The Glass
She stops, mortified, her eyes gaping at the expanse directly beneath her. Nothing but air separates her from the prison of glass below, walled-in on all sides but the very top. She clings feverishly at the metallic sides of the dark tunnel that encloses her, afraid of the unknown only a short distance beneath.
She does not remember anything that happened before that moment, when she was first loosed from her cell many miles away. Her travels were long and in silence, the entire distance blanketed by the darkness of the tunnel. She used to be curious about what lay ahead on her journey, but as she approached the pinpoint of light in the distance fear overcame her, and she spent the few seconds she had left hysterically pleading for something that would stop her speeding down the tunnel. There was nothing she contrived that could damper her acceleration, and now she halts at the mouth, teetering on its lip over the cylindrical glass cell.
The invisible pressure that has been behind her the entire journey is forcing her through the exit, and her hands are beginning to lose their grip. She cries out for it to stop, but her pleas hit only the dull walls of her confinement and spring back mockingly in echoes. The force knows no reason nor submits to the bribes and promises that she spills from her mouth in desperation, and it is deaf to the inscrutable babblings of a terrified tongue.
Her faltering will compels the last of her strength to fill her fingertips in some irrational measure of self-preservation. Even her will-especially her will-cannot provide a fair contest for the insuperable pressure: finally it crushes her body into a liquid, and as her grasp slips she streams into the glass from a faucet. The glass is surrounded with the stubby fingers of a little boy, and he raises it to his lips.