The fluorescent bulbs flickered off and she froze, holding her breath, eyes wide with adrenaline. It is this abandonment in complete darkness that she feared most. She knew the blackness would pool around her and then squeeze like a knot, like the wet towel around her head, absorbing the beating of her pulse at the temples into its cold and heavy, spineless twist. From a far recess of her memory, as if propagating from the inner backside of her skull, a muffled melody made its way into her semi-consciousness, softly flooding her senses with spaced out, delayed reverberations that she couldn’t keep track of. She tried to follow the rhythm, but the rhythm kept getting tighter, more fractal-like, more mathematical, and she finally let go and just let it have her, and she let it make her heavy to the point where she began to sink into her bed. The sensation of sinking got unbearable when her head began to spin, then her body around her head, as if her head was the pivot point. Spinning counterclockwise at increasingly nauseating speeds she finally willed herself to open her eyes but when her brain gave the command to the eyelids to open, the eyelids didn’t because they had been open all that time, and it was at that moment that another violent rush of adrenaline into her blood stream made her panic for real and the spinning became not only counterclockwise but also circum-axial, and the rhythm went from diffuse white noise to focused eardrum-piercing ringing, and the mattress seemingly disappeared entirely, yet she still felt like she was drowning and at the same time like she was floating up into the darkness, the only thing keeping her from floating away completely being the heavy coldness of the towel pressing down on her white forehead. She tried to open her eyes again, throwing her head backwards as if her eyes were simply stuck looking inward due to a mechanical failure of some sort like a puppet’s, and as she kept writhing in all kinds of ways, the coldness of the towel started to turn into heat, first mild, then severe, then completely unbearable, and she screamed for help but her tiny squeal, constricted by thick pain in her chest, failed to leave her and got stuck to the roof of her mouth just outside of reach of her tongue. She tried to swallow but her throat turned dry and inelastic like an old, cracked hose, and when the muscles finally contracted something went terribly wrong and she felt cold air in the back of her throat and then felt something she could only identify as her ego fall through the hole that had appeared in the back of her throat and she heard it land wetly on the cold bile-colored linoleum floor. Having lost her ability to inhale she started to bite at the air, jaw protruding forward to the point of dislocation and attacking convulsively, uncontrollably at what used to be air but had so suddenly turned into dense-less vacuum. The field of her pseudo vision started to glow brown-red like caked blood, flashing epileptically as if backlit by a malfunctioning strobe light. Her temples pounded like sledgehammers against the sweat-drenched towel until, suddenly, her arms began to shake violently and her shriek finally got unstuck from the roof of her mouth and got propelled into the darkness and she froze and the spinning stopped and the rhythm slowed down and decayed and everything got silent and peaceful and what remained was the very final-sounding hiss of her last breath until it too was hungrily absorbed by the impenetrable and all-surrounding dark.