The life was being squeezed of them. They tried to escape, writhing and sweating in a vain attempt to release the grip. The smell of fear was pungent, like the smell of the first rains in Africa, sweet and aromatic, so delicious you wanted to run outside and eat the mud. Their captor wanted to eat.
It had been dark. Not pitch black, but the reddish hue of staring out at daylight from behind your eyelids. Shadows danced across his vision as his eyes darted left and right behind tightly shut eyelids. Terrified to open them, he shut them tighter, grimacing and baring teeth as his cheek and jaw muscles were brought onboard to keep his eyes closed. But he knew they would open. Not because anyone forced them open or his muscles gave up, but because fear had a crowbar and she was prising them slowly apart.
Blood roared across his eardrums deafening them. The blood racing around his brain feeding the roots of fear, powering fear to use her crow-bar to open his eyes. He knew this and yet his heart beat faster. He knew this and yet his jaw clenched tighter. This was a battle of the real and the illusory. The monologue in his head had long dropped the veneer of intelligence and was replaced by the mindless verbal stampede. Words clambered, stood, crushed, killing each other to try and reach his conscious mind.
His limbs trembled. His pores drenched him in sweat. His teeth chattered. He was scared, and anyone who bothered to look up from their life would have seen it. But he could not see them. But flash. Bright! His pupils screamed at the sudden dilatation. Fear had opened his eyes for a split second. With that singular action, she and he knew she had him, and still, he fought on. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth as his teeth ground each other in a pointless attempt to keep his eyes closed. Bright! Pain, dilation. Again. His eyes started flickering open, tears lubricating the parting of eyelids. The droop of his mouth framing the sadness of the loss. The innocence of the darkness was gone.
His eyes were open. And everywhere they looked they saw the same thing. The news about COVID-19.