Cave Game

I - Breathe

He took a breath.

It wasn't an easy one; it was as if he was taking a breath for the first time– maybe he was? This confusion was too much to dwell on with his already muddled mind.

It was a ragged, ancient breath: one that was deep, and almost, but not quite full. A breath that hitched and caught on every snag, cracking its way through the shell of disuse. A breath that faltered and meandered through a papery esophagus, trickling slowly, unsteadily, but assuredly into weak, atrophied lungs that billowed like a crinkly brown bag. He breathed. His old lungs inflated once more, each breath a push to widen the stream of air. He continued to breathe. His lungs filled and took flight like a lantern skimming the surface of a dark lake.

His eyes broke open, just as ancient-feeling as his lungs, and yet just as new to the unfamiliar world surrounding him. They closed tightly first before opening, to make their stale muscle more malleable and break free their interlaced lashes. His eyelids moved like shutters across eyeballs not yet fully his; each wrinkle of skin a stall in the motion open, further exposing a blinding light surrounding him beaming through the expanding slit. From black, to a strange orange, to a vivid white, his vision returned. It burned senselessly and rang inaudibly, but soon it was over.

As the omnipresent and overwhelming brilliance slowly faded through adjustment, a menagerie of bodily functions quietly fled from manual control back to unconscious behavior, as they were quite scared to remain in the hands of a lost man. No longer could he feel each pump of his heart, the inflation of each lung, and each languishing, long blink; they fortunately became afterthoughts to the new senses taking their place. As his vision returned, so did his hearing through a set of echoing pops that pounded through his ear drums, exploding from their canals and clearing the blockage. His ability to feel also made an appearance, as he became acutely aware of each bristle of hair on his appendages brushing into clothes, and his fingertips began to locate irregular pebbles in the piles of sand they were stuffed into. A gust of wind christened his skin with awareness of the temperature, the draft bringing news of humidity and comfortable warmth. His nose came alive, with a furrowing of his brow and a scrunch of its ridge, delivering a plethora of neatly parceled clues to understanding his environment. The air was laced with the salt of an ocean, and the breeze that told him of the climate also brought the smell of rippling grass and rich soil intertwined with the sweet smells of blooming and sprouting things. As he took a easy, panning look around at the beach he laid on, the tree line past it, and craned his neck to see the deep blue ocean waves crashing behind him, his brain came to the startling thought that perhaps it should be doing something as well, like the rest of the organs. Quickly, the last piece of the body-sized puzzle fell nearly into place, and the haze over his cognitive function dispersed.

What am I doing here?  Steve thought.