The Pit

You’ve been thrown down head first, splashing down into the liquid dark.  You are submerged in nowhere. There is no way to orient, to understand which way is up, to know where is the air you need. You know only that you dare not breathe yet or you will surely drown. Your arms seek through the viscera until your hand meets resistance, and you claw along this solid presence the wrong direction for several wrong seconds, then frantically change direction, reaching this way and that until the skin of your fingers detects air, yes, air, and you pull yourself up the wall with your other hand until your face breaches the surface with a slurp. Before you can shake the shock from your mind, your nostrils and throat are filled with the petroleum stench of gasses and decay. A thousand dead things from your ancestral past assault your instincts, and you gasp for breath, but you fill only with impurity. You breathe in ammonia and noxious egg rot. The air seethes in your lungs, primitive and combustible. Your body is submerged in a deep, black organic tar you can barely see but you can feel all around you. Desiccated skins, decaying flesh, insect shells, rat fur, feces, human bone and meat. You struggle to keep your head above the surface, forcing agonized muscles against the dense muck. The sludge shimmers, reflecting the verge at the horizon of the blackness of sight. Above you, a sickle of light from the opening of the pit. Your feet cannot find a bottom. You are sure you will pass out, your senses dizzy and overwhelmed. Beyond all else, you must maintain consciousness, to tread in the viscous quag, or remain suspended somehow in the thickness of it like a cherry in pudding. You have a panicked instinct that you might press your feet against one wall of the pit and your back or hands against the other and somehow force your body upward toward the timid light. But you are weak from starvation. In your hysteria, you squirm and suffer like a rejected fetus. You look up toward the sickly light and wince. Something is dripping in your eye. You go to wipe with your hand, but that is worse. The trickle continues, and you realize that someone far above you is urinating on your head. Helpless and hopeless, your limbs give up, and you succumb to the darkness and submerge. For long minutes, you float in a paralyzed silence. This is what it's like to die. Humiliated, beaten, unloved, unknown. Above, an indifferent waxing moon of light and a black sickle ignore the end of you. Absorbed by bastard memories of former dreams and hope, you surrender. As the bubbling chill of bitter filth seeps into your ears and nostrils and lungs, it occurs to you strangely, “I once loved. I once was looked on with desire.”