Gardening Follies, II

I woke with a horrific headache.  I turned to my side on the bed and realized that this was not my bed.  Rubbing my eyes, trying to focus them, I realized I most definitely was not at home.  I tried to piece together the night before to see if maybe I could figure out where I was.  I remembered being pulled down the hole I was digging in the garden, but that had all been a dream!  I remembered waking up from the dream thinking about how silly it was that I had been gardening, but I couldn’t remember anything after that.  My only choice was to look around and figure out where I was.

 I was in a cell.  The floor, walls, and ceiling were earthen.  Only the door was crafted of something other than dirt.  It appeared to be iron and it was not really a door in the traditional sense.  It as more of a prison door.  One made of bars.

What I had thought previously was a light fixture was not a light fixture at all.  The ceiling was covered in the roots of the plants above.  There were several large lightning bugs foraging within the roots.  They were significantly larger than any I’d ever seen before with bulbous glowing back sides the size of my palm.  I had thought that lightning bugs lived in the underbrush above ground, but apparently some like it below ground.  The light from the lightning bugs backsides seemed to be the only light source.

I didn’t want my captors to discover I was awake before I’d had a proper chance to evaluate my surroundings and figure out as much as I could.  I tried to listen to the sounds outside the cell.  There was a low-level hum coming from all around.  Even my lightning bugs were humming.

The air smelled heavy, damp.  The recent snow had melted and the temperature had warmed to the 50’s so the air should smell like that.

I couldn’t see a way out, so I decided  my only recourse was to call out.

“Hello?  Is anyone out there?  My name is Petra and I’ve been abducted.”

I heard hissing and then slithering….