Entenzahn posted:Thunderdome CXII - Attack of the Graphophobes I'd like to give this a shot, and please choose a weird phobia for me.
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# ¿ Sep 24, 2014 12:38 |
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# ¿ Mar 19, 2024 14:13 |
Prompt: Fear of clouds Nephophobia 1148 words: The hand that was holding mine was warm and dry. Rotting wood and broken tile floors flashed past as we ran, and I could hear the sirens all around us. We stopped for a moment just inside a doorway, and we both sucked in the musty air as we waited. The man holding my hand was thin, but he didn't breathe hard for very long before walking across the next room toward a window covered in blinds. Bright lights drew lines on his face as he peered out and scattered the shadows in the room. It looked like it was an abandoned office with the desk and paper all over the floor. “When those lights turn away, we go,” he said. He turned and waited until I nodded. The light waved slowly back and forth across the blinds, throwing shadows all around us, then moved on. His hand squeezed mine, and he pushed through a door to what looked like an alleyway. The cars whizzed over our heads as we ran. Garbage littered the ground, and graffiti flashed past us too quickly to be read. My thoughts swam as my chest heaved and a needle point pain shoved its way into my left side, and I stumbled as my legs gave out. He kept his grip on my hand, though, and managed to pull me through another door just ahead of another light. I leaned against the wall inside, then put my head between my knees to keep from throwing up, although it didn't look like it would make much of a different to the floor if one more person emptied their stomach on it. After a little while I couldn't taste the vomit coming up anymore, and I straightened up to look around the room. There was another window on the far wall, covered by rotting curtains and blinds, and a couch on the far wall. The floor of the room was covered with papers and dirt. The man was standing by the door, looking out to make sure the light moved away like it should have. “Who are you?” I asked him, and he turned to look me full in the face. He had long face and green eyes, and his hair was very short and very brown. “Carl.” he said. “And we don't have a whole lot of time here. All you really need to know is that the people who were holding you in that room and pumping you full of drugs were bad. I'm going to take you as far away from this place as I can.” “Okay, so I get why the people who held me prisoner are bad, but that still doesn't tell me why you're here at all.” He walked over to the window and stared out of it for a moment. “I made a promise to a friend awhile ago.” He said so softly I'm not sure I was supposed to hear it. His eyes became distant as he looked up. I walked over to the window and looked up too. The city's dome stretched over us, maybe even a mile over our heads for all I knew. It had banks of lights on the metal girders for use during what the patrician decided was daytime. They were all dark now. “What promise?” I said. “That you would be able to see the sky.” He shook his head slightly, and when he looked again his eyes were focused. “We need to keep moving. I know what they did to you will make it hard to keep going, but this is your only chance. Are you ready?” “As I'll ever be, then.” His mention of it made me remember the injections and the trips, and fleetingly I felt the buckles on the straps digging into my elbows as I tried to get out of the bed to escape the images I kept seeing, the horrible white masses that floated across the ceiling of my room and filled my mind and made it impossible to escape them for even a moment. I grabbed Carl's hand, and the sensation brought me back to the present, and back to the pain in my chest as we kept running through alleys and abandoned buildings. In this door, through this window, down this alley. It all ran together, and at times I wondered if even Carl knew where he was going. Eventually, we reached a steel door set into the dome itself, locked tight and sealed against whatever was outside. The first door opened to reveal a deep pit spanned by a bridge of metal grating. Carl pulled me across the bridge and pushed the far door open. Bright light spilled out of the small opening in the doorway, filling the small tunnel and making me shield my eyes. I felt Carl's hand on my arm, and I let him pull me through the door and into the light. Dirty grass stretched as far as I could see, with some trees off in the distance. Then I looked up, and my skin began to crawl. The white masses from the room floated across the blue sky. Sweat broke out on my forehead and my hands began to shake. My eyes locked to the sky and the clouds that floated by. My heart thudded in my chest and I couldn't breathe fast enough. As they slid past, I felt the needles going into my arms and the strange feelings that washed over me again and again as they tested this drug or that, and I could see the people in white coats taking notes while the clouds drifted across the ceilings in the room, seeming to reach for me and push down on my chest so that I couldn't breathe, or to rake my skin with the razor sharp claws they could form from the fluffiness, or even sometimes to reach down and whisper into my ear as I cried myself to sleep, whispering with a lover's caress as I writhed against the straps, trying to escape. “What's wrong?” Carl said. He yelled something as I stumbled back into the open door and started to vomit on the grating. It dropped away into a vast emptiness as my arms shook just to hold me up, and I felt Carl's hand on my shoulder for a moment, and then heard a gunshot from the far side of the bridge. I woke up to a blue ceiling covered with splotches of white paint. “If only you weren't so afraid of us, he might still be alive” The clouds said as one of the people in white coats checked a plastic tube attached to my arm and one of the straps on my bed. It reached down and gently stroked my hair, whispering as I cried myself to sleep.
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# ¿ Sep 29, 2014 07:46 |
In like flynn. Hit me, muffin man.
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# ¿ Sep 30, 2014 04:07 |