7.30.2008

Three

His eyelids opened like window shades, drowning his world with the light. The pain from his previous efforts was gone. He rubbed his eyes with his palm and surveyed his surrounding. There weren’t any tools around him, and when he turned around he found the letters, this time only a few feet in front of him. Dig. The letters were massive. They towered over him, easily four times his height. The size of the letters startled him, and a sense of unease jolted through his body. Panic sizzled in the back of his head as he turned in the other direction and began to flee from the letters. He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps before his nose smashed into the opposite wall. He stumbled backwards and fell to the ground. Son of a bitch! His vision was blurred and his nose felt like it was on fire. He touched it and hollered with pain the instant contact was made. Fuck, I think it’s broken. He rolled onto his side and noticed a small weight in his shirt pocket. Curious, he reached his hand in and extracted a matte-white razor blade. Huh? He looked up and the letters on the other side of the space. “No,” he said, his voice scratchy from several days without use. “No. No, no, no, no, NO” he yelled as his voice became more clear. “I am not fucking digging anymore! I am not and I will not dig, god dammit! What the fuck is going on?” He hurled the razor blade at the giant red letters. “How in fuck do I get out of this place?” He screamed as loud as he could, until all the air had exited his lungs. Then he screamed some more. When his mouth was dry and his vocal chords felt like they had been rubbed with heavy-duty sandpaper, he slowly got to his feet and looked at the letters. He laughed softly. His laughter grew until it filled the room. “That’s great. I get it. I’ll dig myself out of this shit hole.”
He took a deep breath and walked towards the wall, bending over to pick up the razor blade he threw earlier. When he straightened up he saw a small flap had been peeled away from the wall where the razor hit. He firmly grabbed the flap and gave it a hefty tug, ripping a large, thin sheet off the wall. Paper? Behind the piece of wall he tore was another smooth, white surface. The piece he ripped off did not leave anymore flaps or protrusions, so he took the razor blade and ran it across this newly exposed wall. The blade sliced through several layers of the paper-like substance and he started to peel them back one by one. This is like unwrapping a giant present. What the hell? How many layers can there be? His next incision was through part of the D. He cut deep and tore off a large flap of the wall. Underneath the D was another D, each subsequent layer having the same letters emblazoned upon it. With grim determination he laid siege to the paper wall, shredding through layer after layer after layer. The pain from his nose was washed out by the sting of a thousand paper cuts. Whole chunks of flesh were hacked away from his fingertips and hands, blood soaked through the countless layers of paper in a heap on the floor. It was difficult to distinguish between the red of the letters and the red of his blood. When he started to feel lightheaded he just laughed and worked harder. Finally it began to feel like the whole room was spinning out of control and he let out a maniacal cackle before he collapsed in a mess of shredded paper and blood stains.

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