by Teena Faye Kingswell
Audio available here: http://tinyurl.com/
A fuzzy brand of consciousness began to bleed into the fore…
Largely restricted to bodily sensations, albeit in disarray. None of her limbs had their usual distinctness, divorced from the memory of waking sensation. A faint perception of stumpy arms, enlarged hands distant from her center, legs which were seemingly unimportant and absent, and a face so vast, it might span across an entire continent.
Or at the very least, reach the next room.
Let me be clear.
She did not possess, not even a modicum of awareness of her own self, much less the architecture and layout of her surroundings.
So, kindly accept my instruction, to take the word ‘room’ and the relative notion of it being the ‘next’ one; and distill, reduce, to an essential primal notion of…’not here, but further away’. As in a dreamworld, where the next stepping stone may suddenly seem to be distanced by a thousand more furlongs than you ‘anticipated’.
Lifting her eyelids yielded little. The hazy blur, all a-chunk with grottly sinewy masses of grey area interspersed with a blinding white heat, which appeared to pain her to dispel. She quickly reacted by trying to rest her eyelids, but what she ended up with was something distinctly unlike resting. Almost as much of an unwelcome effort to keep them closed, as it was to endure the sludgy, bright mess that presented itself before her.
A pain in the back of her head began to boom and echo within its confines of bone, the entire egg-shaped part of her skull seeming to restrictedly pulsate, as though somehow its core had begun to rot and was threatening to distend.
Her musings led to idle recall of a prominent childhood memory. Of a single dead deer they had chanced upon, back when she was just another carefree, forest-frolicking child. The boys had poked at it with sticks and she had proudly walked away from the whole episode with an oddly inflated sense of self, as she turned out to be the bravest of all the girls present, having ventured the closest to the swollen animal and having generally refrained from making those terrible shrieking noises young girls are prone to making.
She had revisited this memory before, looking it up in a dusty old tome at the local library, and got a smattering of an idea of the reason behind their horribly misshapen bodies.
The fuzz eventually dissipated, the fleeting moments of utter incomprehension quickly forgotten and tossed aside, never to be dwelled upon – bar some hokey hypnotism forcing the mind down streets lined with shops it’d long since closed for business.
What began to surface now was more tangible, more in line with her familiar mental-picture of her bodily self. Whatever that might be. Suffice to say that she still could not feel her legs. Rather, a tired, heavy and numb pair of pinpricked props, entirely non essential to her upright position.
She felt the discomfort of too much thong pressed into far too little buttock flesh, their sodden underside bunched up also, double folded, as they were stuck together. Pressed up betwixt her thigh and oyster. Oyster. A term she’d taken a liking to, and used whenever she thought about her special.. place. Incidentally, the originator of the term, Jauffrey – a fisherman’s son, had shown her just what depth and breadth of air-exhaling, blinding potential, lay hidden and tucked away behind the strawberry-milk-mound between her legs.
Soon after the processing of what she could and could not fathom about her current bodily configuration, came a quiet, aghast horror, in the face of the collected data. She was fastened to a support of some kind, hoisted high enough to have her legs lying uselessly at rest on the ground. She was not fastened by her wrists, as her brain helpfully tried to suggest at first. That being her poor visual terminology for an imprisoned person.
She had fleeting flashes of people in dungeons in cartoons and stories…dark cavernous walls and dark atmospheres, rats scurrying underfoot and of course, a nice heavy layer of cobwebs. You can’t have a good dungeon without cobwebs! These whimsical musings on the nature of her predicament, struck her as a little on the sick side, but she didn’t pay it more than a passing moment’s heed.
When her vision returned, enough to hazard intelligent guesses about what she could see, she was granted none of the cavernous dungeons of lore, no cobwebs (even!), no rats, no scurrying noises.
Matte parquet flooring, a rich dark colour.
Black leather furniture,
heavy dark curtains, which dimmed the room.
She would notice, if it weren’t for the blinding spotlight just a little to the right of her field of vision.
It warmed her face and breasts, and she could feel the occasional tickle travelling down from her armpit, to her waist. And wriggle as she might, she could do little to alleviate the horrid sensation of not being able to scratch an itch.
Teena Faye Kingswell is an average height, carbon-based, bipedal life form, whose dabblings in visual trickery, aural machinations and a range of other eclectic endeavours result in sustained high levels of epinephrine, uncharacteristic of such an organism. Coupled with a large apetite for ammonium-chloride, yeast-extract and caffeine, one can only hope that this Kingswell does not combust before her time. Check out her tumblr at http://subcutaneous.tumblr.com