Spiders. Failure. The ever tightening fist of capitalism.
What’s YOUR greatest fear??
Let us know, and let’s write a character being forced to face it!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that we write some characters facing their fears.
Chat suggested a bunch of fears, then voted on the ones to write.
First up was siderodromophobia, the fear of trains, railroads or train travel.
Here’s what we wrote:
Mom was dying. I got the phone call from Jill, my older sister, pissed that I wasn’t there in the hospital room with the two of them.
“There’s a train leaving in half an hour from Newark Station,” Jill hissed through the phone. “Mom’s cancer has almost got her. If you ever want to see my face at Christmas or your birthday ever again, you’ll be on that train here.”
She hung up before I could say anything. She knew what I was going to say and didn’t want to hear it.
I can’t ride trains.
I mean, it makes sense right? Imagine voluntarily closing yourself inside a box that’s moving along at nearly a hundred miles per hour, stacked like sardines with tons of other people, and you have no control over anything that happens. Even the conductor can only have the train ride the track. If there’s something in the way, pow, you’re dead. Or worse, alive but not alive enough for the doctors to do anything.
I have experience with that. Watching my dad let go of my hand at Newark, slowly walk up to the edge of the train platform, and jump in front of it just as it pulled in. Not at top speed, medium speed, enough to crush his bones and snap his muscles and keep him in a state of raging pain at the hospital for a week until he finally died.
Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with my phobia too.
I quickly checked to see if there was any other way to get to the hospital. Apparently not. Jersey traffic was out of control as usual; I’d never make it in time. No planes or boats either, obviously.
I had two choices: stay home and lose the one relationship I had left with the soon-to-be only living member of my family, or take a deep breath and head down to Newark Station.
The deep breath tasted like screeching, rusty wheels.
Every step closer I took to the mechanical coffin was harder than the last. My legs shook, my fingers were slick with a film of sweat covering them like gloves, and my stomach was churning with sharp acid, trying to eject itself out of my esophagus.
I’d never felt my heart beating so fast, pumping sickness straight into my head where it ballooned thicker and thicker, ready to burst as soon as I stood on the platform and watched my deathtrap pull into the station.
As the doors opened and I stepped on, I wasn’t in control of myself anymore. I was a flaccid puppet of flesh, being dragged around by invisible strings of vague synapses flashing in my soupy brain.
Somehow, I made it to my seat. Somehow, I sat down. Somehow, I must’ve disturbed the passenger next to me, because he turned to me and growled.
“Never expected to see you here,” he said.
I guess fear is a hell of a drug. Sitting next to me was my dad, looking no different than the last image I had of him burned into my mind.
I wanted to say something, but if I opened my mouth, probably all the contents of my stomach would come spilling out.
“Hey,” Dad said, putting his hallucination hand on my shoulder. “I just wanted to say… I’m proud of you. I’m sorry that the way your dear old dad died kind of messed up the death of your mom too, but good on you. You’re stronger than I was.”
Just then a woman came shuffling past me, and sat down in Dad’s seat. He was gone, and I was left staring out the window.
Feeling… fine.
I was still a little sick and lightheaded, but when I wiped my hands on my pants, the sweat was gone, and my heartbeat was down to a light jog. I found myself leaning back in the chair, exhaling, and was that a hint of a smile on my lips?
Bbbbbfffftttttt!
The woman next to me blew her nose into her hands and started wiping them on the seat in front of her.
“Sorry,” she sniveled to me. “I forgot to bring tissues.”
I looked around the train. All the sniffs. All the sneezes. All the coughs.
Germs. Filthy germs everywhere. And even more were waiting for me at Mom’s hospital.
A new fear expanded inside of me like a tumor, pushing sweat out of all my pores, turning my heart into a goddamn hamster spinning wheel.
Next up was nosocomephobia, the fear of hospitals.
This fear flowed so well from the previous story that we decided to write a sequel!
Here’s what we came up with:
Mom was dying. When the train pulled into Newark Station, I left it behind, the mechanical fear that had once controlled my life now nothing more than a wispy ghost of a memory.
Replacing it was now a throbbing, gelatinous muck of anxiety and nausea at the churning hotbed of germs surrounding me.
How had I never noticed it before? Every touch between people, every oily excretion they leave behind, even Mom playing pull-my-finger with me as a kid and making me laugh, all of it was coated in a thick sludge filled with sharp, hissing demons.
Every sneeze, every cough, every breath that comes out of any one of a human being’s holes is tainted with the biome of bacteria and viruses that writhe inside of them, just waiting to find a new host and breed, breed, breed like millions of microscopic cockroaches, invisible to the eye until they puncture your skin and crawl out your follicles in chittering droves to infect and infest any innocent bystanders.
I would not be one of those bystanders.
As soon as I got off the train, I took off my hoodie and wrapped it around my face, leaving just a slit for my eyes. I didn’t care that everyone was staring at me, probably thinking I was packing a bomb or something. Ironic, since they were the ones smuggling death with their bio-weapons.
I tried not to think about the hospital as I walked the few blocks to get there. Just like trying not to think about a pink elephant, and then suddenly your brain is running a goddamn three-ring circus with all the elephants of the rainbow.
It didn’t matter how clean the hospital was. You have enough sick people in one place, and the germs win the battle against disinfectant every time. And a hospital is to sick people like lava is to a volcano. If you don’t want to die in a flaming, oozing mess, you probably shouldn’t go climbing an active volcano.
And here I was, climbing toward a hospital ready to explode. Plus all the needles. Chemicals. Screams from god knows what experiments those doctors are running on people. Running on Mom for all I knew!
Mom. I had to see her. I’d come this far.
The bright fluorescent lights of the hospital lobby seared my eyes as the glass doors opened for me. Inside, the air was a thick mixture of sterile gas and humid disease. I tightened the hoodie around my head and walked up to the reception desk.
“Where’s Doria Hacksmith?” I said muffled through the cloth to the nurse.
“Are you family?” she asked, eyeing me strangely. I nodded, and she directed me down the hall to Room IC06. No part of me came within a healthy three feet of her the entire time.
As soon as I appeared in the doorway, Jill came running up to me and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. When I didn’t reciprocate, she stood back and looked at me unimpressed.
“Is that what you had to wear to get on the train?” she asked, pointing to my hoodie-wrapped head.
“Kind of,” I mumbled.
“Well take it off now,” she said, walking away. “Mom’s gonna want to see your face.”
There was no way in hell my face covering was coming off. It was the only thing standing between me and a plague tsunami, but I didn’t need to get into that now.
Jill stopped beside Mom’s bed, and I stood next to her, looking down through my slit.
Mom looked horrible. She was little more than a skeleton underneath the sheets, her ribs visible as they pressed against the thin cloth each time she painfully inhaled and exhaled. At least there were no tubes going into her mouth, but her face was crinkled like pale tissue paper, gaunt and sallow-skinned, and she was hooked up to some faintly beeping machine.
“Jack,” she breathed, barely an audible ripple in the air.
Jill nudged me in the side. I knew what she wanted. What Mom wanted. The reason I came here in the goddamn first place. So Mom could see me saying goodbye.
But I couldn’t! Jill herself was a petri dish of plague, having walked around this place and breathed in the primordial soup of illnesses. And then there was the nurse, her trail of ooze-breath still lingering in the air. Everything was slathered in a morass of biological filth, ready to claw its way inside of me and breed, breed, breed!
I readied myself to explain to Mom and Jill as best I could. When I looked at Mom again though, I saw something new. An expression on what had used to be her face.
Fear.
Her eyes were wide and trembling, not a single blink of relief. They tugged at me, begging for help. However scared I was, she was feeling it even worse.
You’re stronger than I was.
I didn’t want the last thing she felt to be fear.
Reaching up to my head, I braced myself and yanked off my hoodie, taking in a deep chug of hospital air. Pretending to be strong.
My hand reached out to hers, and her cold bony fingers wrapped around my thumb. I flinched in pain, imagining all the diseases she was riddled with flowing from her flesh to mine.
Except for one. The illness that was killing her, Mom’s cancer, was one that I couldn’t catch.
“Hey Mom,” I said softly. What are you supposed to say in this situation? When your parent is about to die, holding onto your thumb for dear life and there’s nothing you can do. That you love them? You’ll miss them?
“Hey Mom,” I said again. “Pull my finger.”
The lightest tug came at the tip of my thumb, and I made a farting noise with my mouth. Just like Mom used to do to me when I was a dumb kid.
She started laughing. At first louder than the beeping machine, then softer and softer, until she had no more breath to laugh anymore.
This time Jill was the one to wrap her fingers around my hand, and even though I could feel the expressway of disease opening up between us, I pretended not to care.
Dad had said I was strong, and until that was really true, I’d just fake it til I made it.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pakutaso