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Called


The mud felt cold and foreign as it oozed up between my toes. The lukewarm water made a strange contrast while I walked deeper into the brownish water of the lake. There were leaves floating around my legs and getting stuck to my knees and I must have been distracted by the voices behind me for I had the impression that the leaves were moving in the opposite direction of the water’s current.  I watched the trees on the lakeside sway  in the wind and it felt as if the air around me was tensing before it eased again, as if it was about to give way to… something. I heard Shane calling my name. The worry in his voice was palpable but I had no choice, I had to keep on wading towards the strange object a few feet ahead of me.

The deeper I waded into the lake the harder it got to lift my feet from the slick ground. Staring straight ahead I moved further until I felt the water against my chin and decided it was time to start swimming but when I wanted to push myself up from the ground it struck me that I hadn’t been walking on the mud but right into it. I bent down to find my legs being halfway in the thick substance. Coming back up, I could smell it now. Intensely foul like decayed fruits. I wanted to turn around and call for Shane but my heart was beating wildly in my chest and my lungs felt compressed to the size of a fist.  I strained my ears hoping that Shane was coming to help me when I felt a sudden cold touch against the fingertips of my right hand. I couldn’t remember having moved but apparently I had for the mud was now enveloping my legs up to my hips. Another surge of panic burned up my spine and pressed hard against the base of my skull. The object in front of me was neither closer nor farther away than it had been before but I was feeling threatened by it nonetheless. The earlier urge to touch and examine it’s foreign structure had completely vanished and it’s undefined color made me nauseous to a degree that had me averting my eyes now. And where was Shane? Why didn’t he come and help me?

When I had heard his voice I had known that he wanted to hold me back. I was convinced that he had been standing on the shore worried by my strange idea to walk into the dirty lake towards an almost indefinable object. His blonde hair, untamable in the evening wind, falling into his eyes.  But now… Now I am not sure where his voice had been coming from. Or if it had been there at all.

I try to let myself float, hoping that my legs will slip out of the glue-like ground but I am stuck. My arms are moving in a ridiculous imitation of swimming while I throw my head back, panic making me afraid of drowning any second. Afraid to look at what’s ahead of me.

I feel the mud around my waist as it grips me relentlessly. The sound of splashing water fills my ears for minutes and minutes while I try to free myself. The water. The water doesn’t rise even though I am sinking further and I have to because if I am not it would mean that the mud is crawling up my body. Alive and thinking and still so very very cold against my bare skin. The air is leaving my lungs in a rush as the mud presses down hard on my rib cage. I want to scream and fight and unwind myself from this icy embrace. I feel my spine stiffen and my arms cramp with the cold that forces itself into every muscle. I am constrained to lift my head. To look at this thing ahead of me. This soft round shape breaking the water’s surface. And now, barely six feet away from me, it doesn’t seem soft at all, it almost looks as if hair was growing on it. Soft and blonde and untamable…


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Credits to: http://ickmachwatickwill.tumblr.com/

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