Depths: Into the Wild Blue...Yonder

Beyond the wild depths of the dark beast's lair within my tattered soul, I felt the gnashing teeth of fear wrench a bite out of my shattered heart. The woman -- no! -- the foul demon wearing a woman's skin who had just stepped through the airplane's hatch was wearing my mother's fur coat; the very coat that she'd been wearing in her casket when her cold corpse had been lowered into the January-frozen ground.

Quickly I scanned other details of her attire and the intricate pattern of scales on her crocodile handbag drew my eye; it, too, matched the one my mother had carried. My gaze flicked to the demon's head and found the ancient horned-rim glasses my mother thought made her look so elegant and sophisticated, but I always thought made her look old and frumpy.

This mutated aberration met my gaze with eyes the color of soot and ember. It's tongue flicked between a smile-smeared mouth the exact shape of my mother's and stained with the same gritesque Coral Breeze lipstick she always wore. The realization that this...this abomination wore my mother's very face pierced through my armored heart into the tender, still-grieving space where lived the mad predator that was now destroying my heart.

My blood in my ears was a deafening roar, a grotesque and petrifying mockery of the airplane's suddenly straining turbines. The rapidly changing pressure of the cabin-space around me lulled me into an otherworldly state. I was trapped inside of a winged deathtrap hurtling through space above the Pacific Ocean at speeds beyond those which anyone was ever meant to travel. One reckless pilot, one mad rush at the cockpit with the plastic knife in my pocket...that's all it would take for every man, woman, child, and deamon on this plane to surrender to the warm waters and slowly drown.

Yes...let the weight of the ocean squeeze the breath from us all.