SORDID LITTLE WORLD by Gerri Brightwell
You reach your forties and your life’s nothing but bus rides to work, and long hours in the lab, and a sandwich for lunch because with a mortgage and a spouse and two nearly-grown sons your pay doesn’t go far, and every day it’s rinse-and-repeat, your life fading away in this windowless room with its unsparing fluorescent lights, its stink of solvents and reagents, and then one day you mix compound A with solution B and what you’ve made is a substance so viscous and black you can scarcely believe it, you tip it out and it’s like you’ve poured emptiness into a puddle on your workbench, a hole where there can be no hole, an utter absence of light that you lower your head to peer at, and touch its tacky surface with a fingertip, then press your fingers into, and that’s when its chill soars through you, rapid and numbing and dragging darkness with it, and before you know it that darkness is everywhere, that darkness is everything, and you should panic but you don’t, your heart should race but there is no heart, there is no you because you are this void and it is you, and it is stillness, and it is peace, it is where time has never existed, so it’s a shock when it breaks apart and you’re yanked back by a burning in your chest and your eyes open to a glare of ugly lights and your colleagues kneeling over you, weeping with relief that they’ve revived you, and you’re weeping too because you are you again, back in this sordid little world.