The Devil's Runner

My flash drive is temporarily unavailable, so I cannot continue any of my current projects but I also really wanted to write something. So I started something new. The title won;t make sense in this post, but it will in my next one. Also, this first post will be somewhat depressing.

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Jenna’s days had become very routine over the last five years. Everyday she would awaken from a dreadful sleep, finding that she was still in her cell. She would then wait to see if the guards remembered to bring her breakfast, usually it didn’t bother her either way, going hungry was often preferable to eating what they gave her, though she knew that she had to keep herself going and so she made sure that she didn’t starve. Then, she would wait for the sun to peek through the small holes in the roof. This would signal midday as the sun usually poked through around lunchtime (when they remembered it). It was also the only small comfort that Jenna received. The sun was still there, the world continued on without her, there was always another day.

The sunlight only lasted a few hours at most, but Jenna did her best to take advantage of it. During the first year of her confinement, she would try to catch glimpses of the sky and the sun and plan her daring escape or imagine her heroic rescue. She at first had several plans running all at once. Make the guard fall in love with her, go on a hunger strike, chip away at the walls, and become thin enough to slip through the bars were all plans that had been going on in the first few years. The guards never guarded her for more than a week at a time and she was forbidden from speaking to them, they would force feed her if they noticed that she hadn’t eaten the food that they occasionally remembered to give her, they were sure to take away anything that she might use to chip the walls away, and no matter how thin she became, her hips were never going to fit through those bars.

After the sun passed away from sight, taking away her scant source of light, Jenna would again simply wait to be fed again, and then try to fall asleep. At first, she was very hopeful that she would get rescued soon or that she would succeed in escaping. She didn’t notice it at first, but her hope shrank a little each day. Those days turned to months, and those months turned to years, and eventually she realized that she had given up. She wasn’t ever going to get out, and no one was coming for her. Her days had become a routine built by years of sitting and rotting in a cell deep in a cave.

She hated herself for losing hope, and she hated herself for falling into a routine, but it had been so long, and she was so tired of trying to maintain a false hope that she just let herself hate. Hating was easier than hoping, easier than waking up each morning disappointed that nobody had come for her. The only reason that she watched the sunlight anymore was because it was a part of her routine. She no longer thought of it as a hopeful sign that the world was still out there. She didn’t want to be reminded of the world that had given up on her. Jenna was slowly losing her sense of self down in these pits, and she hated that she no longer cared.

And so it was, five years and three months after being captured, that Jenna, whose only sense of self left was one of loathing, didn’t allow herself to grasp the hope that stealthily snuck into the cave prison. It is a good thing for her that the hope that entered the prison was very inquisitive.

~~

I've already written a bit more for this, so you can expect another post soon.