Bathland
Terrie Leigh Relf
Fascinated by the water swirling down the drain, she pressed her fingers on either side of the hole, peered down.
She tugged out the hair-catcher-screen. The hole got bigger and bigger—so big, that she could probably fit through the hole. She hesitated, but just for a moment. Down, down, down she went, through soapy scum and clotted hair and other things that made her shudder with revulsion. She gagged, stiffled the urge to throw up. Tasted orange flavored barf.
The tunnel tube began to widen, then opened up to an immense watery land, its heavens filled with floating eyes, their burnt umber pupils alternately dilating and retracting.
She swam and swam and swam, trying to get away from the eyes. No matter where she went, they followed her, seeing even beneath the dark murky depths, seeing even within the bright cracks and crevices of her white-hot fear.
Exhausted, she crawled onto a sloping shore. The eyes were gone, replaced by a blue, cloudy sky that reminded her a a painting she once saw. "Blue Skies" it was called. Like an aerial view through an airplane window. She wondered what the painting meant and if the painter had also been trapped within Bathland, lying spent on a mossy slope, thinking of how relieved they were to have escaped the eyes.
Then the first rumbles began and the slope trembled beneath her, shuddering like an old mountain wanting to shake off the pesky rocks and boulders. She felt herself falling, no rolling, no tumbling down, down, down. Then she was hanging on the edge of a cliff and below her, nothing. Nothing at all. Just vast uncharted space. Stars, their sharp spikes spinning toward her like a Ninja weapon, then the constellations heaved into action. Crabs pinching, scorpian stings, arrow poised within bow. Water pouring, then drifting and colliding with other water molecules, drawn to each other into blobs and gobules. Fascinated, she watched as they morphed into--something. A dipper scooped her up, poured her into another dipper. Back and forth, back and forth until she tasted green, until she finally tried to scream.
Her voice a gurgle of dark space and space dust, particles clinging to her lips like white flies on the undersides of leaves. Coating her face, filling her nostrils, glueing her eyes shut.
She let go, pushed through the rent in space, an unbillicus trailing after. Her placental suit deflated, filled with jagged tears. Already she missed the fluid warmth, the pod spinning from one galaxy to another. Now she was beyond the womb's edge.
She screamed then. There were voices. Alien tongues.
She let out another wail.