Season 02 - Episode 10

‘uncontrollably she thinks’

Ri is frightened.

She is cold and dirty and she doesn't know where she is.

After a wonderful eternity in the boundless, peaceful dark, the great and angry noise had come and with it, the light and then men. She fled through endless corridors, driven on and on by a wild, gibbering terror that rattled her heart and shrank her lungs.

Eventually she stumbled into a different dark, a new dark. Here, unchained, she moves through it and sometimes finds walls in the darkness. These frighten her because they remind her of the light and of the crushing, wraparound world that comes with it.

If she stays away from the walls however, sits quietly in this new dark, it's almost as good as before. She feels the space expand around her, opening up, leaving her room to breathe and relax.

This new place though, this newfound dark, is less reliable than her old dark before. Sometimes she hears men's voices nearby, low and menacing grumbles and hard, vicious laughter. The voices come from beyond the shape, a tall, oblong outline that glows and floats.

When she hears their voices that means that the other place is coming. The cavernous safety of her darkness suddenly falls away, disappearing as if it had never been. Instead, Ri finds herself in a new world, brightly lit with walls and floors and ceilings that press in and up and down, suffocating her in the middle.

This bad world, with its too little space and too little air, makes it impossible to think. Her mind clouds with panic, her body trembles uncontrollably. She thinks there might sometimes be people in that world, she thinks she has seen them.

The people she sees, if they're really real and not just nightmares, are always angry or frightened. They are always too close and too loud, taking up all her space, breathing in all her air. They confuse and frighten her, making everything worse and worse until it all slides sideways and she doesn't know what's happening.

When she comes back, she's still in the terrible crushing place but now the people are gone and in their place are sticky, wet red things all over the floor. These objects frighten her too but they don't breathe or move so they're better than people.

Eventually, this horrible world always goes away and the darkness returns. She doesn't know then if the people or the red things are really real or not. Perhaps that whole world of light is just a terrible dream. When it comes back, the red things and the people are always gone, as if they were never there to start with.

Ri doesn't understand what's happening to her, why the worlds come and go around her. Sometimes in the dark when she can rest and think clearly, she remembers the voice, the feeling of hands, firm but careful and caring. She remembers the feel of the wet cloth and the dry cloth and the sound of the songs her chains used to sing.

She doesn't know why they went away or what might happen next. Instead she enjoys the dark while she can and tries not to think of the other world. Then she hears the men's voices and knows it is coming, to start all over again.

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