As it turns out, the darkness isn’t quite complete. The power light of the camera casts just enough illumination to bathe the scene in a weird green, albeit, blinking glow. Once my eyes adjust, I can see enough to manage.

Manage in this case means, seeing well enough to piss over the side into the water without falling in. Still, several hours later… I think… I’ve concluded that I truly am a prisoner. With no sense of day or night, my sense of time is already drifting.

Perhaps it’s been longer than that…

I’m not sure…

My immediate physical reaction is to sleep: the body’s age-old defence against reality. And I don’t even realise I’m drifting off until, with a start, I wake up, jerking up against a crick in the neck where I’d nodded off with my chin on my chest.

What woke me?

Movement in the dark…

On the limit of my circle of light, a pair of rats are polishing off the remains of Juliana’s

Sola’s?

…empanadas. One sits on its haunches, nibbling into a circle of pastry.

Some version of the snack can be found in every country I’ve ever visited. In India, it would be a samosa. In England, a sausage roll or cornish pasty. The Chinese would offer you a vegetable roll.

Finger

With luck, they’ll finish their treat and go. Warily, I watch them. Within a few minutes, they’ve cleared the

My panic has dispersed and the

In fact, I’m hungry.

filth-encrusted floor. I don’t want to consider what I’m

quite that

Yet.

Time to think…

*****

Michael

with sweat and smelling more of manure than manhood. The ground

get them green

only to get away from the

the barrow over, I rub away a fragment of straw that has somehow taken root in my stubble…

you

either hand, the steam rather more appealingly fragrant than what I’ve just been

I was just

The Novel will be updated daily. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

Comments ()

0/255