...And It Swallowed Me Whole

...and it swallowed me whole.

I typed the last line in my short story and checked the time in the lower right-hand corner of my screen. Already, it was three in the morning. Funny, I remembered promising myself I would go to bed by midnight. I must have gotten too caught up in my story.

Reading it over in the document window, I found I was quite pleased with it. I didn't finish a lot of stories, so I was proud of this one even though it was only a few pages long. I wondered if I would have time to post it online before my dad and younger sister came to wake me up for school, but I was so excited, it didn't really matter one way or another.

I opened an Internet Explorer window and watched the page load. Not wasting time, I went quickly through the process of posting a story. Right after I pressed submit, I realized that I had forgotten to spell check.

As I was making my way back to the story, the computer randomly went to screen saver.

"What the fuck?!" I yelled, rapidly tracing circles on the laptop's touchpad. I had known it to do this occasionally, so I wasn't exactly surprised, just irritated. "Stop it!" I watched my screen saver, a slideshow of screen shots, all the while grumbling to myself about how badly I needed a new computer as well as a baseball bat to beat the old one with.

"Chelsea?" came my dad's voice from the doorway. I swiveled around, and he was standing just outside of my bedroom, looking at me with wide eyes. "Have you been up all night?"

"Yes," I admitted. My dad and I had an odd kind of relationship, quite different from the standard for a teenage girl and her father. We were always honest and never judged each other, so he did no more than give me a disappointed look.

"Should I get you some coffee?" he asked.

"Yeah, thanks," I said, and he walked off.

I returned my attention to my computer, which had not gone back to normal and was instead going completely berserk. Pixels in every color imaginable - and some not - were dancing across my screen in little pixel conga lines. It gave me a headache just looking at it. I held down the off button and waited.

Fifteen seconds later, the pixel party continued. "Perfect," I muttered. It was supposed to have shut off in seven. "Fucking virus or some shit." On the bright side, I now had an excuse to get some sleep before school.

I closed my laptop so it wouldn't bother me while I slept and lied down in my bed. My eyelids were so heavy that I had no trouble dozing off within seconds.

"Chelsea..." I heard a voice and figured it was my dad with the coffee, so I didn't even move. He would just set the mug down by my bed, and I'd drink it when I woke up.

"Chelsea..." The voice was slower this time, and deeper, spooking me into opening my eyes. My dad wasn't at the door.

"Chellllseeeaa..." The demonic voice was coming from the opposite side of the room, where I could see red light seeping from the crack between my keyboard and computer screen, pulsating, breathing. I rubbed my eyes, but my vision didn't get any better.

My computer was talking to me.

"I've got to be dreaming," I mumbled, but that theory was easily disproved when I tried to get up and instead fell out of my bed. You don't feel pain in a dream. I hit the ground hard, and my back cracked. A sharp ache shot through my entire body. Stars danced in the air above my head. The voice in my computer kept talking.

"Come," it ordered, and I obeyed, crawling slowly as my spine was on fire.

"Who are you?" I asked.

The digital voice introduced itself. "I am Death."

I stifled a laugh, yet I was still nervous, just because of how serious the voice sounded. This was one weird virus. One weird, interactive, fucking creepy virus. "What do you want with me?"

"You've become too obsessive with your writing," it said. "It's come to the point where nothing else matters. Everyone and everything around you could vanish forever, and you would not shed a single tear, but if you lost your life's work, you would come unglued and, ultimately, take your life."

"That's not true!" I shouted. The omniscient being didn't verbally argue, but it knew it was right. I did too, I realized, covering my face in shame.

"You are still young, so I can give you a second chance," it said, and I looked up at it. "The conditions are as follows. I will leave you as you were, but you may never write another story as long as you live."

"The other option?"

"Death."

I weighed these two inside my head. My life had little meaning without my stories, but did my stories have any meaning without my life?

I posed a question as a statement. "Death to me... but my words would live on."

It paused, then said, "Yes."

"My time has come."

"Very well," the voice said. I reached up and pushed the screen back until I could see it. A surprisingly vivid boar creature stood on the other side of the screen, looking at me viciously through beady black eyes. It had spiny reddish hair and long, sharp, stained tusks. It snorted with each breath it took and looked rabid.

The beast leaped through the computer screen, and it swallowed me whole.