Chapter 1: Swallowed by the Floor

The darker side of @littlescribe (although not too dark. So don't get too excited).

I wrote a story a few months ago and never finished the end. So I stalled out at like chapter 4 or 5 and just dropped the ball. Well I finally decided to finish the story last night and I'm going to post each chapter from the beginning. I've made revisions to the old ones. I hope you enjoy the twist!

p.s. This story is dedicated to @roundhere, for always being my little cheerleader.

Sarah dropped the phone and collapsed to her knees, then fell forward onto the carpet. Her fingers gripped and clawed at the carpet in front of her, like a mad cat. Then she stopped, motionless and rigid. Her mouth gaped open for a scream, but no sound came out. The scream was there. But it would not come out. It welled up from the center of her spine where the nerves attached to the back of her stomach--right where she remembered the needle going in when she was in labor with her first born. The epidural had worked on only half of her body, and she was not prepared for the pain.

This felt a little bit like that. Only much worse. It was unexpected, unwanted, and overwhelming. She felt something of a wail erupt out of her as if her stomach had been suddenly stepped on and a bellow had sprung out as a result.

Sarah smashed her face against the floor and let out a wail. As she did so, her body curved in on itself as if to help squeeze out whatever alien emotion was trying to claw its way out.

Her face rubbed and burned against the carpet, exposing her teeth to the fibers while she contorted in pain from her thoughts. The images blurred together like a movie in fast forward, swirling around her. She simultaneously felt as though she could not stop the thoughts, but that she could jump out of them at any time, if she chose. She chose not to stop them. It gave her some false sense of control to experience them as though she might even be able to correct them, or stop them altogether from ever happening in the first place. A sort of time travel.

The carpet was thick, but stiff and unfriendly. Sarah wished the floor would swallow her whole - like a mattress made of endless memory foam and layers of soft down, all at the same time. She would have buried herself in it and never returned.

She imagined being absorbed slowly by the floor as it gradually gave way to her body. It might be nice to just become part of the floor itself. It would turn into soft foam and surround her curves and corners, ooze into her crevices, fill her ears and mouth, and quiet her screams. It would push up against her spine and her stomach, calming the spasming nerves. Her hair would whisp about until it was covered as well.

This is what she wished. Instead she became intimately aware of the floor and its hardness -- its actual makeup, while she screamed about it all -- an unforgiving stiff carpet, a hard foam layer underneath, floor boards that creaked, and probably concrete below that. Rather than a spongy filling, she felt stiffness and complete resistance on all of her protruding edges--her shoulders, her hips, her cheekbones.

She longed for something to take her away. The medicine from the epidural would do quite well to numb her brain. If she could, she would insert it directly into her skull. Anything would do: Heroin. Morphine. Percocet. She pictured the needle being inserted into a juicy vein in her neck and going straight to her thinking center, then stretching to every inch of her body, and everything would go quiet after that. She would drift into a slow peaceful sleep, encompassed firmly by the giant-marshmallow floor, never to feel again.

Aurora, she would call herself. Sleeping Beauty, who pricked her finger and fell into a deep sleep for 100 years. 100,000 years. Sarah stayed comatose for several moments. Maybe hours. No way of knowing. It felt short and long all at the same time. But it felt somehow real, being a part of something, belonging to a safe place, even if it was just an imagined foam floor.

As she wished for this bliss of pillow-soft nothing to surround her, she slowly began to regain awareness of her arms, her fingers, her toes. She could feel them against the carpet. Her fingers began to slowly move. They felt attached to her body now, which was in something of a fetal position. Her right arm cradled her head while the left arm lay somewhere in front of her. She wasn’t sure where yet. She felt her breath move in and out of her lungs. Her back and neck were aching from having pressed against the ground. She must have been there for an hour or more. She must have fallen asleep. She could feel drool on the side of her cheek and on the floor. Sarah thought about whether it would be worth it to move her left arm enough to bring it to her face and wipe the spit. She decided against it. Too much work.

After a few more minutes of breathing…...in……..out……..in……..out…….Sarah slowly began to position herself so she could push herself up from the floor. And then what? She did not know. As she began to push up, it slowly occurred to her that her right arm was completely submerged in something. A blanket? A heavy, stiff blanket. Had someone come and covered her while she slept? That would have been thoughtful and unexpected for her husband to do. But she could not budge out of the blanket. Maybe her arm had fallen asleep. She would try her legs. Same thing.

Something of a panic set in. She could not move, except for her left arm, which had not been covered. Her eyes shot all around her, and it occurred to her that her right arm and her legs were somehow below the surface of the floor and underneath the carpet. She could not lift her head because it still rested on her shoulder, and her ear was stuck inside the carpet as well, while her right arm jutted up past her head, totally inside the floor.

She attempted to pull her arm out again...nothing happened. Her left arm flailed about and she tried to get leverage it against the floor while she grunted and yelped, to no avail. Her husband had to have known she was struggling to get out of the floor. He must have heard her grunting. But the more she fought, the deeper she sunk into the quicksand of the floor. She noticed her body slowly pushing deeper and deeper into the foam and fibers. Soon, both ears were filled with subflooring and carpet fiber. She felt a strange crackling and scraping sound as the matrix of the floor popped and broke to fit her in. Her mouth became completely filled with it too. Her nose seeped with a strange substance that smelled of wood, dust, and plastic. Her eyes, now open, saw only layers of carpet, foam, plywood, dirt, and finally concrete as she sunk even further into the deep.

The parts of her that were still slightly jutting out of the surface above seemed to gravitate lower and lower until the entire left side of her body was submerged underneath and became flush with the top of the floor. Pieces like her shoulder and hips still made slight bumps in the floor, but they rounded and smoothed out over time. As more time passed, her husband was more easily able to view her as what she had always been to him--a part of the furniture.

It became very clear that Sarah’s wish had come true. She had been swallowed by the floor. She suddenly became humbled by the power of her own thoughts. Had she known the effect they would have had, she might have tried something like this sooner. She eventually gave in to the position she found herself in, and uttered a silent prayer of thanks to God for answering her prayer. Sarah could rest here. She was no more.

Whenever friends or extended family came to visit, the line was the same,

"How's Sarah?"

"Oh, she hasn't moved much. Maybe an inch."

After a while, no one seemed to notice her. A young niece or nephew might crawl over her and inspect the small bumps that still remained of her, and then quickly move on in boredom. But there was really nothing more of her to remember. Eventually it seemed appropriate to have a funeral. Guests that arrived for the luncheon afterward wondered at her death as they stood on her buttocks and enjoyed baked ham and potatoes.

Sarah lay there listening to all the wonderful and strange things they had to say about her. She found it difficult to relate to the person they spoke of, as that person was made of flesh and blood, and had feelings, whereas she was made of wood and fiber, and was void of pain or emotion.

Soon her husband would sell the house and move away. And this was for the better -- at least for her. She could not trouble herself with who he might take advantage of next. This was beyond her control.

She preferred her life this way and hoped the new owners of the house would not make any renovations any time soon. She wasn’t sure she was up for it.

Chapter 2

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