Writing Challenge Day 3
Day three and a happy Friday to you, dearest reader!
If you haven’t read the last two stories, you can find them here:
Today’s prompt is: On a no-specified day, you wake up and go about your day as usual. However, when you open the front door you find a long apartmentesque hallway stretching in either direction. Inside your apartment, the world outside looks normal, yet inside you find yourself trapped. With each new room explored, you feel as though the apartment is getting smaller, and what was once mere whispering voices are growing louder and louder. Is there a way out?
Dedicated to Cedric Carter
The Housing Crisis
I let the measuring tape snap back into its case. The room had shrunk about seven feet since I first opened my front door and discovered the world outside was gone, leaving only a featureless hall that never ended no matter how long I walked. And when I turned around, I always found myself right outside my front door.
My windows showed only a grey light, the city was gone.
I stood back up, bumping the back of my calves against the coffee table. Everything was cramped. At first I’d thought I was crazy. Or crazier than I’d felt when I first tried to leave for work and found myself trapped.
I shimmied past the coffee table and retreated to the kitchen. My one bedroom apartment felt more like a bachelor. I opened the fridge and pulled out a beer. The whispers rose around me, a chorus of voices that grew louder as my home shrank.
#
Lost another three feet. I’d tilted the coffee table up against the wall to make room.
I went back to my front door and opened it, staring down the bland hall that stretched miles into the distance—all faded carpet and beige walls, dim lights and humming radiators that let off no heat.
At least it gave me a sense of more space.
#
Another day, maybe. It was hard to tell. I couldn’t open my fridge anymore, the kitchen island trapped it so it could only open an inch. My bedroom was a crushed mess of splintered dresser and bent bedroom. I no longer slept there. I had nightmares of waking up, pinched between my mattress and unable to move.
I ate another handful of uncooked pasta, sitting on the island counter. The whispers were conversations now, a garble of chitchat, benign comments, bland statements. I listened intently, hoping to hear anything that might help me, listening for any kind of salvation.
When I finished my pasta, I wept.
#
I lay on the kitchen island, surrounded by empty food boxes and packages surrounded by the shambled remains of my TV, my couch, and dining room table. The ceiling loomed within arm’s reach. My front door was still functional. It was shrinking with the room and opened outright. I checked it whenever I woke up. The hall never changed.
The voices were loud, too loud, like there was a crowd in my apartment, shouting over one another. I’d plugged my ears with stale marshmallows from when I’d gone through a phase of making s’mores in my oven, what seemed ages ago. It didn’t really help.
My mouth was dry, my whole body aches. I couldn't access any food anymore. The cupboards were all jammed up. My sink was blocked by my mangled stove.
#
Curled up on the kitchen island, I reached out for the hundredth time and touched the ceiling, felt the impregnable debris to my left, to my right, at my feet. One clear path led to the door, still untouched by the shrinking apartment.
The voices screamed and wailed, laughed and shrieked. My ears rang from the cacophony.
#
I woke with a jerk, from a dream where I was being buried alive.
The ceiling pressed against me, the voices sang. My heart thundered in my chest and my head swam. I couldn’t roll over, I didn’t want to die like this, crushed, my insides oozing out over the side of the kitchen island.
I reached up, grabbing a stray coffee table leg and a shard from a mirror with weak hands. I pulled, sliding along the counter until I felt its edge.
The voices laughed and the rubble shifted and groaned. Under my back, the counter top buckled. I reached for the next handhold—a pipe–and pulled.
The voices tittered, cackled. The island shattered, counter top digging into my spine. I pulled hard, both arms trembling, and felt myself slipping off the island.
My pant leg snagged on something.
The ceiling shifted down as the voices howled, pinning me at the knees against the wrecked island. Hanging by the knees, my head bent sideways against the floor of junk. I went limp.
The voices recited nonsense, bellowing dirges of broken sentences and words.
My front door opened, revealing the hall. The twisted innards of my wrecked apartment churned around me, jagged wood and shattered floor, gnarled pipes and slivers of appliances, cutting and crushing, closing in.
I reached for the hall, the endless carpet and walls.
The voices dropped to whispers, promising everything and nothing I could understand.
The apartment closed in around me, cutting off my view, eating me alive.
x PLM
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