"I can't breathe!" she manages to choke out as her throat shuts. She furiously claws little red welts down her neck and her eyeballs tumble around and around in her head. Tiny whistles of air reach her desperate lungs, feeding and fortifying them for a moment longer.
She sees the room with her tumbling eyeballs, rolling around, while her tears cut through makeup and freckles and the only thought in her head is "AIR!". Suffocating, her chest abruptly rises and falls, eerily silent. Blinking through the tears, she sees the walls around her being eaten by shadow. Debilitated by the enclosing space tightening around her neck and vision, her legs buckle and with her eyeballs she tumbles to the ground.
The hallway seemed to endlessly extend before her; the putty colored linen cabinet at the end shrinking until it was only a cabinet simply because she knew it to be so. Milky, blotchy, bargain-buy tile beneath her naked, outstretched legs sticks to her skin as she sweats profusely from the garroting grapple.
The sweltering heat didn't help either. An instantaneous blaze of abhorrence for his frugal mother rocked her core.
A silent gloom crawls from every corner and crease around her. Deep from within the pockets, sleeves, hood, and bowels of a jacket drooped over the coat rack, a shade ascends, veiling all in a pitch. Like molasses, it creeps, covering everything it touches in a penumbra -- death eclipsing life.
The shoes beneath the canopy of jackets, sweaters, pull-overs, sweatshirts, and coats vomit forth a black and shadowy bile. Spreading like slick oil and dragging all hope below the surface, the shadows snuff it out. Reflections fall dull and her tormented expression becomes unrecognizable in the now muddy sheen of various materials. The glass gut of the grandfather clock to her left ticks at seemingly infinite intervals. Hissing each second with ruthless malice and mockery.
Her fingers are grappled in a crooked clutch around her maw, practically piercing porcelain flesh with mouth agape, while her nervous system spits out signals making her body twitch. "In through your nose, out through your mouth..." a quiet whisper rings in the back of her mind like the gentle tinkle of bells. Clamping her mouth and eyes shut, she desperately tries to suck air in.
Nice job setting a graphically dark setting. Using words like molasses, penumbra, and maw do a lot to describe the story's atmosphere. Reading it on my own though, I wouldn't have guessed this was a panic attack, my first thought was sleep paralysis and a bad dream. Polishing up the story with some background; "another panic attack was setting in" would clear that up. Good read.
ReplyDeleteI just read the title, I'm oblivious.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really effective description. As Patrick said, it's quite dreamlike. I liked your description in class where you said it was almost like a tunnel-vision/ blackout situation. Maybe you could incorporate that. Think of how that looks and feels from the perspective of the person having the panic attack.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as we discussed in class, it might help to ground this in reality a bit with some physical descriptions of where it's occurring. It seems like everything that was once familiar is now grotesque and threatening. Maybe describe that sensation.