Catharsis II: An Army of Words (AUDITIONS)

Applicant #64: The Cavity

She is lying on the floor, face up, and blinks once at the dusty ceiling. A sheet of gray, clasping four bleak walls within which was a haven for the survivors. Here, one's status in life had vanished. It didn't matter if you were a chef at a five-star restaurant, or a twelve-time Grammy award-winning rockstar, or a programmer at Google, or the vice mayor of Nashville, or a poet from New York – if you ended up here, you were an equal; and that was what she and the others had been, all forlorn, for the past four months. Here, they all exchanged the same air that kept them alive as they wrestled with a common kind of death. That is, until today.

She forces herself to raise her neck a bit – gently, shakily; fighting nausea – and beholds her lower body. In the dim air everything looks so sharp yet all so blurred. There is crimson tangled with the drab and paleness: her shins are still terribly bleeding. But for some reason, the inflicting pain does not bother her at all. In fact, after having substantiated a living carcass, she is inundated with peace, and remembers things she thought she's forgotten forever.

She remembers: the shade of blue the skies were, grayish, with a violet overtone, when his father of old age got sorely sick; the taste of saying, "No, Mom and I would never give up on you," sweet and indignant and sure; the flavor of leaving home (when she was three years shy of adulthood) to faraway green lands, like lemon pulps, sugary at first then biting with its rancid components; the tears, tang and timid, when she told her parents she had to do this, please let her. She'd come back and would have saved up enough money to afford a better life for them all.

She remembers the flutter in her chest when her mother called, telling her her father was doing better; and the same throb a week later, only heavier and protracted and accompanied with infinite tears, when suddenly and quickly, war had fired up in the east and the pearly islands she had loved in silence no longer were.

She rests her head back. The west was next to find no peace, and needless to say, the world turned madder than it already was.

She chuckles. The man with bloodshot eyes who fired at her legs said, "Sorry," but what for? Because he had left her to die with the dead? It didn't matter; because he has favored her that which she had wished but couldn't do herself.

She smiles, listening to the explosions outside with great interest. They were getting louder – the percussion of a great score. Her quick breaths the climactic phrases, and the murmuring walls, eagerly collapsing, caving in, were the bass. The climax looms. How would the theme sound? She cannot wait any longer. To plunge into the void. Into nonexistence. To where she belongs and longs to be.