Lights suddenly began to dance from outside my window, blinking and coloring my kitchen walls. I blinked and looked towards them, wondering why they’d take the effort to go up my driveway and towards my parking area instead of just staying in the front. I walked outside, which apparently was a large mistake, as I immediately regretted it.

I’m in cuffs with really long chains. Spikes line the inside of them, digging into my skin and causing my blood to drip off my fingertips. I was already in a prison jumper, prisoner 527, my name tag says. I don’t know what I did, and I’m finding I don’t really care. I simply wait until we’re in the desert and line up behind the other prisoners, all sombering into the jail. There is no talking and no way of telling if my prison mates have mouths, so I look forward and head to where I’m meant to be.

Once we reach inside the prison it looks drab and unwelcoming. The walls laugh behind the stone that forms them and the floors move and shift when you don’t head towards where you’re supposed to go. I try to walk towards my cell first, and the floor forces me back to the police where I get uncuffed. I shake out my hands and try once again to go to my cell, but the floor forces me to the cafeteria where I am able to eat Jello and squid. The squid isn’t cooked all the way through, and it’s tentacled unhappily slap my table. I recoil and hand it to the faceless person next to me, whose face moves upwards as if in a smile before opening their mouth. The skin at the front tears and comes open, revealing at least three rows of small but sharp teeth. Their jaw comes to their neck when its fully opened and it places the squid on its tongue before chomping back down and reshaping the skin to cover its mouth once again.

I stand up and walk away, not feeling like I want to make friends all too much. The floor allows me to go back to my cell this time and I sit on the hard mattress of what’s supposed to be my bed and listen to the wall weep behind its stone. The floor moves up and around as the wall gets more upset, its concrete floor growing up towards the wall before falling back down to reveal a flower in one of its cracks. The flower is a bright bright yellow that shines in such a way the color bounces off the wall and onto the floor. It's designed with twisting black marks that circle around the petals and lead towards the stem.

I reach for it, but at that moment someone comes in, carrying an entire tray of food. I would call my cell mate faceless if it weren’t for the stray eye sitting horizontally on its chin. It sits down on the bed across from me and picks up a chicken. I wonder why it’s holding the creature above its stomach for two seconds before it lifts its shirt slightly to reveal a large and pointed mouth right on its torso. The mouth chomps down on the animal and I press more towards the wall to try and avoid hearing the sounds of the bones crunching beneath its teeth. I turn back when the sounds stop and see the chin-eye staring right at me. I stare back, waiting for it to make the first move, but the creature simply stands up, ruffles my hair, and walks out of the cell, brushing off the chicken feathers as it goes. I follow it out to make sure that it won’t be coming back anytime soon, before getting up and inspecting the feather covered bed. I grab one of the feathers and turn towards the flower, placing it near the base of the stem, before walking out of the cell myself.

The outdoor lawn isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The grass is dying and the sky is a persistent gray, but there are tables and plenty of tools that inmates can use to entertain themselves. I sit on a table and watch everyone else as they pass balls to one another and run around having fun. I see my cell mate not far off and decide to head to the barb and spike covered wall that lines the lawn. I feel the spikes are more dangerous than the barbed wire, oddly enough, and look at the watch tower to see what it thinks. It just continues to shine its light around the ground, keeping a watchful eye out for everyone on the lawn.

A young girl bounds up to me, her prison outfit much too large on her, and sticks out her hands towards me. I open mine up towards her and she drops a rock into my palms. Her smile is glorious and she sits next to me to tell me about anything and everything. Her voice sounds so normal that I nearly forget her face is missing half of its skin, and consequently some muscle underneath that. She talks animatedly about the rock and how she found it before moving on towards the flowers that she was picking near the corners of the lawn. Her neck it covered with them as they create a makeshift collar around her that ends at her shoulders. She shows off how she would be able to transform her uniform into a princess dress before searching all areas of the lawn around me for a flower. Everytime she finds one she weaves them together until she’s formed me a collar of my own so that I may cover my neck. She happily puts it on me and sits back down, smiling up at me broadly.

She wants me to meet everyone else that’s on the lawn and I feel no power to say no to her. She introduces me to most everyone that was there. As I talk to the inmates I notice changes and shifts in their faces and bodies. The one that had ears covering its neck begins to remove them and places a proper amount on the side of his head. The one that had skin covering everything peels it down to finally reveal his smiling face. The one that had its mouth sewn shut and jaw busted cuts open the stitches and looks at me with her kind eyes. My cellmate who had the stomach on his torso moves that up to his mouth while his eye shifts up to the proper place and he talked about the small flower that was growing near the foot of my bed. I smile as I meet them, feeling less like a stranger. I look down and realized that I’d failed to notice the young girls skin slowly growing back from the moment that she placed the rock in my hand.

I decided to sit and talk to them, occasionally joining for a ballgame that caused me to trip and skin and face on the ground. That didn’t matter much, though, as I enjoyed our time together and managed to stay around them until I felt tired. The moment I did I decided to walk back to the wall and sit down once again to watch them hanging out and playing.

I feel something drip onto my back and look towards the wall to see water coming down the sides in large amounts. It seems like these walls can weep as well. I study the wall until a bright flash of light comes over everything and blocks my sight for a solid amount of time. When I turn back I don’t see anyone. The walls are still there, the searchlight it still searching, but all that remains of what's around me is carnage. The girls flower collar rested on the ground a few feet from me, and I reached to pick it up. The once yellow flowers were stained with red, and I wondered what had caused their discoloration. I looked around for everyone but they weren’t there. I saw puddles of red and bits of meat thrown about the lawn and wondered if the lunch ladies also used this area to cook their food. Nonetheless, I wanted to go inside and see if everyone was there and give the little girl her flower collar back.

A rumbling and resounding sound distracted me from my goal, and I looked over to see a creature moving around just past the wall I had been sitting at earlier. Half of it was decimated and the other half was splattered in red. I frowned looked up at the monster, watching it lumber along the desert grounds, moving at an impossibly slow pace for such a large creature. It was dark and looked as if it was created from thousands of tiny creatures all joining together to create one, causing the larger figure to look fluid and unsolid. Poisoned vines snaked up from the hooves at the bottom of its legs and traveled all the way up until they withered and died off near its torso. The creature was three times taller than the prison that I was just in moments ago, and it overshadowed all the sandy dunes that surrounded it. Its hunching back was covered in pale screaming faces all melding together to form lumps occasionally stuck with broken up body parts. The creature’s head was small and rounded, with ten drooping eyes on the side that I could see and a mouth full of jagged and threatening teeth colored black. Every footstep from the creature made a resonating sound throughout the areas around it, proving just how heavy it really was despite looking like something malleable tha could vanish with the blink of an eye.

I walked towards it, dropping the flower collar from my hands to get a closer look. I witnessed a full bodied person jumping from off its back, trying to escape whatever mound was on the top of it. The vines snaked out from around the legs and caught the man before bringing him back up and making him melt into the mound of human flesh. I close my eyes to will the thing away, hoping that it won’t come near me or notice that I’m simply standing there like easy prey. When my eyes open the creature is staring at me, twenty red colored eyes boring into my soul. It’s body turned, slow and purposeful, the tiny creatures that made this large one all shifting so that they may reach me. Running didn’t seem feasible, or even like a possibility. I simply watched as it came towards me, its action growing faster and more intent when it realized I showed no signs of moving.

I really wanted to give the little girl her flower collar back, but I was hit with the sudden and intense feeling that even if I escaped this thing, I wouldn’t see her again. I fell to my knees and looked back to where I dropped the red stained collar of yellow flowers and tried to get myself to cry. I felt like I should be emotional, like I should care more than I did, but all I felt was an empty feeling of loss.

Sighing, I turned back to the creature now standing right in front of me, a towering figure that cast a cool shadow over me and everything near me. It stared down at me and I stared back, thinking that it might take me up in one of its vines, or try and lean down to eat me, though I doubted it could get so close to the ground. After a few blinks it shook its head and turned around slightly before going back the way that it came. I wish that relieved me, that the thought of not dying was comfiting. But it left me alone. There were others on its back, there was no one in the jail anymore.

I followed the creature with my eyes until it disappeared into the horizon, contemplating whether it was better to be safe, but alone, and deciding that that wasn’t something that I wanted to think about right now.

I stood up and went over to where the yellow flower collar rested and picked up up before walking into the jail yard where I had met all those people just minutes before. I look around the red that’s surrounding me, trying to find another way out that wouldn’t lead me back to the monster that had decided to leave me alone. As much as I didn’t want this loneliness persisting, I knew I wasn’t strong enough for the pain of being melded to others and never being able to escape.

I decided to go back to the jail and walk towards my cell. The floors had stopped moving and it was eerily quiet without anyone around to cause some sort of noise. I silently walk through the halls, not once looking up from the flower collar to listen to the laughing walls or study the ever shifting ground. I simply go to my cell and kneel by the flower that the floor had made for the wall. I want to pick it up and pluck it from the ground, but killing it didn’t seem like something that would do any good at the current moment. If the monster saved my life I decided saving the life of this flower would somehow balance it out in a way. I set down the collar next to it, and watched as the floor came up to swallow the yellow and red creation, making an imprint of it on the ground when it was done. I smiled and stood up, feeling a sense of accomplishment for doing nothing at all.

I stood up and walked out of the jail, into the yard, and out of the yard, heading towards the horizon of the desert in the opposite direction of the creature. I didn’t know where I was going, just that I was going, and may end up somewhere eventually.