In Limbo

Kevin awoke with a pain in his head. A pain that he couldn’t shake. His entire field of vision was clouded, his eyes felt like burning coals inside that box he called his face.

He licked the palm of his hand and held it up to his left ear. His ears had been ringing for days, a constant dull tone that muffled even the sounds of his own body writhing on the floor. He wished to hear a sign of something outside or around him but it was futile. He hadn’t heard a peep of the tiniest sound from anyone or anything but himself.

When his sight returned to him, as if it was a gift given to him for a short time, he crawled on his belly to the only thing he could look at in the darkness. A shaft of light, no bigger than a pencil, lay on the floor before him. The sharp cutting aches pierced his spine as he slowly moved, inch by inch, minute by minute, until he laid to rest with his face cast in the dull light.

While he lay there, he hoped that the light would bring some warmth to his body, which had been uncontrollably shivering, but it wasn’t in the cards. Kevin wondered where the illumination was coming from, why it was there and what he did to deserve such company. He wondered a lot that day (or was it days?) that he lay in the alabaster glow of his only friend left, a sliver of artificial sodium light.

Mostly he wondered how he ended up in here, this trap, this cage, this prison. He knew that he had bigger plans and even bigger dreams for his life than slowly dying in room where the ceiling was only two feet from the floor. But yet there he was, lying there in that strange place, confused.

Kevin tried to speak, but his words choked out into an incomprehensible slur of grunts and sighs. He reached up for his throat, his larynx was a mutilated mess; cartilage and sinew bent in odd shapes beneath his weak skin. But it’s just the same, there wasn’t anyone there to hear him, nor would anyone want to hear what he had to say.

Besides, everyone else was there with him, even if they didn’t know it.

He always wondered what the meaning of life was and more specifically what the meaning of his life was, but now none of that mattered. He figured he didn’t have much longer.

He slowly turned his body and more importantly his head to try to peer into the source of the light. He finally aligned himself right under the shaft, his left eye blinded by the dull light that seemed intense in comparison to the oily blackness in Kevin’s cage. He thought he might be able to see outside, to the world that he once knew, once took for granted, but could see nothing but the burning rays in his left eye and the dark in his right.

So he closed both eyes and stopping searching, stopped trying. It would all be done soon, he hoped. It would all come crashing down, running into him, sucking the air from his lungs.

He remembered a vacant night from his past. It was a hot summer day, just after dusk. He had been sprinting through the meadows, chasing after lightning bugs and catching them in an old jam jar. Suddenly in the distance, a bolt of lightning struck a large oak tree, cracking it in half and starting it on fire. Kevin stood there awestruck, accidentally releasing his captive prey from their glass cage. From his perspective, the green dots of the bugs danced in front of that orange fire playfully. He smiled, a sight he would never forget.

And with that, it was all gone.