Helen Sedgwick is a writer, editor and creative writing tutor living in Glasgow. She writes novels, short stories, flash fiction, prose poetry, book reviews and non-fiction. Helen graduated from the University of Glasgow’s MLitt in Creative Writing in 2008 and is represented by Kevin Pocklington of Jenny Brown Associates. Helen is the review editor of Gutter (www.guttermag.co.uk) and one of the founding editors of Fractured West (www.fracturedwest.com), and has also worked as a research scientist and musician. Find her at www.helensedgwick.com.

The Immovable (October 20, 2009. Issue 10.)

Don’t open the eyes. Don’t open the eyes. It could be today, that there is a real day. A solid day. It could happen.

He feels softness underneath him. Like a sinking into foam, but sticky. He’s not sure what the stickiness is. It smells human. Thick, damp skin, keeping the softness out of reach. It’s a cruelty. He won’t suffer it in blindness. Reaching his hands to his eyes, he will force open his lids and see his prison.

His fingertips touch his eyes. They are open, and there are things appearing in the blackness, shapes, hovering and threatening. He reaches out his hands and begins groping his way along the floor. It is immense, this place. An expansion of darkness and things seeming to be, in charcoal grey, ghostly and insubstantial. He stops, waiting on all fours without the strength to move on. Subservient. His mouth is sticking to itself like Velcro. There are sounds ominously rumbling, close by, far off.

He crawls forward. He is weak and sweating. He sways, topples into something soft. Like sponge. Like sogginess with edging, and he wonders if it is there to consume him, if he will sink into it and never come out. He collapses, wakes, drifts in and out of sleep, through nothing but sounds and sinking. And he waits to die.

What is that?

His left hand hits it first, while crawling. The edge. The Immovable. He puts up his palms and shuffles forward, feeling around with both hands. It goes on and on, sideways, and as high as he can reach, kneeling. He can remember standing once, but he doesn’t have the strength now. And it is so hot.

He finds a corner, pushes it to see if it will move. It doesn’t. The noises seem to be getting louder, but it’s hard to say for sure. They change, deafening, thundering, then nothing. He must escape. The sounds are a bad sign.

Noises erupt, suddenly terrifying. He starts desperately feeling around the wall, but it goes on and up and way over his head. He pushes it, bangs his fists against it, again, again, throwing his body at it, and he can feel grazes and bruising and knows he is hurting but there is nothing else for it. Dragging himself to his feet he lunges, shoulder after shoulder into the wall until, sliding, throbbing, he falls down.

He crawls to the soft thing and closes his eyes, and in semi-consciousness he dreams of urinating so that when he wakes he might have something to drink.

He is running, tripping, throwing himself around the walls but they are hard and flat and strong – he can’t break them. He knows that there is a way out, if he could only remember. Down to the floor, reaching for cracks. A gap would be chance, would be hope. He finds nothing. Oh, but if there was a gap, if he could find the opening where he was put in. There must have been an opening, surely.

An opening.

A way in is a way out. A chance. Imagine it! Light, light would be coming in, and the darkness would be lifted. Just a crack, and there would be air, breathable fresh air. Black would turn to grey. Things would have shape, would make sense again. A day of greyscale would spell such things, an awakening, a homecoming. He lies down and dreams of it. Of the shadings of things brought back, a rekindling of all the in betweens.

Sometimes he can remember them, the in between things.

At first he concentrates his efforts on the door. Be sensible, he tells himself. Don’t panic and be sensible. He tries the locks, tries breaking them. But they were fastened well. He finds joins where the edges of the door are blocked up, and he scratches at them with his nails but can’t get a grip, his fingers slippery with sweat.

He goes searching around the room for tools, anything that he might use. He tries to break the sofa. To smash it and splinter it into pieces, to use it to batter the door down. It’s making him tired, but with every failed attempt the panic keeps rising, so he keeps going, repeating things he’s tried, over and over.

But no. Wait. Rest. Be sensible and don’t panic.

Not yet.

He wakes up hearing the sounds and thinks they were in his dreams. So familiar. Spelling such warm safety. By his calculations there will be three, maybe four days. Hard to say exactly, with dehydration. But Day One will be wonderful.

Today is Day One.

He lies back into the sofa, enjoying his nakedness, closing and opening his eyes and imagining the darkness that would be inside a body. They get it wrong, in films and documentaries, but he gets it right. Dark. Inside the body is darkness.

It’s warm. He’s made sure of that. Had he been richer, he would have suspended himself in a water tank at body temperature. But he shouldn’t think of how it isn’t quite good enough. Bad thoughts shouldn’t happen here. Focus on the good. The warmth. The gurgling of life surrounding him. Yes, the sounds are perfect.

For the preparations he makes a checklist. Padlocks. 5-level bolt locks. Wood and black felt. Heating to keep the room at 37 degrees. Surround-sound speakers up high, connected to the stereo on repeat next door. Checking everything. Putting all his clothes neatly in the washing basket.

He would do this right. He would show her.

He makes sure all the lights are off then goes into the room cradling the keys. At first he drops them with excitement, his nervousness sparking, then, picking them up, he begins to lock the locks, one by one, pushing the keys through the gap left especially under the door. They will lie there in the hall. If she came, she’d be able to get in. And once they’re all locked, he stuffs the felt through the hole, pushing it in far enough that he won’t be able to reach it later. When it’s all done he’s proud of what he’s made, and he feels his way over to the sofa and lies back, to sleep peacefully through the first night and wake up to the sounds of perfect innocence.

He steals the stethoscope from the hospital. On the afternoon of the day he made the decision. No one missed it. Maybe they let him have it, knew and understood and thought it was for the best. Or maybe they never noticed.

Getting home, he starts recording the sounds of his stomach. Surprised at how well it works, at how right the sounds sound. He hooks up the speakers, replaying the rumblings of nature. Promising himself that when it’s done he’ll be able to stop thinking about her. The painting takes days, but it’s important to get the walls and ceiling a total black, keeping the room pure. He feels all tingly with anticipation. He can hardly wait for it to be done.

He opens the windows because she likes fresh air, then sits on the sofa in the living room waiting for her to begin her speech. It’s not a surprise.

She’s not happy, she says.

He just sits there. He knows, of course. He’d just thought they’d settled into an arrangement. Not what you expect, not what you hope for. But an arrangement. He was living with that.

She’s sorry, she says. But she has no choice. She tried, she says. She did.

But now he just sinks into the sofa, the leather warm, accepting, and he remembers when they’d bought it together. It was their sofa. Soft. He remembers saying to her, after it was delivered, that it was nearly as soft as she was. It was nearly as good as lying on her tummy. She’d laughed at that.

Ssshh. Don’t move. It’s so nice, he says.

Lying there he’s thinking that it’s the best feeling in the universe. His head resting on her skin. Warm, soft absolution.

I want to make this, he says. I want to make this for the world. Everyone wants to leave something behind, right? Well, this will be my legacy.

He can tell she’s smiling.

A place where everyone can feel this comforted. A place with these sounds, and this softness around you. And when things go wrong, people can come to me. You see?

He thinks she can see.

And I’ll let them into this place I’m going to create, and they’ll feel this warmth, hear these sounds, and they’ll feel better. Because they’ll know it is possible to create a place that has everything you need for happiness.

That’s a nice idea, she says. He can tell she’s humouring him. Her stomach bounces under his head as she laughs.

You don’t need that place though, she says.

How do you know, he says. I might. Anyone might.

Yes, but you won’t, she says. And she pushes his hair up off his forehead as though he’s a child. You won’t need it, because I’m not going anywhere.