"Alysson"

Alysson had no idea where she was. It was dark. She couldn't remember anything. Her mind was a churning whirlpool of emotions and images her consciousness simply could not parse. The blurry half-seen photographs left her with a disconcerting and sickening feeling every time she brought them up in her head. She started forward in the darkness, searching for something, anything, to bring her a sens of place, something to ground her and orient her. Her arms reached out in the darkness around her, feeling nothing. Her bare feet slid along the floor, but she encountered no bumps or cracks to trip over.

Alysson's stomach lurched as she fell to the ground. The floor was smooth under her fingers, free of any dust or grit that would indicate foot traffic or even a connection to the outside world. Alysson slid her fingers over the floor, searching for the slightest defect or impurity. She let out a whimper that was muffled and eaten by the darkness. The hard ground beneath her was fee of any scratches, joints, or other mundane faults. The perfection terrified Alysson. Crawling forward on her stomach, she journeyed for an end, a wall, an existence. As she continued to find nothing but hard and prefect floor, Alyson began to openly sob and weep. The wet trail left behind on her cheeks remained stagnant. There was no breeze in this empty realm to dry her tears.

Alysson slithered forward endlessly. She had no concept of time nor any landmarks to mark her progress. The constant slide of the perfectly smooth ground was the only assurance she had that she was moving at all. Her tears stopped flowing. She began to try to untangle the chaos of her mind. Blurry visions of unidentifiable places and happy faceless people were all she could conjure in her mind's eye. She concentrated and tried to clear the empty pictures with all the force of will she had left, but the longer she spent dwelling on her forgotten memories, the more they faded.

Alysson continued struggling forward in the black with a mind as perfectly dark as the shadows surrounding her.

The girl could not recall why she was crawling forward along her belly. She was sure there was some better way to travel, but she couldn't remember what it was. There as an instinctive urge for her to continue through the dark. Her subconscious pushed her forward, insisting that something important was out there in the unknown before her. She needed to find something. She didn't know what it was. It seemed like the perfect floor beneath her and the perfect night around her were the only things she'd ever known.

The girl hadn't moved for a while. She didn't try to move. She didn't think of moving. Her breathing was steady as she lay on her stomach, staring out into the inky black. She thought of nothing. She felt nothing. The floor seemed to fade from beneath her. In an endless void, the girl floated with nothing but flesh and bones inside her.

The darkness was complete.