Travis Gibbs's eyes were wide like a rabid dog. They searched across my waist, where he found a field of bright crimson blood oozing from where the wardrobe's edge pressed into my ribs. His breathing was heavy, and, shaking all the while, he said, "We've got to get this thing off of you."

I shook my head. Don't touch it, said my eyes. Don't touch me-- "Where's Jack? Where is everyone?"

His hands grabbed for my waist anyway, and he meant to evaluate the damage. Then he moved around and slid to a squat so he could begin pulling the heavy wardrobe off of me. Travis ignored my question.

"Did you hear me?" I said. "Where are the others?"

But Travis seemed to just ignore me, as his veins erupted from the temples on his forehead, and he began a series of aggravated grunting sounds and pulled with all his might to lift the wardrobe from off my burning stomach. I could feel the pressure of air within my abdomen rising as the wardrobe pinched with the weight of a heavy boulder on my digestive system. I had felt something like this before, something like having a pyramid of toddlers I used to babysit jump on my stomach while I was sleeping, or the first time I went to the gym for strength training and dropped the bar on my bellybutton. But this was worse than both of those combined and with the added idea that those jumping toddlers would have been jumping up and down on me while stabbing me with cutting knives from the kitchen, or that bar could have been lined with serrated strips of needles before it fell into my flesh. So analogous were those scenarios to the sensation of this heavy broken wardrobe on my stomach. And as Travis attempted to play superman to lift the giant furniture off of me, all he managed to do was twist and deepen the chipped and flaking edge of the wooden wardrobe so that it dug into my flesh with worse burns analogous to sandpaper.

"Stop, Travis! Get help!" I moaned and the tears streamed down in a burning tide.

My shouts shocked Travis and he knocked backward onto his ass in a fright, his hair suddenly standing up on his head. "I'm sorry, am I hurting you?" He said. "I was trying--"

But I cut him off, my impatience and aggravation that the most useless man of the five was the only one in my sight made me coarse, and I drew my finger pointing in the other direction. "Find someone! Go get someone who has actually been to the gym in their life!"

He looked at me with amazed offense, but managed to see that the blood around my waist circled down to my buttocks and dripped onto the balcony tiles, so he scrambled to his feet, looked every which way in a panic (his emotions seemed to muddle his high intellectual capacity for analysis and critical thinking) and burst off into the distance. I could not see him behind the wardrobe, but I could sure hear his feet as he ran.

"Where are you going?" I said, now curious where he would look. All went quiet for a moment, and I was suddenly left alone to the sound of my raspy breath caused by the collapse of my diaphragm under the wardrobe. I tilted my head forward and tried with my own arms to push the thing off of me before it would close off all circulation to my lower body. It was surely pinching a nerve in my lower spine, for I could no longer feel my feet. But as I pushed for a long miserable moment, I gasped and let go. I dropped my head back and gritted my teeth in pain as the wardrobe seemed to sink even further into my pelvis and I felt my stomach start to swell where my circulation cut off. I looked up to the sky, with the back of my head dangling like an uncomfortable rope swing hanging from an unsteady branch of a dying tree. The sharp upturned tile underneath my lower back was still stabbing me in the flesh of my lumbar region, but ironically, as the pain seemed to increase, my lower back seemed to grow numb. My sensations seemed to be fading away, from overstimulation. My body might be giving up on itself, and as the blood seeped down into my skull as I hung upside-down, the sound of the waters below seemed to only be rushing more rapidly. I thought I heard screams, but it was only wishful thinking. No one was around, at least no one alive. The clouds above were grey and racing. . . the blue sky losing the battle for who could cover the ceiling above, and as the grey clouds won, they turned black, and became denser. In a moment, I heard thunder, and rain drops started dancing on my upturned chin. I closed my eyes, and let the drizzling drops roll down my skin, trespass through the crease of my lips, and even fill my nostrils. 

Let me die this way. It doesn't matter anymore. . .

Travis never came back to me.