Holding Cell
08 Apr 2019Today’s prompt: “Your bedroom from the point of view of a stranger forced to occupy it for a week.”
It still strikes you as strange that the red-robes are keeping you here. It’s just someone’s random bedroom. White walls, except for that one dark blue one in the nook where the short dresser is. A stack of comics on the bedside table. Blinds pulled tight on the window and the French doors – is that what you call them, when it’s a double door with glass in it, but it’s not a sliding door? French doors? Whatever. Maybe you’ll Google it if you ever get out of this.
You’ve tried shouting. On the first day you shouted until you were hoarse. You didn’t think this seemed like a bedroom in a house way out in the country, but you could be wrong about that. You heard an owl the other night. Who-who-who whoooo whoooo whoooo. So yeah. It could be in the country. But it didn’t feel like they got you that far out of town when they drove you here. Maybe no one rescued you because the cultists already killed everybody in this neighborhood. Or maybe the whole neighborhood is filled with cultists.
You’ve been staring at that one cheap, quasi-arty-looking picture of R2-D2 and C-3PO for a couple hours now, ever since they last took you to the bathroom. You stare at the picture and try to remember the model names of all the spaceships in the background. When you get bored of that, you stare at the reindeer in the flannel sheets. Sometimes you call them Dasher and Cupid and Rudolph. Sometimes you call them Asshole and Stupid and Adolph.
You’ve woken up in a puddle of drool on Adolph a few times now. You try to rock yourself out of the wet spot when that happens, but it’s tricky the way they tie you up.
You don’t understand why they’re keeping you here. Why they’re keeping you at all, for that matter. Maybe they’re holding you for ransom? Doesn’t seem like the M.O. for a bunch of people who run around in red robes with dark circles painted around their eyes. They haven’t asked you any questions. They aren’t pumping you for information. They aren’t torturing you. They just come in once in a while, take you to the bathroom, and feed you. It doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Are they waiting on a full moon? Are they working through some backlog of murder victims that they have to ritualistically kill one a night? What the hell is with the wait?
The door opens. It’s not feeding time. It feels early for bathroom time. They usually make you wait a bit longer than that.
A red-robe enters, with a machete in his hand. “It’s time,” he says. He pulls you to your feet and pushes you ahead of him, the point of the machete at the small of your back. You say a silent goodbye to R2 and 3PO and the blue wall and Adolph, and he walks you out the door, down the stairs, and through the back door to the killing field.