Contest #218 winner 🏆

63 comments

Fiction

Agony broils, but anguish simmers.

I have known them both well and in equal measure.

In the early days, my brain felt blurry and disjointed; I had the sense of being deep underwater, all undulating shadows and echoing whale song. The darkness was expansive, and the staticky, dull sense of confusion I felt was sometimes intercut with crippling panic.

BP is spiking, the whales moan.

Slowly, slowly, I floated to the surface, leaving the deep water below me. Still darkness, but the birdsong of faraway waterfowl sharpened, morphing into beeps and pings and buzzes.

Then came the boredom, the days of nothingness that stretch out endlessly. Anguish.

There is a bell tower not far outside my window; for some time I tried tracking the days by the tolling of the bells, scratching white chalk tally marks onto the dark walls of my psyche. When I lost count, I decided it didn’t matter. How many days had turned to weeks, to months, while I was in the deep?

I know Lovie by the sharp antiseptic smell of hand sanitizer mingling with shea butter. Her hands are soft and warm, and I sink into her oversized bosom when she lifts me, runs the cool soft sponge across my back. There’s a pulling, a prickling need to inhale her deeply, and sometimes I can almost feel the needling of hot frustrated tears wash across the backs of my eyelids for the fact that I can’t; when she’s talking to me in her honeyed dulcimer voice, I feel amber skin baking under sunshine, the tingle of anticipation as the clock ticks toward midnight on New Years, the thrill of pulling on perfectly worn sweatpants fresh from the dryer.

We’ve eased up on the sedatives, but we’re still not getting any pupillary reflex.

On other days, Bailey comes. I can tell she’s a smoker, and I imagine my body curdling as her nicotine-laced fingers fiddle with my lines and tubes. She’s supposed to wash her hands, but I never hear the thwump thwump of the hand sanitizer foam when she breezes in, always in a hurry, with heavy, agitated footfalls. She lays her clipboard (I imagine it’s hot pink) and her jangling lanyard across my legs; their weight on my shins feels reassuring somehow. I am a table now. She’s rough and rushed and her voice rasps and grates and I urge my shoulders up towards my ears as a kind of shield, but of course they do not obey. It’s in those small moments the tiny stitches of reality pull taut and the futility of wanting for anything at all- the futility of everything!- becomes so overwhelming I want to crawl out of my skin. 

(But of course I can’t.)

I remember a long-form article I read, years ago. It was supposed to be sensational: a survival guide for a wildly improbable situation. A series of interviews with prisoners of war who had been kept in solitary confinement for years and years; it felt exploitative, peeking into their brains, reading about the ways they had kept afloat in the midst of unending years with only their own minds for companionship. A GI who had been imprisoned in Vietnam implored the reader, should they find themselves in a similar situation (because it could happen to anybody, right?), to relive every memory they could retrieve from the recesses of their brain in the most intricate detail possible. You could stretch the memory of a single conversation on the beach to occupy your consciousness for days if you acknowledged every singular grain of sand that had worked its way into your sandals, each slight shift in wind direction, all the individual strands of hair that blew like curtains across your wife’s eyes and named the dimensional shades of brown of each of them. 

What are the odds, I muse, and so I do: I tiptoe my way through my life, picking up memories like shells on the beach, examining them from every angle.

When we were children, Dale and I used to trudge up the mountain toward my Granny’s every Wednesday evening so we could give living room concerts for her Bible study group. The gravel crunched under our shoes; there was a hole worn into the sole of my sneakers, right under my big toe. One day he noticed a daddy long-legs ambling over the jagged rock, and for no reason at all, plucked each of its legs off, one by one, until all that was left was a gray-brown oval with grasping, useless pincers. He tossed it back down, just another rock on the road, and I cried.

It’s just a spider, he admonished.

No, not anymore, I sobbed.

Now it was just another rock. Now I am just another table.

Sometimes Dale comes, but he never talks to me. I recognize him by the way he clears his throat each time he changes position, an unconscious habit that drove me mad when we were younger, before the children, and the house was silent but for his intermittent hrunkk. As the years melted by (as they tend to do), it became a sort of homing beacon, like a bell on a cat. Now, as I struggle against the tides trying to pull me back toward the deep, it’s a lighthouse. I hear the air whoosh out of my vinyl bedside chair as he sinks into it (hrunkk), the intermittent tapping of his fingertips on the delicate, thin glass of his phone screen. When Lovie comes in, he asks questions, and they talk about me as if I’m not here. Agony.

We’ll be sedating her more fully for the CT and MRI tomorrow morning. There are some risks, but we should have a better idea of the extent of the damage after we have those results.

The tide roared in unexpectedly, swept my feet out from under me and sent me cartwheeling under the surface, sucking me under. 

There is nothing here but the deadening pressure, every breath leaden, onerous, and the garbled echoes of the surf. The deep is just as endless as ever, but I am calmer, unmoored here in the infinite shadows, my body twisting and turning in the current, not still and frozen. Not a table.

Vitals are tanking, the whales sing.

The husband signed a DNR yesterday.

I always wanted to spend more time at the ocean. For a time I peppered Dale with real estate listings of beach cottages nestled among the dunes. Then I’d wait with bated breath for him to fall in love with one of them and our lives to begin.

The insurance on these places would be ridiculous, Janine. 

He waved me away, dismissed the idea, and for a moment I felt like the spider from my childhood: discarded, stuck, just another rock among the gravel. Can you even see me?

The deep water presses in on you, makes your heartbeat roar in your ears. Every sound reverberates against itself in an infinite echo, pixelated, like a lagging video.

It’s just a spider, the whales moan.

I dive deeper.

No, not anymore.

October 07, 2023 03:29

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63 comments

Carla Ward
20:30 Oct 13, 2023

From July to September this year I sat almost every day by my sister's bed in the ICU and rehab and back to the ICU as she cycled slowly toward an inevitable end, unable to swallow or speak. But her eyes said she knew plenty about what was happening. I can't tell you how deeply this touched me. Thank you.

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Danielle Barr
23:47 Oct 13, 2023

I am so sorry for your loss, Carla. I hope she also had the opportunity to swim bravely down to the deep and was carried away by gentle tides 🧡

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Molly Sickle
15:34 Oct 13, 2023

Wow this was absolutely amazing. Your writing style, the implications, all of it. I am blown away by this story.

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Paulene Blazey
13:14 Oct 15, 2023

I don't think I'll ever get the image of that poor spider out if my brain. This reads like the modern day equivalence of why bells were erected for coffins. Only she has no bell. Chilling. The imagery paints across my mind as I read. Very well done.

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Patrick Druid
23:00 Oct 13, 2023

There's not a lot I can say that hasn't already been said about this one. It feels so melancholy in a way. The passing of life. I sometimes wonder if my mother experienced something like this during her passing...

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Tom Skye
15:21 Oct 13, 2023

Fascinating writing. Congrats on the win

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Taitum Towns
01:05 Oct 14, 2023

I nearly cried at this story, although I did not completely understand what she was going through, I felt her pain. The most touching part was with the spider, you are a very skilled writer and I am honoured to have read this amazing story, your writing technique brought tears to my eyes, congrats on the well deserved win, I don’t think anyone could’ve done better! ❤️

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AnneMarie Miles
15:17 Oct 13, 2023

Congratulations on this well deserved win! Really incredible story. 🎉

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AnneMarie Miles
12:51 Oct 10, 2023

Just beautiful writing, Danielle. And such a perfectly agonizing premise - I assume the MC is in some sort of coma. I have heard some people can hear everything when they are in comas, so it was an interesting place to put the reader, though a bit torturous to imagine! Really enjoyed the images of the deep ocean - quite terrifying - and the poor legless spider - quite cruel. You've structured it expertly, love last little bit about wanting a beach cottage, I thought it was good placement, like an eerie final wish. And the ending line is just...

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Samaira S.
21:41 Oct 15, 2023

Oh my god, this is beautifully written. I love how it is never explicitly said but the reader can still tell what exactly is going on. You can really feel the tides take her in and slowly feel the numbness as she dies through the structure and the description of the mundane goings on of life just make it worse. I almost cried at the end, when she talks about wanting to live by the beach and then that analogy about the table. So VERY well written!

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Jasmine Gayle
16:49 Oct 15, 2023

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Keep writing. ❤️

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Jeannette Miller
16:29 Oct 15, 2023

Well done. You've encapsulated this moment so perfectly. It's what I imagine it would be like to be medically trapped in your mind, conscious, and yet unable to do or say anything. I like that she is not panicky, though, or struggling in the basic sense. She's more observant than anything. Wonderful :)

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Terry Diefenbach
05:31 Oct 15, 2023

Congratulations with this very moving piece. The first statement is a big hit! Wishing you continued writing and sharing. As a newbie, I have no idea what the points mean. If it shows my opinion on the piece, I would give it the most possible. If it judges my opinion, I'll take whatever it gives me.

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Wilma Segeren
16:52 Oct 14, 2023

Wow! So descriptive and causing me such reflection. It is certainly worth the win. It’s stories like this that keep me reading the entries. When someone can move me to think and feel deeper, I’m wowed ! Thank you.

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01:26 Oct 14, 2023

I was so wishing that she would drift back into consciousness, wiser and eager to reclaim her personhood.

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Hannah Andrews
04:30 Oct 17, 2023

I'm just now getting a chance to read this and wow... I read it again and again. It is just so quietly devastating and beautiful. this... "The deep water presses in on you, makes your heartbeat roar in your ears. Every sound reverberates against itself in an infinite echo, pixelated, like a lagging video." This is what the words did in my head when I read. Reverberated.So wonderfully written. I also loved the "I want to crawl out of my skin. (But of course I can't.)" Thank you for this.

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Cassandra Serra
22:55 Oct 15, 2023

Bravo! Amazing writing style by the way!

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Geir Westrul
21:55 Oct 15, 2023

Danielle, this was beautiful and heart-wrenching and the perfect way to write to the prompt — a narrator who does not command her body nor all her senses, and we experience everything through this perspective. Well done and a well deserved win!

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Lora Sells
05:04 Oct 15, 2023

Absolutely beautiful.

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Alicia Ballard
18:42 Oct 14, 2023

Wow! Beautifully written! Congrats on the win!

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Mary Bendickson
20:23 Oct 13, 2023

Easy to see why this won. You are making a habit of winning. Congrats.

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