Sunlight poured onto the asphalt. The distance wavered in the heat. James Mun hurried across the parking lot, squirming as patches of sweat widened on his back and under his armpits. He threw himself into his car, wrenched the air conditioning to full blast, and rotated all the vents toward himself before driving out of the lot. He willed the roaring, hot air to grow colder faster. He sighed with relief as the air finally began to chill.
After stopping at a red light, he rested his arms on the vibrating steering wheel and lifted his elbows. A smile spread across his face as his sweat circles turned cold against his armpits. His half-open eyes traveled up toward the bright and cloudless summer sky, which seemed to smile back at him. He kept his arms cocked and lifted even as the light turned green and allowed him to drive forward once more. Saliva pooled under his tongue at the thought of making instant ramen for dinner. He would prepare the usual. Three packs of noodles with three raw eggs thrown in. Of course, he’d mix the powdered soup base into the water first before anything else. Only amateurs added the soup base as the last step.
A series of potholes rattled the car. He glanced down at his belly, which bulged slightly against his blue button-up and jiggled along to the car’s jolting and shaking. Ramen probably had a lot of calories. Eggs too. Maybe it would be better to eat something else, something healthy. Losing weight was eighty percent diet and twenty percent exercise, after all. But then again, he was only twenty-five, so his body could probably take the calories. In fact, he probably needed them. He was sweating a lot, and a lot of calories were expended with sweat. And work had been so busy today, as it was every day. Yes, he’d be fine. He could afford to eat ramen tonight. In fact, he deserved a treat for finishing another long day of work.
Despite how fast-paced the office was, he liked this internship the most out of all the ones he’d taken since graduating college. The people were reasonably friendly, his duties were deepening his knowledge of engineering, and he was able to practice the skills he wanted the most improvement in. All the experience was bound to come in handy when he started his master’s degree in the coming quarter. The only thing he really couldn’t stand about his job was the parking.
A large company had recently moved into the adjacent building and brought hundreds of people who took up all the parking spots, or at least all the good ones closest to the entrances. A lot of his coworkers complained about it too. They’d been there for years, and now this fancy, rich company had swooped in and made parking a nightmare. It was pretty annoying, not to mention rude.
He pulled into his assigned parking space as he arrived at his apartment complex. The steamy images of hot ramen that had filled his mind vanished as he looked at his belly, which jiggled again as the car trembled to a stop. He wondered if it would be a good idea to start working out.
He bypassed the stairs and took the elevator to his apartment on the second floor, playing with his pudge as he went. He threw his keys and wallet onto his desk then hurried from corner to corner, turning on all the fans. After stripping down, he grabbed a pair of jersey shorts off the floor and flung himself onto the stained carpet with a pleasurable groan. He decided that working out was a good idea. Then he opened his laptop.
The sun began to set, spilling its blood-orange light across the white tiles of the narrow kitchen counter. The molten glow turned into the cool gray of dusk before settling into the soft darkness of night. The air became heavy with the type of stillness only summer evenings bring, a stuffy stillness that requires watermelon and cold showers. Pipes gurgled within the walls. The clanging of pots and pans drifted out from neighboring windows. Stray cars whooshed down the street in the distance.
He continued laughing at the Korean variety show playing on his laptop as he rose from the floor and tottered into the kitchen. Noodle bits, powdered soup base, and dried vegetables scattered across the stove as he ripped open three packs of instant ramen. He swung his rear from side to side and blew air between his lips to make farting noises as he waited for the water to boil. After a few slow minutes marked with the annoyance of having an electric stove rather than a gas one, he cracked four eggs into the ramen rather than his usual three (he deserved a treat, after all) and sat down to slurp the noodles from the pot. Specks of oily broth flicked onto his laptop screen as he inhaled the noodles. He only paused in his slurping to laugh along with the audience in the variety show. The dregs of his dinner had long cooled by the time he finally clapped his laptop shut.
He tossed himself onto his mattress, which bounced and squeaked beneath his weight. The sheets felt cool under his skin. He threw out his arms and legs and dragged them across the sheets in sweeping motions, pretending to make snow angels, then rolled around to find the most comfortable position. Yawning, he checked that his alarm was set and recounted several action items for work. He felt confident that he could get through them all in one day. After all, he always did. He smiled as drowsiness blended with consciousness and carried him into a deep sleep….
He was standing in a vast, blurred space. Despite the formlessness of everything and the numbness wrapped around him, he knew, somehow, that rooms and hallways surrounded him and that people were moving about. An inclination to run welled up within him, and he began running through the hallways, passing faceless stranger after faceless stranger as he went. The numbness dulling his senses erased any physical strain that might have tired him and instead, gave him the pleasant sensation of weightlessness.
Gradually, he began to understand that only a part of him, an immaterial and transient part of him, was running through this amorphous space. The bigger part of him, the part that held his memories, his autonomy, and his sense of self, still resided in his sleeping body in a faraway dimension. He didn’t know how he understood this. All he knew and all he cared about was his comfort.
A distant sound made him twitch.
A scream. Someone was screaming. She was screaming, “No….”
He shook his head. Did she need help?
He steered his feet into a new direction and followed the far-off echoes of her voice.
A strange sensation began weaving throughout his mind. It was small at first, a kernel of a feeling. Then it grew, sprouting and twisting. The numbness began to dissipate as physical exertion dawned upon him. His feet grew sore as they beat across solid ground. The muscles in his legs burned with the effort of sprinting. His core tightened. His heart pounded. His eyes widened. All at once, the part of his mind that had held his will and his knowledge of self, the part of him that had stayed behind with his sleeping body, expanded until it burst forth, emptying out from the body lying on his bed and pouring into the body that was sprinting at full throttle.
James continued running as he looked around in bewilderment. He was running down an enormous hallway swarming with men, women, and children. The entire hallway, from its expansive walls to its high, vaulted ceiling, was a spotless, snowy white. He did a double take as the crowds suddenly stopped and stared at him. They parted to reveal a black void waiting for him at the hall’s end.
He shouted and windmilled his arms, hammering his feet into the ground in a panicked staccato as he tried to stop himself from running into the darkness. But the whole hall tipped like an unbalanced scale as if to prevent his escape, and the black void rose up to meet him, opening up like the maw of a hungry creature before swallowing him whole. He squeezed his eyes shut and screamed out in terror as he plummeted through emptiness like a stone thrown from a cliff.
He was standing. He hadn’t felt any kind of impact, yet he was now standing on his feet as if he’d never fallen. For several moments, he simply stood still, shaking and gasping for air. Finally, he dared to open one eye and scanned his surroundings.
Emptiness stretched out in all directions, black, still, and deep.
His terror spiraled into panic, pushing nausea up his throat. What on earth was going on? What was this endless black, and who were all those people in that giant, white hallway? How did he even end up there? Where in the world was he now? He took one shaky step then another before running through the silence. He couldn’t tell where he was going or if he was going anywhere at all. He tried to find an interruption, some movement or visual cue to lend him context as to where he was, some sign of life. But he found only darkness.
He stumbled to a stop and wrestled again with the urge to vomit. He tried to calm himself down by saying that this was all a dream. It had to be. There was no other explanation. But if this was a dream, why did everything feel so real? Was it even possible to see this clearly in a dream? To feel the breath in his lungs and the fear in his stomach? To think with this much clarity?
His skin prickled as instinct made him tense. Someone was watching him.
He spun around then jumped. A beam of soft, blue light shone down through the emptiness, spotlighting a small box resting on a stone pedestal in front of him. He swiveled about, his thoughts racing as he tried to piece together how these things had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. He froze as his eyes latched onto the box.
The box. It was deep blue, like ocean turned into stone. Thin, dark lines webbed its polished surface, which reflected the light. It was staring at him. He could feel it. He didn’t know how, but he could feel the box staring straight at him. It was staring, calling, asking him to take off its lid. He began to draw closer then stopped.
On the one hand, the box seemed to be the only thing that existed in this darkness other than himself. Inspecting it might give him some clues about where he was and how he could escape. On the other hand, a random box calling out to him in the middle of a vast, empty darkness reeked of danger. Walking away would almost certainly prove to be the safer route. He could simply leave the box and wander off in search for other clues.
But the box. The box was staring, whispering, calling. He knew he couldn’t walk away. He reached out with shaking hands, hesitated, then lifted the lid off of the box. He cried out in horror and dropped the lid.
A red eye covered with bulging blood vessels lay on red silk in the middle of the blue box. The eye leaked blood as it throbbed in pulses.
He clamped his hand over his mouth as his stomach spasmed. But despite his revulsion, he found himself unable to turn away from the eye just as he’d been unable to turn away from the box. He didn’t know how he even knew that it was an eye. It was bigger than a human eye, and a bite-like crater filled with black liquid lay where the iris and pupil should have been. The thought of someone taking a bite out of the thing almost made him double up again, but even as he struggled to push the image out of his mind, he suddenly found himself gripped with an inexplicable need to finish the job, to consume what remained. Someone had already taken a part of the eye. Now, he had to take the rest.
He tried to stop himself, to walk away, to ignore the sickening task he somehow knew must be completed. But his hand stretched forth against his will.
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