Clothed in our grief

Chapter twenty four

Your eyes are wide open, you know this because it burns. Like there's something in the air that's making them sting. You're tearing up, not sniffling. But your eyes are watering.

Your eyes are wide open. Completely and utterly, wide enough for a single tear to slide down your left cheek and down past your chin.

But you can't see anything.

No shapes in the darkness, nothing like that. It's all the same shade of pitch black. Nothing to differentiate where the walls are. You know you're sitting, hands tied to something wooden behind your back. Your feet are touching the ground, and you're still in what feels like your red hoodie and faded jeans. Still wearing your shoes, but your hair feels different. Feels wet.

You could be in a tiny room, ceiling just centimeters above your head. Walls just barely at your sides. Or you could be in a large room. Ceiling about as high as the school building. Walls as separate away from each other as car parking lots. It could be something in between, too.

But you keep thinking about it. the possibility of you just being in a small tight box. Causing you to hyperventilate, breathing becoming harder to do as oxygen keeps escaping your lungs just as quickly as it comes in. Shaking your head left and right as if to wake yourself up. This is all just a bad dream, right? Shaking your head hard and fast enough to make you dizzy, shutting your eyes tight even though it only seemed to get darker behind your eyelids.

There's no buzzing of the sound of a light, which means you have to explanations as to why you can't see.

One, the light is out. The light could be dead, or just turned off. Or there could be no light in general.
Two, you're blind. Whoever took you- since you're not waking up from this. Not only took you, but your eyesight as well. Now this option is both terrifying and somewhat not as bad as it sounds for two reasons of it's own.
If you're blind, there's a possibility this isn't permanent. There's obviously something in the air that you can smell. It smells like a mixture of god knows how many chemicals, leaving your eyes burning. There is a faint scent of gasoline, and what else you could make out smelled like bleach and engine oil and maybe a little bit of ammonia. Everything else is inconspicuous and you can't exactly tell for sure. So this could be temporary.

"Is there anybody else in here?" You asked, voice raw and hurting as you spoke your words. Voice feeling sore, but it carried softly with hints of tension building in the back of your throat. You're not feeling any type of blindfold over your eyes. And the bindings keeping your ankles to the chair feel like loose rags. your wrists, however. That's another question. It feels like plastic. Two little bumps at the base of your wrist. It's a zip tie.

You thrashed in the chair for a second, trying to see if it was bolted to the ground or not. It's not, and with enough weight you could probably tip it.

There wasn't even the sound of someone else breathing from the other side of the room. nobody behind you, it sounded like. nobody moving around. Nobody clearing their throat. Or anything like that.

There were no footsteps. Only the faint smell of gunpowder coming closer and closer to you. You narrowed your eyes, crinkled your eyebrows, and bit down on your lip. But your face was paling, body growing cold. You're scared. Is this about your father? Is this about the things he does to people? He leaves so many people empty handed after all they do is give and give and give to him. One day, it was bound to happen. Really. It's why he walked away, isn't it?