January 12th: Your Something Dreadful
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January 12th: Second - 200 - Write from 2nd person perspective.
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Your eyes open.
It's dark. The air smells of damp and rot and something harshly sour that burns in the back of your throat and drags a cough from your chest. And something is different. Something is wrong.
Something has changed.
A soft pressure nudges against your hand and you realize you're on the ground, on your back, and the floor is cold. Cold, and when you press your palm against it, slimy to the touch. Another breath, and this one is hot. Choking. It feels like being a child again and hiding from the dark under your bedcovers. It feels like there's something there watching, someone else breathing the same air as you, something monstrous lurking in the corner of your room by your closet and the door. Between you and your parents. Between you and safety.
It feels like suffocating.
The soft pressure emanates against you again. Anxious. Needy. It shoves against your hip and whispers without words, but somehow you understand. It's saying are you okay? It's a little moist when you touch it, humid, but blessedly cold. And you struggle to remember: what happened?
Someone else heaves in a struggling breath, and without thinking you surge up onto unsteady feet. The feeling is intense and vivid: you have to help them. Before anything else, their safety is paramount. You know this absolutely.
You don't even know who you are, but you do know this.
The thick air pushes back and you stagger and you fall, landing this time on another person. The breathing person, still breathing, and you hunch against their body and thank whoever is listening. The cold pressure returns and ghosts over the space where the body's face would lay. It whispers again fighting makes it stronger.
But you don't know how not to fight. The thick air is layered with forgetting, and you know something has gone wrong.
You're losing. You know this.
But there's nothing you can do but keep on trying.
