4:57am
an excerpt

Sasha nodded to herself. She could do it. Now, for the final test. She sat up, moving to her knees. Sasha began gathering up every ounce of courage that she had. She had to know, had to test this. She couldn’t live with herself if she’d been too afraid and later found out that they were just beams of light, utterly harmless and not even penning her in here.

You’re mad.

Shh, no time for doubts. I don’t want to regret it later! Sasha smothered the doubts, took a deep breath, and reached out to clasp the bars before her that kept her penned in this little alien cage.

A jolt of … something … ran through her body. For a split second in time, every sense was alive, far too alive. Every little nerve ending was feeling everything. Everything. The hairs on her arms buzzed and wreathed about like long grass on a windy day, forced about by the incredible force of the air currents of the still and stagnant room. Her knees ached from the rough textures of the diamond hard floor, despite how smooth it had been only seconds before. Her ankles screamed from the pressure of her immense weight bearing down upon them. The blood vessels running up through her thighs groaned at the effort of pumping blood up and down through them. (sigh, ToS censoring. Use your imagination as to which parts she's concentrating on in the two missing sentences.)

Alive. Alive, alive, alive. Every sense so ----ing alive. I can feel it all.

She could feel her stomach still working away in its digestive process, the needle sharp pinpricks of air particles stabbing through her lungs as the breath that she’d taken was slowly processed, the oxygen fat lumps tearing through the lining of her body and into her blood stream. Her heart thundered, the muscles drowning under the weight of the blood filling the little space, ready to overflow if just one valve stepped out of line. Her fingers were on fire with light, the space between her shoulders felt as if each shoulder bone had slowly been dislocated and pulled a foot aside either way.

Too alive. Too much. Too much to take in at once.

The back of her neck was a pillar, cracking in slow motion as each bone split, one by one, moving up into a head already in overload. The room smelled of her, every little scent excreted from her body filling her nostrils at once, magnified a thousand times over. Her teeth ached in her gums, her tongue was swollen with the taste of the very room. Her eyes saw nothing, blinded by a light that no human was ever meant to see or cope with. It was like seeing God, or being God. Her brain had no idea. Whoever she was, it was all too much. Far too much. Too much to experience, too much to know.

And then the frozen moment ended. Her fingers came free. Whoever she was, she slumped lifelessly to the floor of the cell, collapsing into a puddle on the floor as if her skeleton had been temporarily removed. As her head hit the floor, her last thought was that it was beautiful, that that one moment had been worth it, worth it to experience. That she – whoever she was – had known something more, if only for a moment in time.

She opened her eyes blearily, squinting against the harsh white light of the floor. Were floors meant to glow? Every single part of her body hurt. She felt as if she’d been dead, or maybe it was that she’d never really lived. Blinking a few times, she found that she could see a little better. Beams of white light shot up in the distance ahead, brighter than the white light of the floor. What was this? Where was she? Who was she?

Sasha. Your name is Sasha. And you’re an idiot.