2021 FCHS Undefined

something so surreal and cynical about the way that
mass was looking at me. It didn’t have eyes, no face
or body to convince me of sentience, but it did have
a presence. A presence that was stronger than any
I’d felt before, cold and hollow, an aching, painful
creature. It looked like bone covered in drying,
crimson blood.
The car tumbled off the road and across the
shallow ditch beside it. I could hear the sound of dirt
and rocks spitting up against the car’s undercarriage
and wheel-wells. I could feel a quick shift in the
breeze that wasn’t there. I could feel the impact even
before I hit the tree.
A light flickered in the distance, deep within the
tangle of trees beyond the cracked windshield.
Through fogged vision, delirious and drunk with
pain, I watched that light beckon to me like a beacon
of healing. Tempting me.
But I couldn’t move. I tried my feet first, then my
fingers, but as hard as I pushed, they wouldn’t
budge. Only my eyes swam with motion, jerking
back and forth in a panic. The little firelight from
deep in the woods reflected in them.
Think of him. Song.
I forced the pain from my body, tried as best I
could to shove it back down the road, perhaps to
haunt that thing that had put me there.
My shoulders were the first part of me to move.
They hunched over and brought my head down on
the deflating airbag that was covered in glass shards.
Later I would realize those shards had shed from my
face, and the hot pain that covered my cheeks and
forehead was bloody scrapes.
After that initial push, the rest of me came to
easier, slowly waking up to the pain and discomfort
of broken bones and peeling skin, like I had been
sitting here, alone, drying out for weeks. My lips
were chapped with crusted blood and my eyes felt
like their lids hadn’t blinked in forever. My right
knee was crushed.
But I had to make it to that awful light.
For Song.
12:00 AM
I limped up onto the road for a little inspection of
what caused my near-death crash. Whatever was
there before wasn’t there now, but I knew it had
been. I was sane up until then, and that thing was
looking at me, soul to soul. It wanted me to hurt. It
wanted me to suffer.
12:30 AM
Almost to the light now.
There was no trail to follow, so I kept my eyes
fixed on the flicker in the distance. It was getting
closer, growing warmer and larger through the thick
sheets of falling rain. Through the water it almost
seemed to sparkle.
On either side of me while I limped, the sounds
of shuffling leaves and cracking branches filled my
ears. They hurt already, but these sounds hurt them
worse. These sounds made them bleed. They
weren’t just natural things in the hidden depths of
woods to either side. There was something else.
Deeper than the world I knew before my car spilled
off the road. These things were high-pitched, like a
hundred screams folded on top of each other. Maybe
that’s what they were.
Where am I?
I hadn’t bothered to ask myself that question
until then, until my ears filled with the hateful
language of Hell, until the fractured bones in my
knee began to spread and itch and scrape under my
skin, moving to different parts of my body, cutting
my skin from the inside out. The hateful feeling of
Hell. And in front of me, my idea was confirmed:
the hateful image of Hell.
There was a fire, the light that had brought me
closer. It was raging. The man sitting across from it
looked just as ominous, just as dissolved. He looked
miserable.
“Where am I?” I asked the man whose eyes were
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