The last thing I remember was smoking a cigarette on the roof of a sixty-five story building when something wrapped around my waist and pulled me into the sky. Skyscrapers shrank into gray dots, and then I broke through the clouds. Oxygen escaped me, and on the throes of my last breath I was thrown into a large bag where the abundance of oxygen made me giddy, and before blacking out I saw Saturn pass by.
I woke up in a bedroom decorated with fluorescent white furniture. My lower back throbbed. The bed I’d slept in was made of hard, white plastic. I walked to the dresser against the wall and pulled at a drawer, but the drawer wasn’t real. It was all solid plastic. The TV, the nightstand, the table in the corner, and the floor – all plastic. The toilet was real, but instead of being flushed the waste landed in a plastic bottom several feet down. Every few minutes there was a hiss of what I supposed was injected oxygen. The only door in the room ran along a track, but it wouldn’t open. The ceiling was a large mirror, and I watched myself pound against the door and yell. I kicked the walls. Nothing budged.
The ceiling rumbled as if someone dropped heavy furniture and scooted it across. I shouted for help. The rumbling stopped and the door slid open.
The open doorway led into another room, empty except for a large, black cow, its eyes full of confusion and fear. On the floor was a set of silverware set on top of a white cloth.
I retreated into the bedroom and the door slid closed behind me. The ceiling rumbled and shook. The cow bellowed and in the next second it was gone. After more noise from above, the door slid open again.
I peeked into the room. The cow was gone and in its place was a roomful of trees bursting with ripe oranges. My stomach rumbled at the sight of food. I rushed inside and devoured several oranges. The sliding door closed. The rumbling from above ensued, mixed with a human scream, and the door slid open.
I rushed back into the first room to find a young woman sprawled on the bed. She seemed younger than me, perhaps in her first year of college. I recognized the look indignation and fear. Her soft, pretty face hardened and she screamed at me, asked who I was, what was going on. I told her I didn’t know and explained my story. She must have trusted me based on the similarity of my story because she stopped threatening me. The anger drained from her face when the door slid open to reveal a roomful of apples. She kept a safe distance from me while we ate, her eyes retaining a diluted amount of conspicuous suspicion. We told our stories. Neither of us saw our captor. We made guesses as to where we might be and for what reason. She told me her name.
Days passed like this, days full of conversation, uneasy jokes, and eating. The dividing line between night and day was approximated, as we had no windows or clocks. We entertained each other by making up theories about our predicament. Sometimes we just held each other and didn’t say a word. One night while lying in the bed, she said we should make the bed more comfortable by taking off our clothes and lying on them. Then she suggested that we lie close to keep each other warm, and after several intoxicating minutes we lie naked and exhausted next to each other. The need had been suppressed for too long in both of us and multiplied upon itself daily, especially after meals. After that night we had a new way to pass the time.
One day she told me her period had stopped. This was later accompanied with vomiting and even later by a large, protruding belly. She worried about bringing children into this non-world of ours. When the time came she gave birth to five babies. We went without clothes in order to keep our babies warm.
The months that followed were filled with feeding the babies, teaching them, caring for them, and I can’t talk or think about it anymore. It hurts too much.
It was about the time the babies were taking their first steps and moving around on their own. One morning we awoke to find the children had disappeared. We cried all day. We cried into the clothes our babies had used as blankets. We eventually fell asleep. Sometime during the night I awoke to find out I was being picked up. I twisted around and saw the face of something before I went into a bag and my head grew light and I passed out.
I awoke on top of the building roof where I’d been captured, naked. I made my way through the office building, begging for clothes. I saw several people with worried faces picking up phones. The police caught me before I could make it out of the building.
In jail I awoke to find food being slid into my cell. When I saw that I screamed so much that I have never stopped. When my voice gives out, I scream all sorts of screams inside my head. I know they’ll keep me here as long as I’m screaming, but I can’t help it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Eckert lives in Houston, Texas. His fiction has previously appeared in Nano Fiction, Word Riot, and The Houston Literary Review, and in the print edition of New Voices in Horror and the anthology Darc Karnivale. Paul is also part of the musical duo Balloonist Sleepy and is an editor of Sideshow Fables. Addiction to all things Paul Eckert can be cured by visiting www.pauleckert.net.
