The Tunnel by Tommia Wright

It’s interesting how two people can enter the same tunnel only to emerge with different takes during three miles of darkness.

This rambling spun itself, the characters unnamed, during my return walk through the Snoqualmie Tunnel. Some of the ‘off-beaten’ remarks made within the story were spoken aloud between me and my friend, Sheri.

Do I have any idea whose backstory this will become or if this become something more? Of course not.

Enter the Tunnel by Tommia Wright

Tunneling Into Madness

He ran down the corridor, footsteps echoing, but not in time to the falling, thanks to the thinning soles. He had to get to the chamber. He had to get to his spot. He needed his music.

Then again, that titan of a toad probably took his spot – took over everything that was his. Unlike the rabbit who curled up on the curve, carefully observing whatever was going on. Then there was the bird – never able to tell if it was coming or going, possessing as many layers as it did feathers. Animals – all of them. Worst among them was the sharp-toothed shark with its razor-cutting skin and thicker-blade fins. He hated the bruising, biting brute.

He tightened the cords on the hoodie to keep dry – water chamber music tended to be damp. He didn’t care, because it made him happy and energetic and sad, every movement, every note, and every drop. It was his mental IV drip.

As soon as the interlude of whirling wheels went by, he could settle in for the main overture down under. He hated the cyclists. They cluttered things, crowded out the sounds he preferred as much as he hated the silence. Chaos and corduroy paths ruined the silence –his silence, with the constant clickity-clack and chat-chat-chattering of insincere squirrels – the damn spinning, spinning, spinning.

He thanked the shrew for sharing a space on the Spartan spruce, slivers absent. The concert was perfect, peaceful and pounding.

The Tunnel 2 by Tommia Wright

She watched him pace back and forth, before he finally sat down on the ground, rocking back and forth. What he called ‘chamber music’ she called the leaky cauldron of the tunnel. He was calmest in the center; arms wide open to the curtain of drops.

The darkness drove him mad, but shadows made it worse. Why she let him have access to the fireflies, flames or torch, she never knew, but always did. That’s what friends, phantom or otherwise, did for those they loved.

Whenever he roared – well, random rants that rarely met reason – she listened. Too often, he stammered, struggling to find the right words as he flung rocks at the wall. She had them, the words he lost, not that she would tell him – her sanity came with silence.

If he ran fast enough, maybe he could get to the end before it disappeared.

She watched as his hands slapped the sides of the tunnel, wondering how it was that he always missed the sharp edges of the vacant lamp-holders. His shoes would only last a little while longer, and then he’d be barefoot again. Not that he’d notice, she reminded herself. He had lost all feeling thanks to the blisters and callouses. Yet she didn’t want him to catch his death of cold.

She heard him call out to “Lady Light, Lord Light” in every tongue he knew – with many more made up. She heard him call out the names of the leaves that once existed on trees he’d climb with the agility of an acrobat – before he went batty. She heard him ‘recite’ from the “Book of Branches and Beauty” – each poem in order, sometimes grafting themselves into one another.

She felt the confounding coldness claim a bit of his soul once more as he stopped short of the ‘desired destination’ – a mirage in reality. The fact that he had one room to stay in escaped him, convinced that every door was occupied, that every room was his and that was where his shadowy shenanigan friends slept.

She tasted the return to comfort as he approached her, dismissing the missing as a meaningless mistake of messages. He was the air she breathed, or rather his madness her source of existence. She tasted the dankness of death mingling with the lemony lightness of life and wondered when it would all end.