#cw's

He tried to turn on his side and found he couldn’t. The bed beneath him was a smooth steel slab, covered in what felt like vinyl sheeting that did nothing to keep out the cold. As he turned, his shoulder struck the edge of a rail, then wedged against another steel slab overhead.

The feeling of confinement was enough to kick his brain into gear. Pushing back panic, he reached out: his hands found more vinyl, over and around him, cocooning him, and beyond that, the edges of the slab he lay on, seated in its rails. The vinyl bag restricted him from reaching into the corners of the space, but he had a sense of its dimensions. Around three feet wide, maybe two feet tall, and just deep enough contain his body. The realization pressed on Alex’s sanity. He knew where he was.

This is a dream, this is a nightmare and I’ll wake up. But there was no change, no breaking of the dream. Alex sucked a deep breath, trying to clear his head, but the air inside the bag was already stale. His body protested movement, pain registering as he began to shiver. This was too real. This was real life.

He scrabbled at the inside of his cocoon. Where was the zipper? Body bags weren’t meant to be gotten out of from the inside, neither were morgue drawers. Why was he here? Terror flooded in like a tide, swirling a flotsam of disjointed memories. He had been to the outlets with Rosa, they both had the day off and she wanted to look at strollers. What next? Driving, singing the wrong lyrics to a song on the radio and laughing about it, stopping at an intersection, and- and-

Whatever happened next swirled away with a throb of his head. He reached up and felt gauze covering his forehead. There had been an impact, bone-jarring, and a feeling of horror. The distinctive shape of headlights on a make and model he could never remember the name of. A fading cacophony of action all around him, a long, long way off.

Rosa! Rosa and the baby!

“Hey, hey!” He beat on the roof of the drawer. His voice tore in his throat, he couldn’t even tell how loud he was over the roar of his panic. Was he really even alive? Maybe this was what it was like—maybe they would open his drawer and see nothing but a still corpse, even while he struggled to get their attention. If he wasn’t dead, he would be soon. Already his limbs were getting stiff from the cold, his movements uncoordinated. He was hyperventilating, burning oxygen too fast.

Our Father- Our Father who art- he couldn’t remember the rest. Help me, help me, help me!

Something banged on the outside of his drawer, followed by a rattling and shaking. The door of the cooler flung open and light flooded in.