SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

*Day 11.3 Wednesday, November 29, 2017

I don't know why, but I suddenly had the spine-tingling sensation that time was running out.

"Lift the damn furniture off her, boys, quickly!" It was Jack's voice, and it never sounded so beautiful, but so distant. I was floating off into a quiet space, and his voice trailing away into a beautiful whisper, like the inaudibility of a hummingbird flapping its wings, and staring right at you, as you passed away.

"Zara, Zara!" Said Jack. My eyes were closing but I saw his blur slide onto his knees and kiss my voice in a burning hysteria. He then jumped to his feet and I could feel the weight of the Earth lifting off my stomach. It would have been nice, if the serrated edges where the wood broke inside my skin didn't pull at me, clinging as it left, not wanting to let go and willing to kill me to stay attached like a parasitic worm. I screamed and felt every muscle in my body convulse. I seized.

"Stop!" Shouted Jack, seeing my pain. "It's hurting her even worse, we're not doing this right!"

But I heard Brett's voice lunge in with full force. "She's being crushed, Jack. We'd be killing her if we let her stay like this!"

George's voice butted in. "Let the lady speak for herself, you guys--" But he was cut off by my screams. (I hated his voice more than anything.)

"I-I think Jack's right," stammered Craig Ferguson, his voice was clearly shaken and afraid.

"Everybody wait a second--"said the voice I thought I'd never hear again. And at the command of Travis Gibbs, the smartest damn kid in suburbia in terms of trivia, science and out-of-the-box-thought, I felt the weight and sharp edges of the drawer come down on me again, and the wind knocked out as the screams from my throat ceased.

Travis Gibbs continued, "We don't know how long that thing's been on her. We don't know if her intestines, her liver, her ribs, her bladder have been damaged from the weight. We don't know if her flesh will peel off and her inner cavity will be exposed to the foreign germs of the outside air the second we remove the wardrobe from her body." He paused, and everyone, including me, lost their breath as time ticked by, and the terror struck in. If anyone was going to die, right now, it was going to be me.

"Don't say that, Travis," said Jack. His voice was quiet now, like he'd just heard from the oncologist that his lover was to die of cancer tomorrow. Jack sounded betrayed by Travis's negative perspective on the situation. The last thing Jack wanted to hear was Travis's pessimism. "Don't just say anything that comes into your head. If you've got a better solution then come out with it but don't make it seem like the girl I love is going to die just because you say so--"

"It's not just because I say so--" stammered Travis, "it's because death after separation from a collided object has caused people to die quicker than if they had never been severed at all. That happens when a car crashes and sticks a person's midsection to a tree. The emergency response isn't simply to pull the car out right away."

Jack cursed. "Then what is the emergency response?" He said, "What the hell are we supposed to do?"

Jumping in for who knows why, possibly to cease the tension so we could stop arguing and think straight, George responded, "What we shouldn't do is panic. That's the first thing--"

But I heard a smack over someone's head, and the head must have been George because he said, "Ouch, Brett, what the hell was that?" George made a miniscule squeal of pain.

"Just shut your mouth if you're not going to help Zara," said Brett, calm and cool like a solid soldier.

Craig's voice from behind the wardrobe then said, "Are you proposing we just leave her here then? She'll die won't she?" There was a short pause and the word die seemed to reverberate through the cavities of my skull as though Craig had shouted the word DIE through an dark and endless tunnel. After a moment, Craig said, "Sorry, maybe I shouldn't have worded it that way. . ."

But Travis jumped in with a reply that made me almost pass out. "I was just thinking." Thinking what, Travis, thinking what? Was what everyone was wondering and waiting for. He cleared his throat and snapped his fingers. "Find the garage!"

I heard his feet gallop off the balcony and into the house, then everyone but Jack ran after him immediately. Jack shouted after them, "WHY THE GARAGE!?" He knelt back down beside me and gave me a longer, more worried kiss than before. I squinted through the mist in my eyes and could see his tears coming. Why the garage? He had asked. And in a quiet echo that swirled up the bayhouse's stairs, Travis Gibb's voice shouted up, and both our faces turned stone white. . .

Travis had shouted with all his might, and an unsettling hint of worry in his own unsure voice, the words, "TO FIND THE CHAINSAW!" Jack and I did not speak, Jack merely kissed me again, and although I loved him, I could not enjoy his lips anymore. I was immersed in worry, that I might pass out.

This is how I would die. I could hear the metal belt spinning now.

They'd found the weapon. It would kill somebody on this trip.

Because everyone knows, when a gun enters the beginning of a play. . . by the end, someone will die.