MDB: Miasma Defense Bureau

Redemption / Final Excursion

I feel a stream of blood leaking from my forehead. It tastes of hot and wet iron on my upper lip. What caused the injury I'm not sure. No blunt objects are around me, no blood stains to suggest a point of impact. Only a smooth, spotless wooden floor surrounds me. I turn around, and now I see the imperfection in this polished surface: A head-sized hole, perfectly round as if someone had drilled it out.

I crawl over to it and peer down. Down to the bottom of the shaft appears to be more wood, beveled at each turn to make a curving belly like the hull of a ship. I've never stepped foot on a boat, yet this view is uncomfortably similar. I see rope reaching to their tethered extent up towards me and silently waving like seaweed toward the sunlight. I get the hard sensation that I'm lying flat on my back looking up to the ceiling when I'm sure, even looking to confirm that I'm hunched over on the floor looking down, and this feeling that my body and my perception are somehow misaligned makes me feel ill. I want to roll over and collapse, to match the orientation I feel in my head, but the thought of shifting momentum only thickens the putrid air swelling in my lungs.

It makes no sense, but my body tells me to reach into the hollow, to somehow grasp what is causing my estrangement with gravity, with reality itself. I'm not even sure I can move my right arm like this, it seems to be all that's holding me still right now while my left hangs helplessly under the extended exo-arm to which it's strapped. Still, I fight the paralysis. I force my right to slide closer to under my head while I lean into the exo-arm's buttressing support. My abdomen contracts as my grip slips off the edge of the circle, which makes me feel even more sick to my stomach.

My hand drops into the pit to find–water! Cool, damp, invigorating. The liquid jars me to stability, and I feel right-side down again. I let my arm wade back and forth and the splashes distort my view of the bottom. The lapping waves that respond to my every little motion, softened by submersion, sting my arm with a million little reminders that I'm alive. That harsh reminder shivers to my chest and neck, and I feel how feeble that life is. Like a t-shirt stretched and pulled till yawning rips, threadbare patches and dangling tassels of colorful knitting burst and pour out. At this thought, my abs convulse and strain me to vomiting. Deep violet and slimy green douse my forearm and mix into the water hole.

Before I can pull my hand out, something grabs it. The top layer of tainted water erupts with humid bubbles that slosh like a voice choked with phlegm. Then a slick hill of sludge surfaces. It rises so close to my face I can taste it. Runoff crashes on my knees as the mound takes on a more definite shape. Sewage avalanches off a modest elevation atop the larger one, and more drains into a sinkhole at the foot of the arch, which then erodes to reveal two caves. I realize it's all part of a human face, slightly distorted, probably the same one I saw before my accident. The slime keeps me from making out who it is for sure.

But then it speaks in a familiar voice. "Momma, you knew I could swim all along, didn't you!"

"What are you doing here?" I say, disbelieving the voice I recognize.

"Billy came home for supper, Momma!"

This voice would never say those words. "Who are you?"

"Lloyd, darling, didn't I tell you? That's not the question."

My right hand is pinned underwater, stuck through the talking mound of muck, which tightens under an unseen pressure and twists me slightly, like it might pull me through the hole from which it emerged. Contorted to my limit I scream, "Let go of me!"

"Let it go, just let it go! Easy, and oh so forgettable! But that's putting it too lightly, isn't it, Lloyd?" The slime slithers down the apex of the bulge to reveal the forehead and squinting eyes of that man I thought I'd left for dead. He no longer had his glasses, though what looked like its jagged shards protruded sporadically from his cheeks. He smiled with mud in his teeth and gurgled on. "When we're this entwined, we don't simply let go, Lloyd," and I get pulled in till I'm shoulder-deep in what's presumably his neck and our foreheads are touching, "we're torn apart."