3. Kinsley #3
Not a gust. Not the steady, insistent push that's been leaning on the cabin walls all night.
This is different. This is a freight train slamming broadside into the mountain.
The entire structure groans, a deep, wooden-boned protest that vibrates up through the floor and into the chair and through the soles of my bare feet.
The fire flattens sideways in the hearth as a downdraft shoves smoke back into the room, and I hear something outside crack with the sharp, decisive report of a rifle shot.
A tree. Maybe. Or the world splitting open.
I take hold of the table with both hands and hold on like the floor is tilting.
A low, mechanical hum that I hadn't consciously registered until this exact moment stutters.
Catches. Stutters again. I look toward the back of the home where a dull yellow bulb has been glowing above a doorway I hadn't noticed, a utility light, barely bright enough to read by, but it's been there this whole time, a tiny electric anchor in the periphery of my vision, and it flickers twice like a failing heartbeat.
Then it dies.
The darkness is absolute. Not city dark, where streetlights bleed through curtains and the microwave clock casts a green glow and the sky never fully commits to black.
This is cave dark. Buried dark. The kind of darkness that has physical weight, that presses against your open eyes and pushes into your mouth when you breathe and sits on you like something alive.
The fire in the hearth has collapsed to a low crawl of embers, barely orange, barely there, and the shadows don't recede.
They advance. They fill the room from every corner simultaneously and erase the walls and the ceiling and the floor and suddenly I don't know where the room ends and I don't know where I end and there is nothing, nothing, nothing but dark and the sound of the storm tearing the mountain apart outside.
The thunder comes. Not distant and rolling but directly overhead, a concussive blast that rattles the cans in the cabinets and vibrates my teeth and hits me in the sternum like a fist. I'm off the chair before I make the decision to move, standing in the black, the shirt hiked up because I moved too fast, my hands out in front of me grabbing at air that gives me nothing back.
My fingers close on emptiness. I can't find the table.
I turned around at some point, in the dark, in the two seconds between the chair and standing, and now I'm facing the wrong direction or maybe I'm facing the right direction but the room has changed shape, the walls have moved, and my bare feet are on cold wood and I don't know where the fire is.
My breathing goes first. It always goes first. The inhale gets stuck at the top, a tiny trapped bird behind my collarbones that won't descend into my lungs, and the exhale comes out in a stutter, a thin wheeze that doesn't empty me out enough to take the next breath.
I know what this is. I know it intellectually the way I know the molecular structure of water or the GDP of France, as information that exists in a part of my brain that is no longer connected to the part of my brain that controls my body.
Panic attack. Acute anxiety response. Sympathetic nervous system activation. Fight or flight.
There is nowhere to fight. There is nowhere to fly.
My knees hit the floor. I don't remember deciding to kneel but the wood is under me, hard against my kneecaps, and my hands are flat on the boards and I'm trying to ground myself the way Dr. Reston taught me.
Five things you can see. I can see nothing.
I can see absolutely nothing. The exercise collapses and takes my composure with it and the sound that comes out of me is not a scream or a cry but something worse, a high, thin, keening whine that sounds like a wounded animal, like something caught in a trap, and I can't stop it because I can't breathe and I can't see and the thunder hits again and the building shakes and I am alone in the dark on a mountain that is trying to wash itself into the valley.
I lay my forehead on the floor. The wood is gritty and cold against my skin and I dig my fingernails into the gaps between the planks and I hear myself saying something but the words are fragmented, half-formed, a loop of "please" and "stop" and "I can't" that tumbles out between the gasping breaths that aren't real breaths at all.
My lungs burn. My vision, already nothing but black, starts to sparkle with white pinpricks that I know are the precursors to passing out.
Again. Twice in one night. Some independence retreat this turned out to be.
Then hands close around me.
Two enormous hands, one spanning almost the entire width of my rib cage, the other hooking beneath my knees, and the floor disappears and I'm rising, airborne, the world tipping as my body leaves the ground entirely and folds against something vast and solid.
His body. I'm against his body and his arms are locked around me and he is so warm it's almost violent, the heat of him radiating through the thin thermal shirt into my frozen skin, and I grab fistfuls of his flannel and bury my face into the space where his neck meets his shoulder.
"You're safe." The words rumble up through him and into my bones, low and rough, not gentle exactly but certain, the way a foundation is certain, the way bedrock is certain, and his arms tighten around me until there is no space left between his body and mine, until the darkness has no room to fit.