The Darkness

She opened her eyes.

She felt sore. She could not walk. She felt damp. She tried to move her limbs, but could not.

She had no idea where she was or what her name was. She could not see anything. All was silence and darkness around her. The emptiness of her mind and the emptiness of space surrounded her, going hand in hand.

A stench of food entered her nostrils. She gasped instantly.

Suddenly, the stillness became mobility and one of her limbs moved slowly, damp, over the flat surface of the room. After a few hours, her limbs resumed working for the purpose for which they had been designed.

She managed to get up, walking slowly and laboriously through the expanse of darkness of the place. She immediately bumped into a wall. A smooth, cold surface that gave her no indication of where she had landed.

Skirting the icy wall, she kept smelling all kinds of scents. She smelled fumes of ragout encircling her nostrils, poultry exhaling coldly from their humours, tomatoes emitting off-key odors among this cacophony of smells.

Staggering, drunk within her nose, on the now sticky surface, she traversed the sidereal immensity of the place where she had awakened, trying to support herself mentally and walking in directions that could not be seen.

Noises. A light rustling on the air.

"Is anyone there?" she exclaimed in the dark

No answer came from the darkness.

"Is anyone there?"

"Who are you?" countered the darkness

"I don't know, who are you?"

"You don't know your name either?"

"I am here." "Call me Eteocles."

"Is Eteocles your real name? Where are we?"

"Don't worry about it, it will all pass don't worry... what do you want to be called?"

"Let's go with Nerea"

"Alright Nerea, nice to meet you. See you around."

And anticipating Nerea's thought: "Don't worry, there's enough food for everyone... it's the light that's missing in this place!" Eteocles moved swiftly away through the pitch black.

She heard him making noises and walking ratatat-tat on those slippery surfaces. She couldn't figure out which direction he had taken so that she could follow him and learn more about this bizarre place.

Nerea. She liked the name she had chosen, she didn't know why, but it felt like her own.

Surprisingly, Nerea felt peace and serenity in that blackness surrounded by metal walls. Perhaps the abundance of food in the place, even if some things had gone bad, guaranteed that she would not die of hunger and thirst.

With Eteocles having quickly fled, and the carpet of food around and beneath her, Nerea set off toward an unknown destination.

But the important thing, in this case, was not the destination. It was the motion.

A flicker of light penetrated the place where Nerea resided. She couldn't understand its origin, nor could she determine whether what had entered really was a glimmer. Perhaps she had become blind and could only see shadows.

But where had that flash come from? Why had she found herself in that darkness? And why had Eteocles left? Were there other people in this place?

She wandered through that darkness stumbling over banana peels, oranges and lemons. The peels sometimes blocked her path, but she managed to overcome those biological obstacles with ease.