Claustrophobia

You awaken with no memory of the events prior. You shimmy on your back, dragging yourself backward through this little tunnel. Your claustrophobia sets in as you feel your chest contract. You produce little, stifled breaths, trying not to hyperventilate as you proceed shakily toward a dim light, one shoulder blade at a time. You perceive it to be a few yards away. You think of nothing else but getting to that light, emerging from this dark and suffocating crawlspace, however you ended up in it. As you inch backward, the walls form a bottleneck, and you are forced to pull your elbows in tightly to your chest. The passage constricts further, until your shoulders are abated on either side. You feel yourself beginning to lose control, indeed, to hyperventilate, as the pace of your breathing escalates. You feel a panic building as it begins to overtake you. In the distance, your fingers find the edge of the tunnel. You rip yourself free.

Only a short distance, before catching yourself on your elbows. A bristly rug scratches them. You catch your breath. The taste of nascent emphysema rattles in it. You slide your legs out of the tunnel. How the hell did you squeeze out of there? How the hell did you squeeze into there? Your skull contacts the cold hardwood, which is exposed a little beneath mismatched rugs, strewn about a disorderly room. You know this room. It is your apartment.

It is a hellhole. It is your hellhole, your perdition, spruced up with hoarded rugs; like a corpse you’ve dressed as a ballerina. You’ve left the walls devoid of decoration, as if to draw attention to the chaos on the floor. You’ve left a single lamp on, atop your bedside table (the one with the splintered off leg). The lamp soaks half of your tiny room in a pathetic, dreary light, and leaves the other half to shiver alone in the dark. 

You make your way slowly back to your feet, trying to discern how you ended up in that crawlspace, but the concern shifts as you notice the parched dryness in your throat, and begin mindlessly to seek water, as though you are some river-borne parasite.

You feel around in the dark for what you know is there. It takes you a moment, but your hands find it— it is your water cooler. You shake it. It feels and sounds empty, but you lean it back towards you, and remove a styrofoam cup from the dispenser on its side: the last one. With your index finger, you feel underneath the nozzle. A weak stream emerges, lukewarm, wetting your finger and continuing down into the cup. You allow it to fill until the stream dwindles to droplets, and you come away, grateful as you can be for less-than-half a cup of water. 

It is enough to coat your throat with, vanquishing the dryness. You try to collect yourself, looking around the small room. In one corner, there is a door to your bathroom, with some of your rugs bunched up against it. At the opposite corner lies the exit. At the nearest wall, a mini-fridge stands next to the water cooler, a piece of cardboard halting it from direct contact with the floor. Beside that, there is a small table holding up a microwave. These appliances produce a dull hum from the shadows. 

You consider opening the mini-fridge, but you are near certain that you will find nothing of sustenance within. Something worries you, and you eventually realize what it is:

You will have to leave the apartment. That, or die of starvation.

You consider the latter.

How many nights had it been? How many days? Your blackout curtains on the singular window do an incredible job of keeping out the passage of time. You are never certain whether it is noon, morning, or night, and this is by design. You sniffle, you wheeze, and you cough raucously in a sudden wresting of the faculties. Instinctively, your arms curl toward your mouth and chest. You become momentarily paralyzed, unfurl your hand, half-expecting to see the lining of your throat spilled out in it. 

Nothing.

You recover, itching at the thought of peering out your window, of seeing that dreary complex, the monotonous line of doors with single windows all circumnavigating a big square, clones of each other, the only difference being the crooks and snapped ends of sallow-white blinds in said windows; the parking lot in the middle lies one story down like an abyss with trash floating in it. When dark, that abyss gawks up at you, as though it knows you. As though you share a secret with it.

Reluctant, you peel back the curtain. It is pure darkness outside. No grocery stores will be open yet. You allow the curtain to swing back into place. You are famished to the point of pain in your stomach, but you allow your dizziness to distract you, and you walk over to your bed. It is queen-sized, which is much more than you need. You collapse onto it gratefully, arms outstretched, and you stare at the popcorn ceiling. It undulates and bulges in your dizzy gaze. You smile, enjoying the disorientation it causes you.

Mixed in among the crawling topography of it, you see little black specks. In some places, they swarm and amalgamate, becoming puddles, black and inky at the center, and brown about the circumference. You allow the shifting image to lull your eyes closed.

After a time, you awaken. Your stomach screeches and you roll out of bed. You drag your feet to the window. Lifting the corner of the curtain once again, you surmise that it is early morning. The sun straggles unseen behind its light, but the outlines of the doors and windows across from you are now discernible. Surely, some grocery stores are now beginning to open. 

Another cough. It folds you. You wheeze into your hand, and it comes up dry again. You spit yellow. Your stomach bends you, practically tossing your head towards the door. There is no excitement at the thought of a meal. Hunger is an urge you are indentured to. 

You reach for keys, phone, cigarette. In a previous incarnation, you had these. They sat on an end table by a different door, a sort whose knob did not tint your palm brown when you turned it. You had water then, as well. A sink. 

Honey? Don’t leave the faucet running, okay?

You shiver. Before you know it, the warm light and the sounds of the highway and the smell of somebody’s breakfast are trying to suffocate you. You clench shut your eyes in the overwhelming light and you witness behind your parched eyelids pulsations of green, red, violet— like the colored, vertical stripes on your television from that time in the house, with the sink. Panicked, you come shambling back into your apartment, gibbering nonsense. 

They’re after you, you remember, but who? You nearly fall as your heel catches one of the rugs. The coarse threads ride up your ankle and scrape against your Achilles tendon. The rug folds over itself as you stagger, noticing the hardwood beneath it. You pause. It is minutes before you realize you’ve been staring at:

A splotch of rust-red, brown at the edges like the mold infesting your popcorn ceiling. You remember now that, indeed, there is mold up there; that your lungs are currently filled with its spores; that a doctor had instructed you to vacate this place months ago. But none of that is important now. The important thing now, the thing you can’t draw your eyes from, is the rust-hued stain there on the floor. Blood. Blood again! Hidden by her fucking rugs!

They’re antiques, Honey. Take them. They’ll sell for a lot, and you need the money!

You see what the lying rugs hide. They hide the vitality that has kept you in this hellscape, the ichor that once filled those veins, the ones that expunged life into a brain that could only think of you as an incapable infant for all your life! 

Honey, please, answer the phone! I’m worried!

No phone. Not anymore. 

She came to reach you the old-fashioned way. Somehow, she had gotten the address. Perhaps via the landlord. You screamed that she was an intruder, but you knew. You knew for certain, at least, after the first hit, the one that cracked the leg of your end table (it was quite sturdy, for a piece of shit you found on the side of the road), that she was not. The next two hits splintered the leg completely off. Then you smothered her, smothered her in these goddamn, ever-present rugs! You did it to show your capability, to show how you could impose your will, how you had grown beyond the need of her constant worry. Look at you, you had thought. Look how strong and competent you had become!

Honey, my office got a new water cooler and let me have the old one. Do you need it for your new place?

No. No, you did it for another reason.

You killed her because you were upset. You really did believe she was an intruder at first, and the mold and this shit hole room, and you were out of medication, and you were embarrassed of how your life had fallen apart, and it just all came out of you at once! You had regretted it after! Truly, you had!

Honey, I called the pharmacist, he said they can’t refill your prescription and they need to talk to you directly. Where are you?

You shake your head. You upturn rug after rug, revealing more and more of those red splotches. Your heart races. Then, another fit of choking coughs seizes your abdomen, and you fall on your side, now fetal.

No. You didn’t do it for any logical reasons. Choking. It was no outburst either. You did it because you went mad. You are mad, and you have been since you were a child. You remember that you would capture fence lizards out in the backyard, and bring them inside the kitchen to a full sink to drown them.

Honey? Don’t leave the faucet running, okay?

No, you already had that memory! You want new ones. They terrify you, but they are all you have for entertainment. Otherwise, you are simply waiting for the mold to take you, or the starvation, or maybe even the police. That’s who is coming! You’ve remembered it now. Nearly all of it, you think.

Honey, don’t be afraid.

No. No! Not that one. Not that one!

Suddenly you are in it. You lie there in a blanket. You are safe, cradled in those arms that bore the blood which now adorns your floor, the arms that can no longer bear anything. Not this one! Not this one!

You crawl, choking, wheezing, pulling yourself toward that dark opening in the wall, the one you had intended to hide her in when it was all over; the one you had chipped away desperately; the one you had planned to seal over with drywall, to show your competence. You attempt to shove your head through, but your shoulders will not fit that way. You must rearrange yourself.

Don’t be afraid, Honey. I’ve got you now.

You go in feet-first, as though you aim to leave this world the way you entered it. The dark firmament pans upward, as your view of the ceiling dwindles. You inch into the claustrophobic hole on your heels and shoulder blades until all is blackness again. Safe blackness. Your breath is tremulous, but your body is again starting to warm. You feel as though you are, finally, some semblance of human again. 

They are after you, you remember, and you are okay with this. Soon enough, they will come to arrest you, bring justice to the world and all that, and they will take you out from these arms that cradle you, from your safety, as the world always has; and you will be dragged outside to look upon that merciless sun, and again be reminded of the colored stripes of your TV, and you will see the abyss of parking lot below, but it will not be dark. The abyss will show you the secret it knows, right there on its asphalt: the body you had tossed over the railing when it seemed it would just disappear, when you last wished to just climb into your hole and hide, but there was only room for one of you.