Buried alive? Or, it’s all just a big misunderstanding.
Eugene was often underestimated. It may have been as a consequence of his rimless spectacles, or it may have been that he wore brown socks. Indeed, you might have thought it was due to the way his hair would stick out at the back, or the way he did the straps up on his backpack ever so tightly. He was a slight fellow and had a penchant for unusual facts; at any moment he was likely to move from an unassuming character to an animated expression which would have the effect of making all his colleagues and strangers on the bus and family members and storekeepers and online acquaintances’ eyes glaze over.
But, it seemed to Eugene, that he was finally going to have a story that would interest other people. He couldn’t be sure how, but as he’d awaken that morning, he had found himself inside a buried coffin. As he attempted to look around, he could see nothing but blackness. He didn’t have to reason this through, the absence of light, he would be certain, was due to his being underground.
With a sense of admiration for his mind, he knew not to light a match. Of course, he’d seen this trick in the films from time to time and he knew that this gave the leading lady or man the opportunity to evaluate their strategic goals. Eugene knew, however, that in order to keep that light alive, he would put himself in a position where oxygen would feed the flame and potentially lead him to an earlier grave. He smiled at the pun he’d made, but then he admonished himself for the darkness of the quip. As luck would have it, however, Eugene was not known for carrying matches and he was certain that there were no boxes of them here with him in the coffin, and this was something that he counted as his own good fortune.
And it was about the time of that realisation that Eugene began to notice the silk lining of the coffin itself. He ran his hands through the fabric and the smoothness of the material made him feel calm, and oddly, quite luxuriated. It was a sad irony of life, he thought, that the silkworm, despite having eight pairs of legs and a beating heart, did not have lungs – a fact which most certainly would have supported their ability to live in the confines of the coffin; again he chuckled to himself. He supposed that the bug would in fact call this space a cocoon. Of course, he knew that the silkworm had holes along its body which allowed it to breath, and he was satisfied that this quirk of nature, despite being able to help him out of his dubious position, had become a welcome distraction.
And then he realised his error, his fingers were not touching silk, but rather, polyester. Eugene began his lecture, ‘As many people know, polyester is a cheap material which is water resistant, far more so than nylon’. It was an odd moment to feel satisfied, but Eugene could hear no one yawning, and felt his delivery of that interesting nugget was rather dynamic.
Eugene then shifted a little to the right and, while it would have been a natural curiosity to wonder how he’d found himself in this prison, he decided not to dwell on it for the moment. For many years he’d repeatedly come to the conclusion that people just didn’t really get him. He knew he was a bit odd and while his mother laughed at his jokes, he understood that his humour was ‘different’ to that of everyone else that passed through his life. Similarly, he also knew that he just didn’t ‘get’ others. And then he understood: all this must be some sort of laugh that he didn’t understand. He understood it was probably all some ruse that would cause another to giggle – a game, perhaps, where it was obligatory to play the good sport and perhaps even consider something self-deprecating to say following his release.
To that end, Eugene did what he imagined any reasonable person would do. He laughed in a good humoured way, said, ‘Jolly good joke’, in case anyone had put a listening device in the coffin and then he closed his eyes, certain a nap would fix everything.
But would it? Find our in Part 2 of this 3 Part Serial Fiction Challenge!
