Below

It's really a bit silly to be freaking out so much, when you think about it.

Once I did this experiment at university where we hooked someone up to a machine that made them re-breathe their own air, and we all had a go. Ordinarily, your system can feel that there's too much carbon dioxide in the air after a while; you start breathing really heavily. But if you put lime in the system, and you don't need much, then that starts to absorb all the carbon dioxide. Your body literally can't tell it's low on oxygen. When I had my go I didn't notice anything was wrong. When one of my group turned off the machine and I pulled my mask away, my vision suddenly widened- it was tight and close and I hadn't realised- and my brain started firing and I started gasping in these great big lungfuls of air. It was pretty calm, while I was on the machine. Not sure why this is so different. The local soil's lime-heavy, so it's got to be absorbing a lot of what I'm breathing out, right?

Ugh. I want to move my legs. How stupid is that? I've sat at a desk, practically immobile, for nearly half a day before moving, just twitching my fingers across a keyboard. Now I know I can't stretch it's all I want to do and it's making me panicky. I wonder if I'll lose it completely before I pass out. In films whenever this happens the hero always finds fingernails embedded on the inside of the lid and everyone in the audience grimaces at how awful it must be to go screamingly insane in a tiny little seven-by-two-by-one box.

The physical bit is bad, no lie, but it's not like this doesn't come with a big set of mental itches. I mean, this is not the sort of thing someone does just to kill someone. (I'm being killed, here. Huh. So stupid!) It's a big fuck you, burying someone alive, and the thing that's bothering me is I literally have no idea who hates me this much. I must have made one hell of an enemy and I don't know how. Hell, I don't even have a little list of friends and family in my head who seem a bit... off. You know. The type where you just know as a kid they pulled the wings and legs off flies, and they stopped doing it because they learnt they shouldn't but they've never understood why. I've only met two people like that, both way back in school, and it seems pretty unlikely they'd go to this much trouble for me after all that time.

Hah, I should really be trying harder to get out of this, shouldn't I? Let's see, if I can get my- my arms braced against the- the lid there, then if I push hard enough- come on- Jesus, I must be far down. I'm no bodybuilder but I'm not exactly a little guy here, I should be able to- come ON- damn it.

Damn.

Fingernails thing starting to make more sense now, hah ha haaa.

Shouldn't have pushed at the lid. I'm gasping now and there's nothing left in the air to take.

I tell you, the worst thing now is how stupid this is.

You didn't make your point, psycho guy! I don't even know who the fuck you are! Lesson completely not learnt, bucko!

I want out.

I want

come ON

I

Big Sky

Allie sat at the edge of the disc, dangling her feet over the edge. A hundred miles below, she could see the clouds, a thin white blanket stretched over the Atlantic. She sighed, and thought about how much she needed to fix her toenails (that one on the right especially, it's starting to look like a friggin' talon) and lay back on the cool, metallic surface. Above her, there were so many stars it was difficult to pick out constellations, even the ones she knew by heart. Not the real ones, like Cassiopeia or Orion, but the ones everyone knows by heart: the Big W, The Saucepan, the Wiggly Line. Like every time she looked up from the disc, she felt a sudden lurch of nausea, of awareness of her impossible location, but it passed. Fear is made in the lizard part of our brain, Allie remembered. Lizards can be frightened of drowning, but show them the vacuum of space and they'll just stare blankly at you.

Allie's shadow tapped her politely on the shoulder and cleared its throat in a meaningful fashion. Allie sighed and rolled over- the constant company of her shadow was the only thing she didn't like about the disc. She'd been coming here for a few years, spending longer and longer here each visit just to spend some time by herself, and since the very start her shadow had followed her about. It was the only thing she couldn't shake- the only thing that stopped her coming here and just letting herself unravel out into the darkness, letting all pretence of self and thought and flesh spiral off like a loose thread. Allie knows that she could unravel quite happily, if her shadow would just let her.

I Think You've Been Up Here Quite Long Enough, said her shadow. Allie didn't hear it- she wasn't that crazy yet, thank you very much, but she knew that's what it was saying. You Have To Meet Your Friends At The Bar. They Worry That You Are Becoming Distant (I am becoming distant! I'm a thousand miles in the god damn air!) And That There Is Some Awful Reason For It.

Allie knew why she'd decided that her shadow was so infuriatingly logical (still don't know where the Gravestone Headline Voice came from though) - her shadow was where she put the bits of herself that still stuck to the ground when she came up here. Her first visit was entirely accidental, a fit of bad hallway planning, running late to a lecture and misreading the byzantine campus map. She'd pulled open the door to "Observation deck 6" to ask if someone there could help her out, and stepped through while she was looking in her bag for her timetable. She'd found herself here, a thousand miles above the ocean, with a warm breeze dusting her hair across her face, and she'd fainted dead away. When Allie woke up, she panicked less- it felt dream-like, utterly fantastic. Here on the disc was a door at one side, supported by nothing, and a forty-foot wide space just for her. It gleamed in the sunlight, and Allie's boots clicked on it as she walked. There was nothing else but Allie and her shadow, and after another moment's dizziness Allie decided that her shadow could do the worrying and the panicking, and she'd just sit down and look around for a little bit. So she did.

Half an hour later, she’d almost jumped off the edge to wake up, but decided instead to drop a pencil sharpener from her case over the side. It fell realistically enough that a rush of vertigo made her lie down flat on the disc for a minute, eyes buried in the firm opalescent surface of it, suddenly gnawingly aware of the gaping chasm beneath her. After that, she went back through the door, it clicked shut behind her and locked, and she was left with a thoroughly bizarre sense of loss.

Her shadow cleared its throat again,  in an annoyingly polite way, and Allie slipped back on her flip flops and huffed through the door. Next time, she decided to herself, I am going to stay out there and my stupid shadow can come back if it's so important.