The Waning Read online

  I kicked out my legs—metals bars.

  I flailed my arms—metal bars.

  I struggled to stand—metal bars.

  I could not fucking move. I could not fucking breathe. It happened so quickly. My mind was scarcely able to register my predicament before my instincts dissolved my brain. Thoughts started to break down as fear burned through every cell in my body. I was reduced to a thrashing, shrieking animal—an animal in a cage.

  Once the animal within me ripped to the surface, cohesive thought disappeared. It was impossible to string together any semblance of an idea amidst the throbbing, screaming flood of fight and flight signals. My pulse undulated in the edge of my sight, giving the darkness sickening life, and causing me to hallucinate a chance of discerning anything out in the heavy black.

  The darkness was potentially the most terrifying. More than the acidic dread of claustrophobia permeating the muscles of my restricted limbs. I could feel my body, the metal bars. I could feel them, see what they were with my hands; I knew they were there. The darkness was an ominous mystery. More than anything, I did not want to know what was out there. I wanted to not be there.

  It was all a blur, a blur of raging senses and blinding stimuli. It was a place my mind was incapable of comprehending.

  I could not discern the memories of those first moments or hours even if I wanted to.

  The connection between brain and body was impeded by biological imperative. Fight, flight, anything, everything in a desperate fury. It felt like nothing and everything simultaneously. My brain was awash with sensation and emotion, yet my mind was absent to interpret it.

  I imagine You were waiting just outside that door, listening to me. A muddle of metal against flesh and rocking on concrete, a flurry of screams, moans, and cries. I can see You there, stoic and calmly awaiting my break. Like a parent waiting for the toddler to give up and finally realize all the kicking and screaming is futile. Maybe You were running a razor along a sharpening strap. Maybe You were rationing out my first meal. Preparing for something. You never wasted a second.

  Fear and panic are just words. They in no way capture how I felt in those first hours in my cage. I could say them, scream them, carve them in my fucking arm a million times, and never fully express how the terror absolutely radiated from my bones. My mind abandoned me. It was not commanding my thrashing limbs or my throat screamed raw.

  As the moments stretched over my flesh, the full rage of my initial reaction dissipated across the surface of my mind, fragmented into phases. I tried to block out the darkness, squeezed my eyes shut so the black at least made sense to my brain. It was too alarming to face with open eyes.

  My body did not feel pain as I slammed it repeatedly and desperately into the bars, the shaking and shuttering echoing back at me. It felt only trapped. The energy and the fear built, swelled my muscles, exhausted my nerves at the simple denial of extension. I was disgusted at the sensation of my own legs coiled up against my belly. My arms felt like assailants so trapped against my torso. I hated my own flesh because I found it so imprisoned.

  Yet, my physical resolve faded, crushed down by the darkness. My throat dried up and split after my voice continually tore through it. The adrenaline abandoned my cause and let pain and fatigue float up to my brain. I felt myself collapsing within and found what remained of my coherent mind at the bottom, buried somewhere beneath my failing primal self.

  First, it was disbelief that formed chaos back into thoughts.

  “This is not happening. This is not happening. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening!” I whispered to myself over and over out of my harsh throat. I barely recognized my haggard voice so gripped by terror. I pulled my hair and kicked the bars futilely once more in hopes of rousing myself from this nightmare.

  I dug around in my warbled memories for some semblance of sense until the parking lot and those final light steps materialized from the haze. The day I was ripped from snapped back into my mind, and a greater wave of disbelief followed.

  This just cannot be happening. I was just at work. I was just in the parking lot. I was on my way home to Lei. This was my fucking day!

  Who would steal tonight from me? And why? What purpose could I serve in this fucking cage?

  I cannot actually be in a fucking cage.

  Does this shit even happen in real life? I felt the irrationality of a horror movie plot infecting my reality.

  This simply could not be happening. I had no other explanation. Only that this could not be happening to me.

  Then, almost instantly and seamlessly, rage consumed my chest. I rejected this fucking moment; I rejected this fucking situation. More than I did not believe it, I did not accept it. I would not accept it, not in body or mind.

  I lashed blinding against my confinement, fueled now by anger instead of panic. I was bruising my feet, hands, arms, legs, but again, I could not feel it. I couldn’t feel a fucking thing except sheer mania—some despairing blend of panic giving way to fury. Rage was only that same initial panic endowed with thought.

  I ignored my feeble throat and released more pathetic screams.

  “Help! HELP! HELP!”

  As if anyone could hear me.

  “Who are you? Why are you doing this to me? HELP!”

  My words mocked me as they echoed back at me from the concrete. They made the room feel smaller, the walls feel thicker, the dark seem heavier. I hated the sound of my voice, the fear shaking in every syllable I screamed.

  As if I had earned any answers. My words meant nothing anymore, to me or the world.

  And in this void of reason, next came depersonalization.

  I felt a gap expanding between the me that commanded from my mind and the me in the nerves of my flesh. The two separated, like stupid girls in the woods in a bad horror movie, both frantically running towards different failures to survive. The mental me began to calmly watch the frenzy of the physical me with detachment. The miscarriages of disbelief and rage created a rift within me.

  I felt divided and compartmentalized, as if I could be of more than one mind, more than one person. Perhaps I ascended as a third party capable of viewing the conflict between the mental and the physical versions of myself. I watched the physical me contest a metal structure she did not even bend, and I watched the mental me attempt to reason an unintelligible circumstance. And somehow, for a brief instant, I felt divorced from it all. My consciousness tumbled through levels of myself, each reeling for some foothold in this darkness.

  Yet all things eventually faded. Phases seized me then abandoned me. Passion diffused pain then discarded me back into its embrace. My mind whirled in desperation then collapsed exhausted. Thoughts began to roll lazily by in my omniscient third position above the storm, slow observation of my damning circumstances.

  I am in a fucking cage.

  I was taken. Someone took me.

  Someone is keeping me here. For some awful reason.

  How am I ever going to get out here?

  When are they going to kill me?

  They are going to kill me. Or worse.

  When my instincts and my mind did unite and decide to chime in, it was with one singular contribution: This is the end.

  And when all waves fell away, it was me and those bars at first. Those abrasive, cold, alien bars pressing into me at every angle, containing my fury. Fire burned down my limbs as they begged for freedom and mobility. My mind throbbed against my skull in sympathy. Every cell of my body felt simply trapped.

  I tried to fidget to dispel the sensation. I attempted to shift my limbs around to deceive my body into feeling movement. My flesh was not so easily fooled. Perhaps because I could not banish the thought that I was confined in a tiny cage. The thought dripped through the cracks of my mind and pooled in my angry muscles, accelerated the burning denial in my body. I shook my legs and wrung my hands, taking ragged, forced breaths, trying to ignore the thoughts and the feelings.

  Eventually, exhaustion snake
d into my limbs. My muscles became slow and heavy, and I felt a weight descend on my forehead, pushing down even frightened thoughts. Pain seeped into the skin I kept slamming futilely against my cage. My fingers were gnarled stems of pain. I felt the swelling in my joints when I tried to shift them in my confined space. My toes were jammed into my foot from futile kicks; my knees burned in opened flesh.

  Now, I found myself in defeat. My entire body throbbed from the fight that had accomplished nothing. I had not so much as bent a single slim bar; I had not so much as shifted the cage across the concrete. I was just as imprisoned—welted, bleeding, and now sobbing.

  There were no tears. Maybe I didn’t have any. My tongue was cleaved dry to the roof of my mouth, sealed to that horrendous coppery taste. My body just convulsed in a familiar pattern as the anguished sounds reverberated against the walls back at me. It was disgusting to hear these incoherent laments streaming from my own mouth, batted around the cold box. I sounded like a crazed animal; I could not even recognize my own voice amidst the shrieks and mumblings. I sounded less human by the moment.

  The sounds grew weaker as the fire drained from me, as I reached the limit of both my body and mind. Defeat weighted me heavier than the physical exhaustion. A dense mind plunged me deeper far faster than any bodily drain. Then I slept, of all things. My cries calmed. I held still for the briefest moment, and the sheer, physical fatigue overwhelmed me.

  The sleep began as black as my cell. Thick and paralytic. Then out of the dark, a swell of feverish dreams materialized upon the ruins of my mind, in a subconscious that could still pretend to be free. I dreamt of Lei, of course. The sunlight playing in her hair as dawn broke in through my window and fell on her tangled in my sheets. The torn jeans she was wearing when I met her and how just enough of her thigh was exposed to tease me. Those awful fucking woven hippie bracelets I bought for her.

  Darkness greeted me when my consciousness did surface again. It was so obscure that it felt heavy on my eyes. They ached from scanning, searching, and stretching for light. When I closed my eyes, there was no difference; it was the same gaping void in front of me. It felt all the more hopeless.

  My hands pulsated with the impressions of the crosses at the bars. I rubbed my fingertips over my palm, feeling the dents and the lines of pain. I rubbed them instinctually, trying to elicit the shape of my own hand. The joints in my hip and shoulder whined at so much constant and uncomfortable pressure. Weight and immobility packed into my bones, making them heavy with ache. There was only a thin blanket between me and the unforgiving base of the cage, which hovered unnervingly above the cold, concrete floor. My muscles felt thin and acidic. I just hurt, from my scalp to my toes, and I could not shift or move to alleviate any of it.

  Lei remained entwined in the fleeting coherent thoughts in my head. How long had I been here? Surely long enough for her to miss me. Or would she just assume I was working late yet again? Breaking our plans as I always did. Maybe she thought I was out cheating on her, as if I had any time for that.

  I imagined her without me for that first night. She would come home from work, the aroma of bread and pastries chasing behind her, thick enough to be a cloud. She would toss her keys on the counter, then her purse several steps later, breadcrumbs of her arrival like every night, things I would collect and consolidate by the door to the garage so she would be able to find them in the morning, things I would not be there to gather tonight. McAllister would be pawing at the back door, but it would take her littering junk mail all over the kitchen table before she let him in. She would smile beautifully, lighting up for him as he bounded around the house and jumped up against her.

  She would wait for me, assuming I had to work late yet again, making herself a modest salad of only organic veggies and sip on her filtered water as she let McAllister cuddle on the couch with her. She would half-watch cooking shows and wrinkle her nose when she paid attention until it got later and the night grew darker. She would text me then call me then curse me, convinced I was choosing my career again. Then she would huff and puff up and down the hall, slam through brushing her teeth and washing her face, and let McAllister take my side of the bed. Maybe she would curl up in the fetal position and let the sobs shake her body, just like I was here.

  They would miss me. Lei would actually worry when she woke up in that bed alone with McAllister. She would call Julie first thing in the morning, questioning her of my whereabouts. Of course, I was working when Julie left. Julie would ask around the office, discern when I departed. They would be looking for me; they would be putting together the timeline.

  Lei would surely call the police before the day was out. They would tell her she had to wait forty-eight hours. She would wait those forty-eight hours with growing fear. She would begin digging at her nails without thinking about it, until the cuticles began to bleed. She would be consumed by the thought, unable to focus on work, forgetting to feed McAllister.

  Then the police would be looking. Maybe even by now. Weren’t there security cameras in the parking lot? Couldn’t that footage show my abduction? They would know what happened to me, and they would be looking for who did it. Perhaps tracking down a license plate, perhaps putting pictures on the news of a foolishly exposed face.

  They would find me. Lei would not give up. She would stop sleeping until I was returned to her side. She would call the detectives assigned to my case so often they would roll their eyes at the sight of her number or message. She would never give up on me.

  My vision of her faded to darkness. My hopes and all the things I told myself receded deep beneath the surface. And then it was just the darkness. Heavy, quiet, consuming. I fell in and out of sleep; I don’t know how long or how many times. My dreams teased me; my nightmares mocked me. As time seemed to stretch out before and behind me, the line between the reality in my cage and the fog of my mind began to wobble.

  Where the fuck am I? How will they find me here? Am I even in the same state? Am I even in a city or town? Am I even in a fucking house? What is in that looming darkness? At this point, only an unfathomable monster would match the fears brooding in my guts.

  I wanted Lei. To my very core, amidst the turmoil of my mind, I only wanted to feel the softness in her touch. I cringed to imagine her gnawing and picking at her nails, worrying about me.

  They are coming to save me.

  They will never find me.

  I am already dead, and this is Hell.

  I could feel my sanity start to sidestep. So soon, if it even was soon. I was confined in my mind too long, lost in the seething wash of phases of captive grief and versions of my wilting selves. Time was rapidly becoming as forgotten a concept as light or movement. How long had I been here? I had not starved or thirsted to death; I had not pissed or shit myself.

  A day? Two? Maybe three at the most?

  Yet it already felt like a fucking eternity had passed in this black hole.

  That drip, that fucking drip invaded my every thought, permeating my increasingly gnarled dreams. It filled the dark space around me and collided against my head. Over. And over. And over. And over.

  It told me the room surrounding my cage was small. It told me I was somewhere wet and cold. It told me the floor was concrete and a good distance from the source of the drip. After a while, my mind started trying to convince me it sounded like a voice. I tried to hear Lei in the splash. I tried to feel McAllister’s tongue in how wet it sounded.

  I felt the confinement in every inch of my bones; an anxious, crawling claustrophobia that twitched and burst on my nerves. I wrapped my fingers through the bars, pressed the soles of my feet against them, and pushed until my muscles shook. The metal did not yield. I just wanted to stretch out; I just wanted to fucking stand up.

  At this point, I would have cut off my own pinkie to do so. Followed by my whole hand or any body part to go home.

  God, I wanted to stand up. I just wanted to fucking stand up! I felt the rage, the frustration, the burning panic welling up in
side me again. I heard a guttural scream erupt from my core as I began to beat around the cage again. I howled wildly, shaking the bars, slamming my head against the cage.

  What in the fuck was I doing?

  I don’t know what I expected to accomplish. I don’t know that I was capable of thought in those frenzies. I pushed myself past my body’s threshold, continuing to bash and bang even as the blood welled beneath my skin and my muscles trembled with weakness.

  My body was completely dry; sweat crusted in a salty film on my skin. My stomach was a cavernous pit that had forgotten how to be hungry. Was I just going to be left in this hole to die? Was this how it was going to end, without so much as a glimpse of my captivity or captor?

  Surely, if the point was just to erase me from the world, it would have already been done. The idea that I was taken for another purpose, yet unrevealed, was all the more worrisome.

  I just had to stay alive until they found me. I just had to keep breathing until I inhaled air outside this box.

  Maybe I just wanted to die here. If only I could forget Lei’s face.

  Her face was the one thing vivid on my mind. Her wide, dark eyes dominated her face, dwarfing her other soft features. They were like deep pools where sirens could dwell to entice me to her desires. Only her mouth could further seduce my attention, the way pale pink lines parted to reveal her front teeth that crossed ever so slightly.

  Then, looking into my memories of her eyes in the dark, it became despair.

  The sensations of my body began to fade and distort as the darkness in my own chest began to swell over my consciousness. It was a familiar sensation, an internal darkness I recalled in the muscle memory of my soul. The way suicidal tendencies crept up my spine after my first girlfriend shredded my heart. The way I wanted to crawl into the grave after my mother. It was like stepping into a warm bath; it was like lying down with an old lover; it was like a seductive gateway drug.