Repose Memories (reposememories) wrote in repose, @ 2017-06-01 20:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | newt penhaligon, patrick gunster, ~plot: memories |
[memory]
What: Memory
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing it.
Warning, this memory contains: Sadness, nothing NSFW.
There is a window, high in the back wall of this room, made of dull, opaque glass blocks. Light shines through it during the day, turns ruddy at sunset, and goes dark during the night hours. Still, you're not convinced.
You’ve spent many nights lying awake under your blue comforter, looking at the dark window, waiting for a glint of muddy light in the night outside - headlights swinging by, or a light from a building in the distance, glimmering like a thin star. You know that UV light shown at hourly intervals can fool animals into new circadian rhythms. You have a watch, a small black one with a white face, and you checked - the days are getting shorter. If they are days, and that light is the sun.
You are small. You’ll notice this when you stand, but you’re sitting on the floor just now. You're watching television. The television is small also. It sits on a rolling tray made of cold steel, out of place in this comfortable room. The floor is white carpet, and the walls have been painted a cheery blue.
The bed in the corner is neatly made, and one of your stuffed animals, a sheep named Carlos, is tucked under the covers. You haven’t seen your cat in a while, but you were told someone is taking care of him.
What’s on TV? Sitcoms, reruns of Sesame Street, crime dramas. You change the channels whenever you get bored, which is often. As you watch, a man comes in, sits down next to you, and says something you ignore. The words are the same every day, but the TV changes. Home Improvement is on, then a documentary about the universe. You feel a few small, sharp points of pain in your arm. You watch him leave out of the tail of your eye. He is wearing the same gray sweater he wears every day, the same glasses with thin silver frames. He smells of disinfectant. It clings, searingly sharp, to his soft-colored clothes and feathery brown hair.
When he leaves, you release your breath. You don’t like the smell, or having him in your room. It makes you angry.
You lean back on your small palms and watch the small television, while the light from the glass blocks gets low and pink. After two episodes of the documentary show, the door opens again, and a woman offers you her hand. You get up and take it, even though you don’t want to. It’s Sunday, and you have lessons tomorrow. You like the things you learn about, but you do miss school. You wonder sometimes if you’ll ever go to school again, and then you get angry, so you try not to think about it a lot.
The woman leads you down the hallway by the hand. She asks what you’ve been learning, and you describe the process of cellular mitosis, which makes her smile. Every other person here is a stranger, but you’ve known her for a very long time, and she makes you feel a little safer.
This is good, because you hate Sunday nights. They are the worst part of the week.
She takes you to the white room, the Sunday Night Room. There is never anyone there when you enter, but you can feel them watching. There are cameras in the corners, close to the ceiling.
There is a thin glass board in the center of the room, the sort used in classrooms for writing out notes and equations. It is still streaked with marks from erasing some earlier work elsewhere. The woman asks if you can show her what happened.
She explains it all again, as she does every Sunday. You are here to be helped. You've been very good for all these months. This will all be over soon, and nothing will happen to you or anyone else if you show the people watching what you did. She isn't afraid, and she doesn't think you should be either.
You think she's lying. Some Sundays she seems to believe what she says, but not always. No one expects you to notice these things, or thinks you can tell, but you can. This is why you hold your breath and do your lessons and don’t ever do anything in the white room. You are so afraid and so angry that it’s hard to breathe right sometimes. You are terrible. You are very bad. You come from the devil's pit, and you'll go back to the devil one day. But until you leave here, no one can know about it. If you let go, even a little, something horrible will happen. After that they’ll never, ever let you go. You have read about animals with diseases that make them try to drown themselves, or even attack people. You are like that. But if you can just keep it a secret, maybe you’ll get to go home.
While she’s walking you back to your room, you ask, "Is there sky outside my window?"
She smiles at you. It surprises you - she rarely smiles. It isn't a very happy smile.
"Of course there is," she says, and she runs a hand through your hair. "Of course there is, nene."