Mimi

She had screamed for some time…hours, maybe. Perhaps it had just been minutes, but in fact it felt more like days and days. She hadn’t moved from the mattress, not knowing what was beyond its boundaries. It felt like a raft, surrounded by nameless horrors. Pits of snakes and rats or bottomless crevices. Centipedes, scorpions, bats. She came to feel that, as long as she stayed put, she wasn’t going to suffer some monstrous fate. Occasionally, she harnessed her panic and tried to think rationally. Bit by bit, she made sense of her predicament. She was a prisoner, entombed in some underground cave. When this fact became totally clear in her mind, she began screaming for help again.

After a while, the sound of her own screaming scared her more than silence, so she stopped. Her throat was raw. The chemical she’d inhaled and the vomiting had scorched it, and it felt swollen, almost closed. Her breathing was ragged, and panic tore at her again. What if she could no longer draw breath? She’d had a touch of asthma as a child, and she remembered that horrible feeling of not being able to empty her lungs. Whilst trying to control her breathing, she soon found that panic could take other forms. It was a welling up from the very core of herself, like a surge or an explosion. This was followed immediately by an implosion, a shrinking or caving-in.

It was best to lie completely still with her eyes closed, and force pictures of life as she’d known it into her mind’s eye. She found it was the only thing that kept her from dying, though at the same time she thought sensibly about death. She understood that she might soon welcome it.

Her thoughts took her back to a counsellor she had seen a couple of times who had tried to teach her a simple form of meditation. She remembered the stillness it brought to her body and mind. Trying it now, she just focused on her breath. After a while it slowed her gasps and unknotted her belly, and in this calm she began to hear something, a faint, rhythmic sound. It was the dripping of water. Hadn’t he said that there was food and water? At once her tongue felt like a wad of cotton wool, stuck fast within a cavity of parched flesh. The sound of the drips began to torment her, until the yearning for water became greater than her fear.

Finally, she turned on the torch and pointed it around the chamber. It was big, like Mrs. Cohen’s bedroom. The floor seemed to have no pits or crevices, nor did any snakes or rats scuttle across it. Slowly, she rolled herself onto her hands and knees, and began to explore her prison.