micro-fiction friday : dec 6 2024

cw: drowning, freezing, survival scenarios, hamilton

PART ONE

The fall felt like it lasted hours.  It was the same feeling of walking down the stairs in the dark.  You think there’s one fewer steps than there are, then as you take a step forward, there’s no solid ground.  Your heart stops as your foot plummets down.  It last hours, and milliseconds simultaneously.  The fall felt like that.

There weren’t any warning signs, or at least none that I recognized. Same route home from the bus, same traffic, same hum, same droning hum of wheels on pavement.  Two blocks from the bus stop, left turn, another three blocks, up three flights of stairs, key in the door, bed, then do it all in reverse twelve hours later. Same as every day.  The only thing that changed from day to day was how much snow I had to trudge through.

Today should have been no different. I zipped my coat, stepping off the bus and started down the two blocks to Cavell. There was no bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, no Final Destination-type premonition. The melting and refreezing of the snow had made the path slick; I took my time navigating the route.  From the road, the bus hissed,  clunking forward as its wheels swerved to avoid the potholes. Same as every day.

It all started in a moment.  A crunch made my head flick up.  Not the crunch of snow and ice.  This sounded industrial. Gravelly.  

In my peripheral, I saw a car jump, as it freed its wheel from a pothole. The car behind it swerved, trying to avoid the rapidly deteriorating section of road, its front hole missed it, but its back wheels caught the edge of it, and the asphalt crumbled under the weight. The traffic behind it stopped, as the car accelerated uselessly forward onto a road that was no longer on solid ground.  The sedan plummeted, along with a section of Barton Street about 20 feet in diameter.  It kissed the edge of the curb where I was standing, and I watched as the section of sidewalk around me begin to crumble.

This was when things began to move in slow motion.  There was nothing I could do, and I knew it.  I was going the way of that Acura.  All I could do was scream as I felt my footing give way beneath me.

The fall felt like it lasted hours.  It didn’t; but when I say my life flashed before my eyes, it felt like it was I was watching it happen in real time.  Everyone I loved, everything I’d done, everything I still had to do played like a movie in my mind as my heart leapt into my throat.  

I hit water, or rather, it hit me.

The thing that really gets you when you fall into ice cold water is the shock.  Your entire body seizes up and you become unable to move.  All the air escapes your lungs as the cold punches you in the stomach.  

It hurts.

I gasped as my head plunged under. My lungs took the dirty water greedily, forcing me to choke up any remaining oxygen.  I was drowning, and my body, locked in cold shock like an early rigor mortis, was only hurrying the cause along.

There’s no real adjusting to the cold, but as I watched darkness closing in on the edges of my vision, my fingers were able to twitch again and I could thrash and kick my way back to the surface.  I was losing a battle against falling debris and an actively deteriorating water main actively and a current.  I couldn’t fight it. All I could do was watch the sodium orange of the streetlights vanish as I was swept away.

For a while, it was just darkness.  Whether I was above water or below didn’t matter.  Pitch blackness.  I grasped at anything to hold onto, anything to help orient me in the current. My hands were scraped from the effort to no avail. Finally as the current slowed I was able to float my way over to a small bank.  I could hardly move.  I was exhausted, bleeding from who knows where, coughing up murky water.  I felt myself slump to one side, and before I’d even realized it happened, I was unconscious.

My first thought when I came to was that my clothes were soaked, and I had no way to dry them.  They were making it hard to rest comfortably.  I wanted to rest. The drive to get up and get warm was irritating enough to keep me conscious. It was my body fighting for me.

My eyes had adjusted and I was finally able to take in the scene. The water in front of me, bobbing along peacefully, burbled against the bank. A pebbled embankment. And then, as I shifted on the rocks, a tunnel.  

As I stared into the narrowing mouth of the tunnel, I couldn’t help but feel claustrophobic.

Instinctively I reached for my phone, which, unsurprisingly had at some point freed itself from my pocket.  

So no flashlight.

Calling down the way I came from seemed to just echo back, funnelling the sound into the tunnel. It echoed my voice like a mockery, the sound bouncing louder and louder on a delay. Like a version of me was calling for help from that cave.

I know that when you’re lost you’re supposed to stay where you are.   But where I was, was freezing cold.  I was freezing cold.

My options were clear.  Swim against the current to hopefully get back to the place I fell in, and hope someone is waiting to rescue me, or try to navigate the cave in the dark, hope it leads up and out, go home and have a hot shower.  

Both options were shitty.  Objectively: the tunnel was distinctly less shitty.  Un-objectively: looking into the entrance of the tunnel felt like staring into the maw of a great beast that I was willingly feeding myself to.

I stood on shaky legs, raised my left hand on the wall, and started walking in. Bon appétit.