Rooms

   As soon as I opened my eyes, I was in fear. I couldn’t see a single thing, as everything surrounding me was pitch black. I could fear the air moving around me and I thought, for a moment, that I had heard some voices. But aside from that, I was there, in the dark, waiting for something. I did not know if I was standing up or lying down. I did not know if I was inside a building or outside. I felt cold, so maybe I was outside. But why was it pitch black? It made no sense at all, or so I thought.

 For a moment, I tried really hard to remember what had happened before. It was obvious that, as a living person, I would have been somewhere before. Or maybe… Maybe I was dead. Maybe this was death and I had just discovered what millions of people had wanted to know for millennia. Maybe death was just staying put for something that may or may not come. At least there was no pain. But that fear, that sense of dread, the one that makes you want to run away from a certain place… Is that death too?

 Then I noticed I had felt the wind earlier. Dead people are not supposed to feel, so maybe I wasn’t dead after all. Maybe someone had condemned me to a prison of darkness, maybe I was just incarcerated in the most horrible jail and I would live the rest of my days in the dark. That thought in my mind made me want to move but I couldn’t. I hadn’t realized it but my body was completely unable to move around. I could move my eyes but that was useless in such a dark environment. There was nothing to do, but wait.

 Of course, that’s easier said that done. It seemed easy to just be there, somewhere, and wait. But one can grow tired of waiting and waiting, without anything coming to you. Besides, darkness is inherently inhuman. As creative beings, we have learned to combat the dark, as we see in it everything that we fear about in the world. We see monsters that are here to kill and eat us, and we see our past failures and shortcomings being displayed over and over, in order to torture with everything that we are.

 I maybe shed a tear or two, I don’t really remember. Trying to think seems to be almost impossible in such a dark space. You don’t even know what you’re doing and when you can’t even see your nose or move around your wrists, it makes it even more surreal and horrible. I wanted to use my voice, to see if someone would come and help me. Maybe there would be no one to do that but at least tell me why I was there, where was I and how had I gotten to such a place. I just wanted to interact with someone else, even if that meant torture or the silent treatment. Anything was better than that.

 Suddenly, I felt myself move. At first, I thought it was something around me or under me, but then I realized it was I. It was me who was moving but I couldn’t really it was me making the orders. I was scared, but I didn’t try to fight it off. My body seemed to glide in the dark, probably looking for something. Then, I heard voices again. The same one I had heard the moment my eyes opened. They seemed distant but I knew they were coming from people or at least from something that could talk.

 Then, light started to flood the place I was in. An aperture had opened in front of me, horizontal in shape. White light was rushing in, as if the gates of a dam had been opened. I covered my eyes, trying to avoid being blinded by such a bright flow of light. I walked slowly, one foot after the other, trying to breathe as calmly as I could. I didn’t want to rush. I was afraid to die at any moment, as everything had been too much for me, just too much. I finally got closer to the light and I realized, I was in control of my own body again.

 I stopped covering my eyes and decided to check myself, my hands, my legs, my feet. Everything seemed just as I remembered it. The only strange thing was that I wasn’t wearing any clothes. Of course, I knew that was uncommon but, for some reason, I did not care at all. I had survived the darkness, the obscurity of who knows how much time. I had felt myself dying or already dead, so who cared about having no clothes on? Maybe there was a reason for that and I had to know what that was.

 So I decided to walk into the light and find out. Every single part of my body was engulfed in white and, for a while, I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t that color. It was so powerful that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. So I closed them tight and tried to navigate, walking like an idiot but knowing I hadn’t seen any objects in front of me before closing my eyes. I have no idea how much time I spent walking like that, but I eventually felt the wind on my skin again, so I decided to open my eyes.

 The light room had been left behind and now I was in something else. It looked like a forest, complete with the tallest trees I had ever seen and the sound of small animals and birds all around me. I even heard a stream passing nearby, and dead leaves being stepped on by several types of creatures. However, something told me that I wasn’t really there or at least not completely. I just knew that forest was just another room, after the one with darkness and the one with blinding light. It made no sense for me to just appear in the forest out of the blue. Nothing made sense.

 However, there was no coming back. I couldn’t see the light room anywhere, I couldn’t see which way I had come through. It was just the forest and I. So I started walking, feeling with my toes the moistness of the ground and the harshness of the rotten tree bark. Walking felt better than being in that dark room trapped inside some sort of prison. At least in that forest, even if it really wasn’t a forest, I could feel a little bit of freedom. When a bird landed near me, I started crying for no apparent reason.

 Watching such a delicate creature made me crumble, so much so that my knees failed and I knelt in the middle of that place, almost by force. I couldn’t stop feeling what I was feeling, I couldn’t stop blaming myself for a bunch of things and excusing myself for others. So many things were going trough my head that it made me feel sick for a moment. And just after a couple of minutes, it all ended in nothing more than a sob. I felt weak and stupid, but I stood up and kept walking towards the stream.

 It was just a small brook coming down from some mountain. The water in it was cold but filled with life. There were fish swimming upstream and plants moving around with no will of their own. It was beautiful too but I knew that I needed to keep moving. It made no sense for me to stay there forever, to just give up on knowing who I really was and why had I been dropped in such a horrible place. For a moment, I thought I would cry once again. But I didn’t because I had grown tired of not being in control.

 It was then, when that thought happened to cross my mind, when a door, a simple wooden door, appeared out of thin air. It stood there, by a tree, as if it had been waiting for me to get to the conclusion that I had gotten to. Fearing no more, I got closer and opened it. A big breath and I was in. I found myself to be in another room, much smaller than the ones before. There was no detail on the floor or the ceiling, only an armchair at the center, with someone sitting on it. I walked around the armchair and swallowed hard.

 It was I. The person sitting in the armchair was me. I had some sort of goggles on and gloves that attached me to the chair. My head was tilted to the right, as if I had fallen asleep. I tried to touch my shoulder, his shoulder, but noticed my hand went through his skin, as if he was made of nothing.

 No. I have to correct myself. It wasn’t him who wasn’t real. It was me. I was the one that had been living a lie and he was the one outside, somewhere else, the actual me trying to do something. But what was that? I would never know. Right then my body started to fade and everything returned to the dark.

Endurance

   The moment he reached the top, Finn sat down next to the yellow flag and removed his shoes. He knew that to be a stupid thing to do, because he had to go back down at some point, but his feet were hurting so much that he needed them to breathe for a while. However, he did grab the flagpole and removed it from the soil. He then opened up his backpack and put the flag there, leaving the pole outside in order to use it as a cane, in the case his feet hurt him even more as he climbed down.

 He then sat down still and enjoyed the beautiful view. The mountain was the tallest one in the vicinity and it overlooked a very deep valley filled with trees and a stream that could be heard from that summit. Birds and other animals could also be heard and seen. It was an idyllic place to be in and it wasn’t a surprise they had chosen it to be part of that year’s race. They always chose beautiful places and the flag was always in the most remote place of the area chosen for the contest. Good choices anyhow.

 Finn wiggled his toes to make blood flow through them. As he did that, he closed his eyes and raised his head at the sun. For some reason, the clouds that had been covering the area all morning had mostly dissipated and now the sun could shine and bring joy to everyone, including the race’s contestants. It was nice to feel warmth on the skin, just as it was nice to participate in such an event that made people use their physical skills but also their wit and intelligence to solve puzzles and riddles.

 The race consisted in every contestant receiving a backpack with various things. They chose the backpacks randomly and each one had different things inside. However, they all received some sort of clue in order to begin the event. It was fun to do it with friends or if you liked to compete with other people. Finn, however, loved to do it because he had fun by himself. He had no friends to invite to such a thing and he wasn’t the type to enjoy competitions. He actually thought they were only for brutes.

 But he did love to enjoy himself in the woods, by a stream or just walking up and down a mountain. The problem was that he had made too much of an effort this time and his feet were too sore to continue. The game did consist in people finding the flag but they had to come back to the area’s entrance in order to win whatever prize the organizers had. Sometimes it was some money, some other times it was something like a gift card or sunglasses or things like that. The point was that with his feet hurting so much, Finn wasn’t going to get anywhere near the entrance point. He would have to forfeit from the whole thing.

 He expected someone to at least solve the hints fast and come help him go back down from the mountain. He would give that person the flag and just say he had been just behind them. The pain was increasing slowly and he was also beginning to have these pinches on his legs. It felt as if a scorpion had walked into his pants or something. For a moment he did think that was the case but then he remembered he was in a cold climate and there were no scorpions around, for thousands of kilometers.

 The young man waited up there for an hour and then another hour. By the third one, and after finishing one of the power bars that were inside his backpack, he decided to go back down by himself. He would probably get to the entrance by night, but it was really necessary for him to just go back and rest properly or even ask if they had a nurse or a doctor in place. It wasn’t normal that his feet were hurting so much. He was used to doing these sorts of things and didn’t make any sense that he was feeling so awful.

 Putting his shoes back was not an option. He did try but it made no sense to do it, as his feet seemed to have swollen up as he waited seating down. So the trek had to be done barefoot. As the mountain was covered with small stones, it hurt like hell but he then realized there were small patches of grass on it, so he tried to walk only on top of those. There were still some stones there and his feet were making him cry and yell silently, but he continued. Finn knew very well it was always easier to go down than to go up.

 He had walked up the mountain in less than thirty minutes but it took him three times that to make it to the bottom, to the tree line. There, it was almost impossible to walk barefoot. There were too many things on the ground including leaves, branches, roots and rotten fruit that had fallen from the trees. After stepping on something that looked like blueberries, he decided it was time to be a little smarter about the whole thing. So he sat back down and looked for something to use in his backpack.

 Having found nothing that could work, he did think about ripping the flag in two and using a piece on each foot in order to walk easier or at least with much less pain. However, he decided against it because the organizers could see that as something else, as him not wanting for others to find the flag, for example. So he left it alone and decided to do what he was going to do with the flag but with his own t-shirt. He took it off, ripped it in two pieces and carefully wrapped each one around each foot, trying to make something similar to the early shoes used by cavemen.

 After this short stop, he decided to continue through the forest, walking by the river that he knew he had to cross at some point. The bad thing was he had to do it by walking on top of a gigantic tree trunk but he would only worry about it once he saw the crossing. His feet were still in deep pain but at least he wasn’t carrying any more dirt or little stones between his toes. He had to make many five second stops along the way. Not only he was in pain but he was also getting very tired of the whole day.

 He heard wolves and birds and even something that seemed to be a board in the distance. That’s what made him fall in love with the whole thing: he loved nature and how free one could feel in it. The forest always felt alive and thriving, it always seemed there were many possibilities for it to move on and keep being that awesome place were everything felt so far away and where everyone seemed to be on the same level. It was almost an utopic place to be in, even if it was only for a couple of hours.

 But, by the time Finn got to the tree trunk, the sun had almost completely disappeared from the sky. He tried to move faster, climbing the trunk as fast as he could in order to cross over the river. After all, the entrance was not that far from that place and he could easily push himself to the limit in order to get there and finish the whole thing for the day. He was even thinking that he might miss the next one, just to have a bit of a rest.

 Climbing the trunk wasn’t easy and it took him various attempts to finally make it on top. Once there, he tried to modulate his breathing in order to cross in one go, not stopping at all. One, then two deep breaths and then he went. He was more than halfway through when one of his feet got a cramp and he lost his stability. In moments, Finn slipped from the tree trunk and fell straight into the water. The backpack’s weight pulled Finn down, who was in shock for the first few moments of the incident.

 However, he then tried to pull himself out but the only thing he was doing was fight a force he wasn’t able to submit. His feet were useless so his legs couldn’t propel him properly to the top. He started panicking, knowing he could not hold a long time underwater. He had never been good at that.

 Then, he felt something pull him out. He was dragged off the water and then over the grass on the other side. The sensation went away but he couldn’t see anything, as he felt he could not properly move. Then, the face of a young man such as himself appeared in front of him, all drenched in water. He smiled.

Strength

   The pipe had been there all along. It was make of some metal, maybe lead or something similar. I’m not an expert on things like that. I just grabbed it when I had the chance and used it fast against my aggressors. The first one got the blow right in his face. Blood came running down his nose fast and I took advantage of that by hitting him again, this time on the top of his head. He crumbled to the floor, his face rolling backwards and now his head also bleeding profusely. All in a few seconds.

 As for the other guy, he had been somewhere else. After all, he thought his friend was going to have his way with me for a while, so he had gone out and probably smoke a cigarette or have something to eat. He wasn’t worried at all because he knew no one would ever go near that abandoned warehouse. It was a huge thing, with several floors and a lot of rats running around. No decent person would ever enter that place, so it was an obvious hideout for the kind of scum they were. It was their natural habitat.

 However, when he came back, I was waiting besides a hole where a door used to stand. I grabbed the pipe with both hands and struck him several times, until I destroyed his hands. Then, I moved on to his legs and I would have killed him if I hadn’t noticed he had lost consciousness a few moments before I stopped. I didn’t drop my weapon and I didn’t run out instantly. I was still in shock, without any pants on and my underwear tainted in a color I have never liked to see. I started trembling and then the tears came running down.

 I had no control over anything. The pipe finally fell out of my hands and made a tremendous noise but there was no one in the vicinity to notice it. I cried for a while but then realized I needed to get my shit together fast. I checked on the men and they were apparently only knocked out. That was good because if people ever learned about all that had happened there, I wouldn’t want any of them to think I had killed someone. They deserved it though. I wanted to grab that pipe and smash their heads many times.

 But I didn’t. I grabbed my pants and shoes. My socks were so wet from all the puddles on the concrete floor that I had to remove them and put them in one of my jacket’s pockets. I put on the pants, slowly, as it hurt more than I had imagined. I cried a little more, this time because of the pain, and then put on my shoes without tying the laces correctly. I walked towards the exit, coming out of the building into a large courtyard. There were weeds all over, even some bushes. It didn’t take me a long time to find the proper exit from that place. I was soon walking among other citizens, down a commercial street.

 I couldn’t go fast. There was a lot of pain and I was afraid that my pants had already been tainted with blood. So I decided to take off my jacket and put it around my waist. It was a very odd thing to do, because it was morning and it was very cold. But I had no choice. I’d rather freeze to death that let anyone wander what had happened to me. A cop actually crossed my path as I tried to pretend I was just taking a morning stroll. He looked at me, straight into my eyes, but he apparently didn’t see anything of interest.

 I checked my pockets several times but I couldn’t find my wallet, my cellphone or anything that had been there the night before. It was then when I realized that I had no recollection of the events of the preceding night. I probably went out for a drink or something but couldn’t really remember a thing. That neighborhood didn’t look familiar at all and it wasn’t the kind to be close to the place I had recently rented. I mean, my neighborhood was awful but this one was… the opposite.

 There were nice stores and old little ladies buying bread for breakfast. There were happy families walking around and old men having a walk with their dogs. It was all very peaceful and even beautiful in a way. I have to say it scared me even more to be in such a place than in a district as dangerous and filled with scum than mine. And it was weird that those men had taken me near such a place. Maybe they thought no one would think to check on old factories near posh neighborhoods. That could be it.

 I finally found a bus stop that had a small city map on the side. It was very helpful to make me understand that I was practically on the opposite side of the city. No wonder I had never known of such a place. In order to make it to my apartment though, I would have to take a bus or the train but I had no money for that. I saw several people waiting for the bus and the thought of robbing them crossed my mind. I had never been that kind of person but you change a little bit when awful things happen to you.

 It was then when a nice old lady talked to me. I hadn’t even seen her getting close. She asked me if I was feeling okay, because I had a “paper look”, as she said. I assured her I was doing great and that I only needed my bus card but had lost it somewhere. I pretended to check my pockets, which was apparently everything the old lady needed. She told me she could lend me her card and pay for the trip. She said she liked helping people, because so many people used to help her everyday, especially when she went to the supermarket for groceries. She wanted me to be her good action of the day.

 Of course, I didn’t complain. I got in the bus with her, not even knowing if the route would take me anywhere near my home. I forced myself to talk to her all along the ride, even if I had no real interest in doing so. She was very nice but the pain I felt was increasing. For some reason, I felt worse that I had a few moments ago. Maybe those men had done something else to me, something that wasn’t as obvious as what I had noticed from the start. Maybe there was something else that was making me feel ill.

 The lady finally got to her stop and I made myself help her down the bus, only to get back into it. She waved to me as the bus pulled away and I did the same. I was surprised to see such a kind person the very same day I had almost killed two people for doing something awful to me. The world felt insane and I was in the middle of all of it. I was going to sit down in the same seat when I noticed the place I had been was tainted with blood. It wasn’t a lot but it was visible enough. I touched the jacket and it was wet.

 I rang for the bus to stop. Luckily, the next stop was very near and I had to wait only for a moment, which seemed to last forever. When the doors open, I almost burst out of there. I was so fast though, that I tripped in the last step and fell hands first into the ground. Every single person on the bus and around the stop looked at me. It was exactly the thing I had no need for. I stood up as fast as I could and ran away as many people tried to ask how I was feeling and as some were wandering what was all that blood about.

 I walked away as fast as I could, finally stopping in front of a large supermarket. There was a breeze there that made me feel a little bit better. I had no idea where I was but there was no point in staying on that bus with my body leaking blood like crazy. It had finally taken its toll on me, as my body felt completely tired. Using my arms and legs was painful and even thinking about all that was happening was tiring. I tried to move from the railing I was leaning against, but I couldn’t.

 Everything went black in a moment. I had glimpses to people gathering around me and voices saying things I didn’t understand. My body did not respond to me. My brain was working but everything else was going away. Darkness came and it lasted for a while, until I had another glimpse, in a hospital.

 A doctor was pointing at me with a flashlight but I didn’t react to it, as I should. I was too tired to do so. The face on that man looked scared, even a bit surprised. But I wasn’t able to ask why he looked like that. I fell back into the darkness and wouldn’t come out of it for quite a while.

She lived as herself

   Amanda had never been known for being kind to anyone, rather the opposite. She was normally vicious to every single one of the people that worked for her and she would never accept a negative answer from everyone. Amanda Carvey was the daughter of the owner of the company, a man that had died only a few years ago in a ski accident in the Alps. Amanda had to step up and take control, something that most members of the board were against. That was, until they were able to see who she really was.

 They didn’t care for a woman commanding the ship. But that was before they saw the kind of woman she was. Amanda ruled with an iron fist from her first day and wouldn’t let anyone tell her something different than what she wanted. She didn’t accept advice and, when addressing her, she would often remind others that she was now the head of the company and not her father. Maybe they had gotten use to him but that was the past. Her father was no longer there to captain the ship in such a careless way.

 In her mind, her father had been an idiot with all the family’s assets. He had not done his job of really taking care of the wealth of the family. It wasn’t like he had lost too much money or anything like that. Rather, he had been exceedingly cautious and the company had run stale, no generating interest of any kind, whether it was with its clients or with its partners. People saw it as a dinosaur that refused to die and Amanda had seen that ever since she was a teenager and she had taken an interest in the family’s business.

 She laid off a lot of people during her first week and forced all the remaining workers to double their efforts, making lunch hours very restricted and putting up a “points” scale in which workers of any type would get points for their mistakes in the eye of the new owner. Too many points would mean that the person could get kicked out at any moment, so everyone tried their best not to upset Amanda. And they stayed there because the salaries were still very good and very difficult to earn in the modern world.

 In her first year running the company, she earned almost double that what her father had earned in his last full year as chairman. She was so glad about it that she even authorized for the most loyal and hard working people in the company to receive a substantial bonus to their usual earnings. People thought, for a second, that it was because she was getting a bit softer and kinder but that wasn’t it at all. It was because she was happy to have made a much better job than her father, she had shut off all the criticism around her and now people trusted her to be the one to lead them.

 However, her abrasive personality took a really heavy toll on her personal life. Her mother distanced herself from everything that had to do with the company and would no let her daughter talk about it when she came in for visits at her countryside home. Beside the company, there was no real connection between mother and daughter. The first had sent the second to boarding school from a very young age, so they had no idea what the other liked or thought about. There was no relation ship or empathy.

 Their weekly dinners would largely consist of silences, only interrupted by the mother scolding the daughter when she pulled out her phone in order to check stocks or talk to someone at work. So those dinners were only about honouring the late father’s legacy and nothing more. They both wanted to show respect to someone that was never there, someone who had drifted through life without ever really making a proper impact.

 The father had always preferred to take the private plane to some far away place where he could use his latest yacht and enjoy the best foods. He would always invite some people to come with him, people that enjoyed his millions and his stupid comments about life that didn’t make any sense, because he had no sense of the real life. He didn’t know real people, not even his immediate family. And his company was the laughing stock of the rich society he inhabited in, he just didn’t know it.

 But Amanda did know. She had always known that her father was just a stupid clown to all other people and that, by extension; her family had been laugh at for a long time. That ended the day she took control of their assets and made her family even more powerful and rich, more respectable and a force to be reckoned with. Her mother was just one reminder of the past, who didn’t even care about anything. She only cared about her check being on time and that was it. She was practically out of reality.

 And yeah, Amanda had no boyfriend or girlfriend, and her friendships were non-existent, unless you count business associated. She knew some men tried to court her because of her success, but she disarmed them pretty fast, with only words. Sometimes, she did “good” things because she felt she could lure more people towards her goals, but there was nothing good or positive about her attitude. She only lived to torture the memory of her father and to prove to everyone else that they had underestimated her and her family for far too long. It was her time to rule and she was not going to leave space for anyone else, no matter what she had to do to achieve her goals.