work in progress

The thick emerald vine crawled across the floor. Diseased crimson gems speckled it's razor-edge leaves: a delayed warning sign like nausea after a failed pregnancy test. Hidden in the darkness and consternation, these details might as well have been as minute as the number on the front of the house, or the year of the single car that was parked in it's driveway; but a cold 60 wat hospital bulb was enough to give us both glimpses of these rogue images in the few moments of clarity that the broken celling fan would allow. This was some twisted justice.
    No rain forest was as muggy and hot as this basement in the middle of suburbia. The floor orbed and ebbed with a swamp of dense piss and blood. Walls swayed and perspired a black oily life. That is if there were walls to begin with, and there must have been because somehow I knew I was hanging from something.
    When I was nine years old I was locked in a trunk and forgotten for three weeks, two days, and 6 hours. The claustrophobia formed by that experience had luckily never resurfaced. Until now. Claustrophobia, yes. But dread? Sheer terror at the nightmare uncoiling itself around me? When you are slowly simmering in a putrid hell of all your worst fears until your flesh peels from your slightly animated corpse because it can no longer protect you- no. I mean, things can only get better from here.


    My name is unimportant. Stop right there- don't be a jackass and say "Nice to meet you, Unimportant". I don't have time for that. I'm surprised anybody has time to be a jackass anymore, it's just such a waste. Anyway, I feel that most details about me are unimportant, because this entire story is not about me. It is about a lot of people, but most of all it is about Beck Harris.  Rebeccah Victoria Harris. What a girl. What an artist. What a whore.

    It is 6:23 in the morning and the sun is just about to rise. Of course you wouldn't be able to tell that below the tenth story of any building now because the congestion of steel and concrete prevents any weather condition from existing on the city floor. So floors one through ten were in perpetual shade from natural light, which meant that the next one or two were plagued by the fog. In apartments and hotels these were the hardest rooms to let and almost always empty.