Black

Based on a true story.

You love dress shopping. You love trying on clothes, picking out colors you like, seeing hilarious new styles. You hate shopping alone; it’s always with your friends. But one day you have no choice�"homecoming is a week away and you still don’t have a dress. Your date keeps asking about a color because he needs to get a matching tie. So you go alone. It’s just once, But just once can make all the difference in the world. After browsing for several minutes, you find a gorgeous black and white dress. You look all over, but you can’t find your size�"the only one is a nine. Too big. You feel slightly sick. What if you never find a decent dress? You tell yourself you’re being ridiculous; of course there’s a dress somewhere in this huge department store just for you. You can’t shake the lingering headache, so you keep browsing. As the choices get narrower and narrower, you finally pick up the size nine and take it to an employee. She says that is the last one, but she will call the mall ten miles away and check for you. You agree, still feeling slightly dizzy. You hope it’s just the excitement of finally getting asked to a dance by a boy. As the woman is transferred from department to department, trying to locate this dress for you, you lean up against the counter, your head pounding. You can see her looking at you strangely out the corner of her eye; you stand up straighter so you don’t appear to be annoyed by the short wait. Two more women approach the counter to check out a neon blue dress and you stand off to the side to wait politely. Suddenly you feel your whole body grow cold and clammy. You can’t move your fingers; your face feels like it’s shrinking; your leg starts to shake uncontrollably, of its own accord. You grasp the counter hard, your knuckles glowing white under your paling skin. The pain in your stomach is sharp, but at the same time you know it’s not your stomach that’s the problem. Your eyes cross and your vision starts to go out in patches; you can see the two women on your left, now they’ve disappeared. You can still see the counter and the dress laying on your right, now the dress is gone, now the dress is back but the counter is no more. Slowly the black patches grow bigger until you feel like you’re wearing tinted sunglasses, inside, at night. You can barely see; you’re getting dizzier with no sense of direction. You can’t hold your head up any longer… you can no longer see… even your thoughts are getting slow. You hear a woman’s voice shouting, but it takes you several seconds to process the sound and another several to decipher it: “Someone help!” You realize you are no longer gripping the counter; you feel something hit your shoulder, hard. Suddenly you can’t sense direction at all, and your vision is getting blacker by the second. You think you’re falling through space for several seconds, until your body registers that you have actually hit the carpeted floor. But by then, you’re gone.