Glass

A young woman who has been trapped in a box of glass her entire life breaks down.

Glass
inspired in part by Ex Machina and Mary in the black and white room

She looked past herself at the stream of cool silvers swirling about her head, their eerie familiarity rendering them almost colorless. There was nothing left to gape or gaze at. She had already studied every visible contour of her body: every pore of sun-deprived skin, every strand of entangled blonde hair almost translucent against the bright canvas walls, the ticks of her fingers and the strange shapes they could make: bizarre creatures that existed only in these crude forms.
Her skin, from which she could previously pick out every every subtle change in pigment of every pore, now blended together in a dull, monotonous shade of dried-up peach. Her eyes were different; she could still remember the ink-blotted detail of her irises: specs of blues, of yellows, browns, and greens. These hazy fragments of polychromatic patterns, sharp contrasts, and edges still resided in her head, but she hadn’t looked at them. Not in a while. Were the same fate of overexposure to fall upon them too, she would have nothing. At least, now, she had a memory.
She glanced to the side at another reflection, keeping her own figure out of focus as it replicated down the fictitious hall, the characters volleying off the frame behind her, growing smaller and smaller. Above her, a blurred out figure of a girl stuck to the ceiling, looking down at the glass floor upon which her feet stood. The only place these reflections ceased was the main wall, as facing it was the only wall which was opaque. It was a good bearing which also functioned as a night mask; she faced it whilst she slept to ensure if she did awake during sleep, another’s eyes would not be staring back at her. This cube was the best and worst thing she had ever known. Or remembered.
At every 4,500th blink, red sludge seeped in through the corners of the ground walls; on arrival, it sufficed as an edible liquid, and if left to harden it became a sustainable food supply. Recently, she had taken to rolling its surplus matter into a sphere, clacking it against the walls in a game of one-person catch.
She was staring into the blankness, tossing the ball to her jailmate and back, dark red marks sticking to the wall, when suddenly her vision shifted. A flicker of eye contact. She tried to escape it, but her longing for interaction kicked in. She took a long glance at the only person she had ever met: her partner, her jailer, her best friend, her mortal enemy. And she glanced in her eyes, glass encasing them as salty water dripped down its canals. The colors were still there, but she could feel it. It was fading. Just as the silvers had become grays had become colorless, she could feel it. The only thing she had… she gripped the ball behind her as her reflection did the same. They hurled it at each other's head, the ball shooting out of their hand. The two clumps met in the middle, repelling off each other as a chunk of glass shattered into bits.
She recoiled in horror. What had she done? She sat in the opposite, lightless corner, examining it for thousands of blinks. Eventually, she moved. She moved to the curious chip in her world and timidly plucked at the splinters of sky. A sharp pain shot through her finger and she retreated once again, inspecting the red liquid pulsating from the wound, oozing down her digits and forearm. She curiously stretched her tongue to taste it and reactively spit out in disgust. Yeah, that wasn’t red sludge.
Then, a glimpse of color (something new, almost unfathomable) caught her eye: a spec beyond the glass. She reclaimed her red ball from the ground and began to chip away at the barrier.
As the last shard fell, she walked forward, carefully applying limited pressure with her feet. Gazing wide-eyed, she stepped out into a new world, free.

Author's Note

Criticize! (Constructively!)

Reviews

[pstalbot]

This is pretty cool, I like how you play with ideas from Ex Machina. First of all, I love the profile picture! My one criticism is of preference in writing. You use a lot of punctuation early on in the story and it gets distracting. This might not be a bad thing. I think you can play with the punctuation and lay it on thick until she gets out of the glass cage. Use the punctuation like a cage then free the reader when she gets out.

Here's the Cormac McCarthy article about punctuation and the gist of it is that there really aren't set rules for writers and what you should take away is do what you're comfortable with and make sure the reader's eye is entertained too.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/cormac-mccarthys-punctuation-rules.html

Personally I like using less semicolons, but the idea of no quotation marks seems crazy (although it works great in The Road). I've been playing with using italics in a story instead of quotations and inner monologue. Hopefully it doesn't annoy the reader.

[James B Wells]

Thank you for the feedback! Sadly, I can take a total of zero credit for the profile pic (saw it in a Google search, thought it looked neat). Also, yes! Looking back, I was amazed at how jumbled the grammar was in the first paragraph or so. I'll definitely try to fix that up in a future draft. That article was very interesting also (though having almost no commas and absolutely no quotation marks in most forms of writing would be utter madness). I do agree on the comprehension aspect of it, though. If a reader can clearly understand what is written, grammar doesn't really matter.

[James B Wells]

Whelp, I just saw Room...s**t.

[Lars Raviena]

It was an enjoyable read, it setup a nice environment and I was unsure for a time of if the jailer was herself, I concluded that it was.