storage: small space and sensory deprivation
Everything clambers for your attention in the absence of normal stimulus. Hot air, skin sticking with sweat, pain points from constriction. Tongue tacky from dehydration. Head pounding low with dizzy fear. Pressure on your ears, over your eyes, blocking everything.
You saw nothing of your assailants, and they ensured you continued seeing nothing. With muffs went the hearing. With binds went your ability to thrash.
Hot, heavy silence now. Pillowy darkness pressing up against your vision.
You arch, the only movement available to you. You feel the binds shift, suspect metal chains, but hear nothing from it. No clatter, no crinkle, rustling, creaking. Your brain senses the materials by touch and considers hallucinating the expected sounds for you, but you're not that far gone yet.
There's you heaving with breath, muffled whooshing, which comes faintly to you through the small bones in your ears connected to your jaw. There's the intermittent bass pounding of your heart, more feeling than sound, but occasionally too loud to bear.
All of it competes to be noticed. You fixate only on the tightness of the space.
Walls just far apart enough to hold you. You couldn't tell what was happening until you slid into place and the air went still after some movement from above. Limbs already pinned in by the binds but held still further by the physical boundaries.
The walls hold you closer than you've ever been held before. You could swear they're pressing in, but it's just you coming further apart.
Time stretches forever as you shift, pant, cry out. Weep into the foam-padded blindfold. Grind your teeth into the gag. You can't even form words to keep you company, just useless sounds joining the saliva soaking the cloth. Gut taut with sickly panic, teeth aching from gnawing.
And still nothing changes.
Your inner ear tells you you're upright, that your box is motionless. Why dump you in here? Are they not transporting you elsewhere? Are you stored for later use? Will you die here?
The air cools slightly, but its lingering sense of suffocating stillness remains. The wet breath and sweat become clammy, and you shiver from exhaustion, strain, waves of fear, tomb-like cold. Your organs send warning pangs up to your brain for water, food, more air, less tension, begging for movement of any kind.
At some point, the body surrenders its panic, nervous system collapsing in, and you can't hold your head up or eyes open. Neither of those things change your current experience. Have minutes become hours? Panic turns seconds into days. You doze against your will.
Nothing changes. You'd say something breaks in you each time you return to the thought, but it's a continual process, pieces ground smaller and smaller every time you check back.
When you at last come alert some hours later, it's the reverberation of footsteps.
The movement transfers through the material to you, closer until it's just before you. You can't hear them, how many, what they say. It doesn't matter. The water lost through your renewed tears can't be helped, either.
As a hand lands on you, you cry out, straining with every muscle towards it. You sob, any fear left evaporating, with blind, delirious relief.
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