Falling Away, Drifting Into
by: David Som

A boy finds himself huddled in a ball in the corner. Breathing hard as an ox, he feels the air trying to escape the from the viscinity of his lungs...he sucks in harder and harder to feed his need for oxygen. The room around him is dark, yet for a dim amount of light, coming from a radial hollowness in the floor next to him. He peers over, and looks...nothing but black surrounded by a dim light, reminding him of a halo. He stutters the movement of his legs from his curled up ball, and gravel sounds pushes its way between his toes. He's somewhere on dry sand. He leans closer to the hole, and yells into it. His voice doesn't echo. He feels around him and finds a pebble, the size of a quarter and flicks it into the hole. The wind created from the fall of the rock echos around and around in to hole and starts to fall silent. He listens to see how deep the hole may be. The pebble falls deeper. He listens. No sound from it hitting solid ground. Suddenly, a vast reversal of air rises from the hole..and he feels himselfbeing pulled into the hole by some unnatural force. He fights his way to stay in the corner, tears dripping from his eyes, as he claws away at nothing but dirt and rock. His legs reach the hole first; he fights harder with his arms, catching pebbles between his fingernails causing him to bleed from the finger tips. He's wailing now, yelling that he does not want to go. His body is seduced into the hole...and soon, his fingertips, shown bleeding, are at the edge of the hole...the blood is slick...thick...and then he slips in... He's falling, sobbing as he screams. The light from the bottom gets dimmer and he wonders why its oddly disappearing as he is supposedly getting closer. He falls, and continues to cry, screaming at the top of his lungs, but then, he instantly hears a groaning to his right. Thinking it was himself, his screaming slows down because of his lack of breath. H looks down and wonders when he is going to hit something...again, he hears the groan. The light becomes darker until finally, he is surrounded by darkness. The groan becomes horrifically louder. It seems as if something's vocal chords had been torn out and torched. It gets louder. The boy tries to scream again, but its as if he was in a sense of tranquility yet mixed with fear, happiness and pain...his voice would not work. Suddenly, he feels three sharp slashing motions on his back. He rears his head in agony. He hears the moan again but from behind, this time. He turns his head to see a white blur caress his line of visible vision, and instantly feels three more sharp slashes on his chest. He raises his arms to his chest and feels warm liquid. The groaning get more intense and is now coming from all around him. He feels swiping at the rear of his legs and shoots into a half spin. After about seconds from trying to scream, he hits hard ground, horizontal on his back. The groaning is now joined by heavyset footsteps, coming randomly at him with echos all around. He lays there on the ground, still in tears. In the darkness he feels droplets of water, splashing on his face. They were the tears he cried as he was falling. With each tear that fell on his face, a burning sensation erupted from his skin, causing him to sit upright, hugging his body, trying to extinguish the fire in his tears. The groaning came from behind him...he turned and put his hands up, begging for mercy from whatever it was. He felt deeper slashes on his back, feeling bone scraping his spine. The blood pulsated from their veins to their man made exits. He reared back in pain with a single, deep gasp. Instantly, three more slashes followed across his face, and then three more from his shoulder to his abdomen. He tried to stop the blood from spurting into the darkness, where he could not retrieve it. Tears in eyes, he yelled even more for it to stop. The groaning was sound right in front of his face this time, yet he could see nothing but pure darkness. He felt the breathing of the phantom on his face. Soon he felt it on the back of his neck, his cheek and in his opposite ear. It was everywhere. He looked down and shut his eyes tight, curling into a ball. His phantom started to claw away at his back, tearing flesh from bone. He cried and jolted from nerve damage and pain, yet he never left the viscinity of HIS darkness in HIS ball. Then...the clawing stopped. The blood leaked onto the floor, feeling the liquid between his toes...it was so warm to his cold body. He knew he was going to die, his body was becoming cold and numb. Soon, he didn't feel the warmth of the blood between his toes anymore. He knew he was dead. He opened his tear filled eyes...still darkness. He felt for his missing skin...it was all back. The cuts had healed. He raised his head...there...he found himself in the corner next to a dim, radial light, shining from the floor. He felt the air reversing itself, and he began clawing away again to save himself....