Gills

I've come to hate this. It's all over the place and fails to get a solid description.

 

 

              There was a blindness that day, lying over the striped flesh of my eyes. I sat there in the middle of the floor, looking. There was a steady dripping at the far right corner of the dim blue walls. It was a torture of some kind that made my job even more important. I was a motivated now, and I was set on getting out. I swear there were things crawling on the surface of every inch of me, grazing to get inside of me. I could taste the brackish water that was just outside of the small California lake that engulfed me then, and the rocky walls were closing me into unbearable creases in the wall that made me feel the slimy flesh of withering cave dwellers that the world had never seen.

                I couldn’t remember why I’d come here. And the more that I thought about it, the more that I could have sworn that I’d been there before. Darkness, slime, some sharp object that’s just barely in reach, it all seemed so familiar. The water was rising still, and the more time I wasted, the farther that the water ingested my body. I stood up in attempt to be something, anything at all. There was no source of light except the one that I knew was waiting for me outside of the cave.

                I pushed my face against the walls, carved neatly by nature’s own design. My body curved into the barrier, fancying that it wouldn’t be such a bad place to die. But then I felt the paralysis of fear that sparked within my heart, and the startling feel of something truly inhuman shivering through my bones. The water had reached above my knees, and the thick of my thigh was drenched in water that I knew was a greenish-blue.

                The silhouette of hallucination . . . . or not . . . . came pouring lazily at me. I jumped in the spree of sentiment that edged through my skin. And the water was making its way toward my waste. Just to the left, there was a slightly dark figure that made its way toward me. My throat was closing up, and throbbing as if something were inside of it, trying to burst out. A bloody image flashed through my mind, just once.

                There was a knife in my pocket, this I knew for it had been cold against my flesh when I grabbed it before I came here. There was an intention for it, oh yes, but it had changed now. I remember saying goodbye to the house that I hated for what I thought would be the last time, waving to the stupid moldy patio furniture and thinking of the future that a guy like me would have never experienced anyhow.

I tried to see the knife again, imagined its point folded neatly into itself, sharp and dangerous, buried within my jeans. I wrapped my fingers around its handle, the glittering image drawing nearer, and I wouldn’t have that. The water had closed the opening of the cave completely, and I’d have to swim deep under to get to it. Worse, worse now; there was a psychotic rage inside of me. I screamed in despair, thrashing the knife from my sodden jeans. It would have shined so brightly then, if there had been light. I imagined the gleam, there out in front of me at the tip of the knife that exposed itself angrily. Once more, I screamed, the throbbing in my neck growing; it was so intense I could have . . . . slit my throat. And then I thought to myself; I thought for just one quick flash of a moment, If only I had gills, I could get out of this place. I thought it again, and the idea seemed more and more rational the more that I thought about it. I imagined the gills, there on my neck, clean and glittering. I thrashed my body into the side of the cave once more, and I swore that there was some sort of creature inching toward me with every second, stepping with some inhuman, slimy foot. I could hear the slick toes of whatever it was crawling in the darkness, but the biggest enemy there with me was myself and my shiny little knife. My innocent knife had a job tonight, but something strange had delayed its kill that was supposed to be me. Still, I held it out, pretending that I had some sort of ability to protect myself. I still remember the gleam that came toward me at that very second. Anyone with proper brain function would consider me mad, but I saw it, I saw the gleam of some demon that came toward me in that cave. Right then, the knife made two quick thrashes out in the crisp, deadening air as I lashed about pathetically. I screamed again, scratching at the things that crawled all over me as I made a blood-drenched decision, the blade making its treacherous way toward me. I lay my head to one side, closing my eyes as the bare flesh of my neck was exposed.

 

 

“It’s morning now,” she said. I shake the blanket of info in front of me, getting up from the dilapidated computer chair that still had the brown stain from Uncle Mark’s depressive state. The screen has nearly become a part of me, the words could say anything and they’d pass through every concaved particle in my brain. But today, the words sound a bit diluted; too diluted to remove any sense of despair. Everyone’s so set on determination these days, and I keep hearing that “the cure to anguish is hope!!” But how can I be hopeful when the bread is moldy and the rice has earwigs crawling through it??

                The potatoes are nearly done now; I can smell them from the kitchen. The dill has soaked through the fleshy vegetable; the oil is gone into the antique pan that Grandma Duphor left when her organs gave up.

                “The sun has come, now . . . . the sun’s here.” She keeps saying it like it can bring something into this dim-lit house. There are leaves on the ground and some sort of fungus growing in between the third and fourth floorboard, and it seems that the only up-to-date technology here is the computer, which so gratefully sits in the corner, facing away from everything so that my eyes bleed when I turn away from the light. “It’s golden . . . .” her voice sounds again, this time only to herself. Finally, I reply. “Rosen, come here. Sit at the table now, come away from the window and have some potatoes.” She glares at me with some emptiness inside of her. “Honest . . . . we had potatoes yesterday, and the day before that. Just let me stay.” She turns herself back toward the window as I set off to eat the potatoes on my own, for the third time this week. And scraping the browned vegetable onto my seashell-patterned plate is rather depressing, let me say.

                It’s a gloomy chair, the one that I’ve been sitting in for the time that we’ve been here. The wood is dark so that when I sit, the black of my pants disappears. Just as I topple a fat chunk of potato onto my tongue, she speaks. “What happened to your neck??” My fork falls into the plate. Releasing a calm breath of rigid air, I smirk sideways, my eyes falling to the dusty floor. “It was a cat.” I can feel Rosen’s empty eyes scorching through the back of my head.

                My eyes still in place at the floor, I remember.

Author's Note

As I said, this really fails to capture the idea of mystery and wonder, from the reader.

Reviews

[speakingcolors]

when i first saw that you edited this piece and requested that i read it, i wasn't sure what to expect. could it get better, or were you making a futile attempt to build on something great? fortunately, it was the first. it got a lot better.

so what does it make me feel? well, i can't quite describe it in words. i know how i feel when i read it, but, well, that's all. i guess i just have to say that a smile, or rather, maybe a smirk comes across my face when i read this.

what is it about? truely? i don't know and i hate to guess when i don't know for sure because i don't want to be wrong, and i don't want the writer to think that people get something completely different from what they really mean (unless of course that's what you're going for).

the only thing i don't like is this sentence: "And scraping the browned vegetable onto my seashell-patterned plate is rather depressing, let me say." it just doesn't feel like it fits the...the...atmosphere of the rest of the story. other than that. it was great. simply.

[Broken.]

Darn I seem to feel left out sadly.
But this piece is amazing in every way.
F**k you if you think I'm lying this time Vanessa because the way the story makes me feel is way too incredible for words...its all so endless...
A tad on the depressing side, with the perfect balence of it from those warm potatoes. :]

[Kat]

Ha I guess it wouldnt be fair if I reviewed this because well... I know exactly what its about.

Good write

I've always wanted to say that haha

[M@]

I honestly have absolutly no idea what this piece is about. My best guess would be that the first portion of the story before the break is a dream/hallucination the narrator is having, and that he finds out that what was in his dream had some effect on his reality when he woke up. Aside from that, I don't have much else to stand on.

Your choices of words never cease to amaze. There's a lot of lines in this piece that are incredibly poetic, which makes this piece stand out descriptively. As far as I've seen in your work, that seems to be a thing you can pull off quite easily, and you do it well.

As far as feeling goes, I get a very dark and sinister feeling when I read this piece, a sense of urgency courses through me as I read the first section. Sure, I can't really imagine a scene taking place since there's very little description of the environment or situation, but I as a reader can get into the narrator's mental state incredibly easily through this piece. A sense of paranoia, something always looking over your shoulder, pervades the first section, and you pull it off well. Of course, this doesn't translate into a connection I can feel with the narrator since, as previously mentioned, there's little description as to where he is, what he's doing, how he got there, etc., so it stays more as a feeling.

There's only a few gramatical errors in the beginning of this piece, and only a few more throughout; a quick edit will fix 'em. Besides that, a nice read; a great way to get a feeling to a reader regardless of connection.

[speakingcolors]

that was awesome. i don't even know what to say.