I was on my own, making my own way again. I was away from Her, on my way to see Sarah, to get healed, to become whole—normal again.

I set my jaw against any invasion of my mind, and consciousness was sucked away.

Low moaning sounds awakened me. Sounds close, reverberating metallically from the thin steel walls around me, muffled by the stiff cloth that was my bed. The moans were all about me, emanating from every corner of the bin, bouncing off the weird conglomeration of sharp angles and soft corners, back again to my ears with their subtle tonal differences. Moans of distress, of discomfort, of the tortures of Hades. Moans from the soul, from the source of pain too deep to define.

The sounds were mine.

The air was close, and thick with hot fumes of paint. My head reeled and I grappled for my cane, but it had fallen away from me somehow and I couldn’t seem to grasp it. The fumes rose about me in great jagged technicolor waves, poisoning my brain cells as I lurched, reeling like a praying mantis, trying to escape from my toxic prison. I seemed to move in slow motion, one movement forward and then a long rest while a million bees encircled my head. I scrambled up a mountain of concrete shards on my hands and knees until I could stand and push up the lid. It was hot to the touch; the sun had just settled below the horizon, and it had left its impression, left me to bake in a tin oven filled with poisons.

Fresh air flooded in, and I gasped at it, growing weaker and sicker instead of stronger and more alert. I sank back to my knees under the weight of the lid, but the stench below, the smell of the drop cloth on which I had slept all day, was overpowering, sickening, and I scrambled frantically for my cane, found it, and worked slowly but desperately to get out of the bin. I pushed on the lid and it rose, higher and higher until it fell over backward and clanged against the back of the dumpster with a sound that sent great purple jags through my vision. They repercussed for a long while as I grasped the edge of the bin, breathing deeply. When they faded, I dropped my cane over the edge, then hitched one deadening leg over, rolled my shoulders, and fell to the ground with an “oof!” as my lungs took the shock. I lay there for a long time, trying to clear my head of the bizarre visions, trying to clear my ears of their audio hallucinations.