Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Blinking
Something about the room was off. The walls all seemed to be in the same position and the same color as usual, so it surely couldn’t be the walls Mark thought to himself. He shifted uneasily in his chair. The desk was covered in a familiar white powder that he knew for a fact was some prescription drug….”Or is it?” a whisper asked. He jerked his head to the left and caught a glimpse of something slithering under his bed. He leaned down to get a closer look. Nothing. Only the white of the wall stared back and a few dust bunnies. He shifted returned to his chair and closed his eyes, trying to will himself to relax.
He opened one eye then the other and now he wasn’t in the room. Panic spiraled up from his stomach threatening to make chucks. He glanced quickly from side to side, he was inside the old tree house. “Oh no, not this..” he said almost breathlessly. He tried to get up from where he was sitting on the floor, but he couldn’t move, in fact it was as if he was a giant rock and nothing on this planet could move him. That’s when the tip of the tentacle began to worm its way into the threshold of the tree house. The effort to close his eyes seemed so immense that he thought it would never come, and just as the black and pulsing tentacle snaked close to his left leg his eye slammed shut.
“Why does he keep blinking?” asked one of the interns. “We aren’t entirely sure. He was brought here two weeks ago with a diagnosis of drug overdose and suicidal attempts. Ever since his arrival he has been blinking.” The nurse on duty said lazily. “Maybe he just needs something better to look at.” The intern said as she began towards the wheel chair.
Mark felt a cool breeze on his face and the smell of the sea seemed to permeate the very air around him. He slowly opened his eyes and the glaring light of the sun danced on an endless sea of turquoise. He was standing waste deep in warm ocean water. Overhead the sky was the most majestic blue with not a cloud insight. He breathed a sigh of relief and waded a little further out; just enough feel a temperature change migrate up his legs. Mark turned back towards the shore and began to trudge back. Once he was ankle deep in the water he allowed himself to look down. A face was forming in the water very near to his left foot. He began to scream and splash to the shore. Before he made it a thick black tentacle sprung from the now deathly gray water and wrapped around Mark’s left leg and began to drag him slowly back towards the gaping maw.
Mark sat motionless in the chair as the nurse tried to wheel him over to the window. She placed the wheel chair facing towards the darkening sky and that’s when he began to scream. He thrashed at the window and fell out of the wheelchair still screaming in that ear splitting high pitch. The nurse rushed over with a syringe in her hand.
Mark was being dragged back to the ocean and with each jerk of the terrible leviathan’s tentacle he felt a new rush of water crash over his head and the taste of salt filled his mouth. Each time he resurfaced from the plunging depths he let loose a high pitched scream and clawed desperately at the shifting sand. The tentacle jerked again and this time sea water rushed into his nose and mouth making his lungs burn and causing him to gag. The water was starting to get deeper now, and Mark knew that soon he wouldn’t resurface at all. His head bobbed just above the water on his last attempt to scream for help.
The nurse plunged the needle into Mark’s left buttocks and the boy went motionless. His pupils dilated and his muscles relaxed. The intern helped the nurse return Mark to the wheelchair and as she positioned him comfortably in the chair she noticed a puddle of water where Mark’s body had been and in the puddle were clumps of sand.
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