
When I landed, the floor shook, shifted, and moved. A dozen hinges screeched somewhere above me, the sound vibrating through my skull like an angry wail. It wasn't just the floor beneath me—everything around me was shifting and alive.
My suspicion was confirmed…
I was in a cage.
Why was I in a cage? I didn't know. I couldn't remember.
Fear exploded into rage. My palms burned, my fingers raw from gripping the metal too tight. I screamed, the sound breaking in my throat, and still—still—it wasn't enough. I shook the bars and stomped the floor.
My efforts only increased the cage's swaying.
Nausea slammed the back of my stomach, and I burped up the taste of bile. Despite the disgusting taste in my mouth, I realized I was starving. There was no food.
When had I last eaten?
Did it matter? Someone would come and feed me.
I called out.
Tap, tap, tap.
A rhythmic tapping of something small, clicking something metallic, coming from above.
I called out again, but there was no change, and nothing answered. I shouted until I was hoarse. There was no water to soothe my parched lips and throat.
Tap, tap, tap.
When had I last drank anything? Did that matter? Water would be brought… right?
Why… why did I think that? Because it wouldn't make sense to cage someone and then leave them to die. If they had wanted me dead, they could have just killed me.
Tap, tap, tap.
Worried, I fingered my head, checking for an injury. Nothing hurt, but dried crusty stuff was thick in my hair and trailed down my spine.
I didn't have on a shirt. Now that I was checking, I had nothing on, not even my underwear. I was completely naked. I had been stripped, caged, and left dangling in the darkness.
Tap, tap, tap.
Why was I put here? How long had I been here? Where even was here?
I didn't have the answers. I didn't know what was going on. I couldn't remember, well, anything before waking up here.
Tap, tap, tap.
Why? Why?!? Why!!!
Emotions swirled around inside me, too big for me to identify.
I needed to get control, to calm down. To think things through. To remember…
Except I couldn't remember!
I swallowed hard, resisting the urge to vomit, and then vomited anyway. After emptying myself, I crawled away from my filth.
I rolled onto my back and waited for the cage to stop moving and the darkness to stop spinning.
Something had changed.
There still wasn't light; the world was still dark.
The cage had slowed, almost coming to a rest.
The tapping… it had stopped. The world was silent. I didn't like it.
When had the clicking stopped?
It was maddening hearing only silence in that darkness.
I had already tried for more, and my throat was still hoarse from those efforts.
What more could I do?
What more was there?
Was this to be my entire existence?
I curled into the fetal position and cried. I was so exhausted and hurt so much I didn't think I could do anything else, including sleep.
Sleep embraced me anyway.