W. Doug Bolden

"He Once..."

"He Once..." is my take on the "man in the room/box" story where someone comes to consciousness inside of an enclosed space and has to deal with what all that might mean. I don't know who it would be in the style of, but it is sort of retelling of an older story idea I had, about a girl in an ever growing chamber, which I might get around to writing again one day. In that version, the room reads nursery rhymes to her, and I repeat part of that notion here.

I lost the rewrite that I liked when my last harddrive crashed, so I went ahead and did a slightly larger rewrite to it. I have both the very original and the new version below in pdf formats.

Excerpt

"The cell has a comfortable enough bed to the left and behind him and a table also to the left but in front of him. The cell is four meters wide and six meters long. He no longer cares about such things as distance measurements, not in the same way you do, but he once did. The walls are a smoky old white color, one that would normally impart a quality of dirty or dingy to a description of the place if he did not know better. The cell does not allow dirt, at least not for long.

"The light are a dim fluorescence. You could deduce this from the slightly hum below hearing and their square shape in the ceiling. They glow a dim yellow, as though incandescent. This could confuse you if you allowed it. They are plenty bright to see, though you feel an urge to squint or turn them to a brighter settings, had you the means or the chance.

"Three meters in front of him and his position in the center of the known world is the refrigeration unit about one and half meters tall and a color that is somewhere between silver and steel, two meters to his right. Behind him, directly, is a chest of drawers. Three in number, each accessed by a simple, adequate handle. There is a shelf to the right of this, facing - as he is - away from the drawers. This shelf is something you would readily call a bookshelf, and is half used.

He once read constantly."