Chapter 4; Swallowed... Again. (SW pt. 2 of 8)
This is the fourth short story in my book. It's part two of an eight-part arc. Most of the stories aren't related at all, but there's a tiny bit of crossover here and there. This story is the only real continuous thread throughout the stories.
Here's the text, in case anyone cares to read it instead of watch.
Swallowed... Again.
Calvin had blacked out from fear. This time, when his eyes opened to the darkness, he felt an incredible mixture of feelings. Was he dead? Was this the afterlife? There was a warm pulse around him, and a variety of gurgling sounds. And breathing. I guess that's the answer, he thought. When you die, your soul lives on in the thing that killed you. Wait... Breathing? He fumbled around himself for his phone again, and turned the flashlight on.
"WOAH!" He yelled in surprise. A person was hovering over him.
"Oh ho. Oh ho." Came a quiet, breathy, feminine voice. "He's alive! Alive!"
"Alive? I'm alive? I was knocked down... Did I really get back up again?" Calvin felt his face to be sure.
"Yes, yes, ho, boy. You're in the bear now. With me... I've been in here, ho... fifteen years. Alone." She had an odd way of speaking, like someone who had been divorced from the rest of humanity might.
"Ohhhh...!" Calvin's pitch turned to a rising whine. "Will I never get home to the people who love me?" He curled himself up into the fetal position to pity himself more closely. Her soft hand gently caressed his knee by the light of his phone.
"Don't cry that you're here now. I've been here waiting. I, Jennifer Love Hewitt.... could... Jennifer love you."
Calvin sniffled, then wiped the slime away from his upper lip with his bare arm. "Jennifer Love Hewitt? Is that really you? The Tuxedo was my favourite movie."
"That's me... Ho... And I haven't known human touch in, ho, fifteen guilty summers. If you had any idea what I'd been doing every summer for fifteen years....ho..." She continued to stroke Calvin's leg in a way that was both wistful and seductive. His pulse began to quicken. They locked eyes, and he slowly leaned in to kiss her eager mouth. Then abruptly turned away.
"Well... I don't know. My girlfriend just broke up with me half an hour ago... I'm still reeling. Let's take it slow. Let's get to know each other... If that's OK with you?" He asked tentatively. She leaned back and shrugged.
"Ho...? That's reasonable. Tell me about yourself."
"Oh, I'm not that interesting." Calvin chuckled. "I was a co-manager at the Olive Garden, I'm allergic to bees, I'm the first person to ever experience the thermonuclear wedgie, which is a waaaaaaay more scientifically advanced version of the atomic wedgie. Did you know that the atomic wedgie was invented during World War II as an interrogative technique? I don't know that for sure, but I really think it's true. Oh! I'm working on a country album right now called Colonoscopies and Kisses. It's just poetry right now. Want to hear some random excerpts?"
"No... ho.... I don't"
Calvin cleared his throat and practiced a couple twanging sounds before getting started. "Iiiiii ain't fifty, babaay, I just wanna know, what's going down below. Oooh, prostate prostate, let's stay togetherrrr foreeeeeeverrrrrrr."
"Is this hell?" She asked nobody, quietly under his chanting.
"You can't take the boy out of the polyps, but you can take the polyps out of the boy. Scrub me clean, oh Broccoleee Broccoleeeeeeeeeeee Broccoleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, oh, live life like you're fifty. Broccoli."
"I think I'm dying. What is this pain?" She clutched her gut in agony.
"Ooohhhhhhh the light at the end of my tunnel, exit only, cameras excepted. And tomatoes."
"There IS a light... it's so beautiful... Hoooooo....." She looked upward, toward the top of the monstrous, spacious beast they were both inside, and the light faded from her eyes.
Jennifer Love Hewitt had died. Fifteen years of hard survival inside a gargantuan bear had ended with a ruthless bludgeoning of arrhythmic, atonal poetry about the inside of a man's colon. Calvin was too busy pantomiming his own imagined music video to notice what had happened. Several minutes passed before he finally turned around. When he did, Jennifer Love Hewitt was no longer beside him. Instead, the chalky husk of her desiccated remains stared blankly at him through empty sockets. His song had killed her, not just decidedly unsoftly, but also retroactively.
Calvin looked down at her, agog. His hands shook with shock. "JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Why does this keep happening?!"
Calvin didn't have time to mourn. The world was shaking again. The gurgling sounds around him were becoming louder. And louder. Soon they had filled his entire head, and he felt himself being pulled away into sloppy wet darkness. Everything went black again
As I mentioned after Pt. 1 in this arc, the concept was originally borne from Buried (Starring Ryan Reynolds). This second part was developed after we realized we needed a little more material for my Fringe play last year named after pt. 1 of this piece. It was made for sketch, so it didn't need to be extremely fleshed out in and of its own.
It was really fun for me to turn these two stories into an entire arc.
I hope you enjoy it! Until next time, take care!