03. Some assembly required

Her vision was completely restricted. She couldnt move her head, but she could see... and what she saw frightened her to her core.

The eye stared unmoving. Its iris with flecks of pale blue and green under its dusty wrinkled surface were barely visible... black veins webbed around it

The eye was dead.

She was panicing now... what did she wake up to? she didnt belong here.

Her vision couldnt even move a sliver of an inch. so she didnt miss how the dead eyes iris contracted.

It was looking BACK AT HER.

Terror gripped her lifeless body, her thoughts scrambled. She was at a loss, she could not fight, nor could she run, she could only scream inwardly and pray for death to be quick and painless.

It took her a few moments to realise nothing seemed to be happening... the eye was not moving, and nothing was happening to her... the moment stretched on... she struggled to take in her surroundings, the wooden surface she was on, the giant blurry mass behind the eye... it suddenly dawned on her... that eye was hers. she followed the wood grain as best she could... and found the edge of the mirror facing back to her. she shifted her focus to the imperfections in the glass and noticed the iris in the eye facing back also changed.

Her relief and constantly elevating stress switched back and forth as these simple details sent her into horrified confusion once again. she strained her eye to focus past the reflection, and sure enough, a deathly pale corpse skull stared back... a female face. From one of its empty eye sockets, a wet bundle of nerves wound its way into the back of the reflection.

She broke down into a silent fit of mental deranged laughter.

"I'm dead... I'm alive but I'm dead! I'm fucked!"

If she could, she would have scratched away at the decrepid face looking back, but as it was, she could only look on in horror as the face looked back in lidless motionless horror.

It wasnt long before she noticed movement from just outside her range of vision. Something was moving behind her, visible only due to the reflection of the mirror. It got closer and dropped a matching eye. It rolled just inches in front of her, or her eye rather, before it was tugged by the nerve bundles attached behind it. A bloodstained hand fed the nerve bundle through her socket. she was now unnervingly aware that another hand was fumbling around just behind her face, bony fingers worming their way around the tissues behind her sinuses, before the nerve bundle went tight. the strangest of macabre and slightly painful sensations fired off within her as her vision doubled, two vastly different visions superimposed upon themselves and she was unable to make sense of either. A moment later, and a nauseating sensation of two wet squelches and pops... and her vision wobbled erratically. Both her eyes had been pulled back into her sockets from behind her face.

She could still do nothing but look on in grim, slightly-out-of-focus curiosity as she felt her eyes attach to the muscles within the sockets, her brain came into focus just as it was picked up and set gently behind her face. She... She FELT it contact the base of her skull...

"This is hell... this MUST be hell..."

An explosion of half baked hypotheses and baseless guesses erupted into her preserved brain.

"This is hell, it must be... that storm must've been a punishment, it must've torn me apart and now they're just putting me back together to do it all over again. It's hell afterall. You cant die in hell. you'll just get punished again... that has to be it..."

She realised what the smell was... blood, bile, all the familiar smells of innards from livestock, she now knew to be from herself... she probably lay in pieces on a table, like so many slabs of butchered meat. It was a good thing she wasnt connected to a stomach anymore... if the mirror were only angled a bit more, she might have just puked from the sights.

The deathly face that stared back at her shed a putrid yellow tear. It would have been revolting had she not been in the middle of grieving her predicament. She opened her mouth to wail, but no sound came out.

The hands stopped tugging on god knows what behind her head. She realised at that moment, to her abject horror, what she had done. She screamed internally as a hand gently cradled her chin and turned her face up.