The green plasma-like blobs faded as soon as they appeared...
Colin, still depressed, sat staring at a scene as bleak and dreary as his thoughts. Only a few minutes before, he had been comfortably melancholic in a small-but-warm shack, listening to Aerosmith and eating chocolate brownies. The scene now before him kind of made the whole manic-depressive side of him shudder in self-realization. The brownie slipped from his fingers, silently falling away, much like the shack had.
He slowly turned, looking in all directions, oblivious of the crumbs on his chin and clothes. The view was the same everywhere he looked: Grey, featureless, boring, and sadistic. He couldn't think of enough descriptive ways of saying he hated it.
As he sat, he became aware of what he was hearing, or more specifically, of what he was NOT hearing. He did not hear himself breathing. He could not hear his clothes brushing against his chair, which oddly had not disappeared with the shack. He couldn't hear air moving past his large, often-mocked ears. Everywhere there was a silence, as deep and complete as he had ever wished for. It produced an atmosphere of a library about to play host to a massive nuclear war. The silence was hatred, and so he hated it.
On a whim, he stood up and starting sing "The Star-Spangled Banner". The words formed in his mouth and promptly fell flat in front of his face, producing little more than imagined sounds in the back of his mind. He panicked a little, clearing his throat desperately. He risked a yell. It seemed little more than a child sobbing into a pillow.
He suddenly felt the urge to jump, but ignored it, focusing instead on trying to clap loudly. It sounded like a one-legged fly trying to tiptoe. The urge to jump became a foolish desire to jump away from this place, and then became a hungry, clawing terror of the ground he stood on. All the while the silence lurked around him, on him, in him; taunting and mocking until he felt he couldn't stand it anymore.
With a sudden, garish movement, he started to run, first just clumsily, then wildly, then it was a painful, desperate attempt to hear or feel something. He ran, and ran, and ran. The pounding of his feet against something solid was unmistakably absent, as was the rush of the wind on his face; yet, still, he ran. He ran for what must have been miles, the minutes unnoticed as they flew by. He ran until he could feel each pustule bursting in his lungs; until he could taste his own iron-rich blood in his mouth and throat. He ran until his muscles began to spasm and jerk from the acids building in them. He fell once, and then, stumbling, began to run again. He began to see black and white spots, and he could feel his vision fading into a tunnel. He was passing out.
Dropping to his knees, he sobbed un-checked, as he stared down onto an unchanging grey surface. A little spittle, mixed with more than a little blood, dropped from his chin and landed in front of him. In the very instant it made contact with the ground, just when it should splatter and spread, it simply disappeared. It was more than he could bear.
Falling forward on his face, Colin wailed like child, screaming and blustering. His very body was crying out in pain, but it was all he could feel. The ground, featureless, didn't even seem to be there. The sounds of his anguish barely seemed to go beyond his own mouth. He longed for his chair, mourning that he had ran so far from it.
Shortly, he rose from his prostrate position and turned -intent on returning to his now cherished seat. With sudden, startling clarity, he saw it. It was directly behind him, as though he had never moved from it. Bewildered, he forgot his pain, anguish, and crying. Curiosity took control of his mind. He stepped backward, but he didn't. Either he didn't move, or the chair, impossible to gauge against the nothing of the gray backdrop, followed. He couldn't tell. It was all too surreal for his feable senses.
Looking around, he couldn’t find his brownie. Searching his clothes, he found that the crumbs had all disappeared, and in fact, the color of his clothes had faded considerably.
Suddenly, a thought struck him. Turning quickly around, he could just make out his chair, now nearly as gray and featureless as everything else he surveyed. He reached out and touched it, then sat on it in an attempt to keep it with him; but he was sitting on nothing - the nothing of the drab ground he hated. Glancing in surprise at his lap, he realized his pants had disappeared. Or was it his legs? A quick examination showed that his entire body (what he could see of it within the limits of physics) had faded and begun to blend with the nothing that surrounded him, now a threatening thing, alive yet full of death.
For a long time Colin was conscious, first remembering and questioning what was happening; then struggling to remember anything at all. He could feel his consciousness fading, just as his body had, into the grey nothingness that he was still vaguely aware of.
His last conscious thought was in the form of a question. He had long pondered his situation, but he wondered, just briefly, if anyone else had, was, or would experience anything similar to what he had.
But then, just as quickly as he had arrived, he was no longer there. Colin was gone as though he had never existed.
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