The Waiting Room

We do not know why we are here in the Waiting Room, or how we got here, or what we are waiting for.

Even though many of the Other Contestants will tell you different.

There are magazines to read, but they were not Material Provided by the Management of the Waiting Room.

The magazines in the Waiting Room were fashioned by the Other Contestants in the Waiting Room.

And that makes anything they might say as suspect as anything the Other Contestants in the Waiting Room might say.

I talk to the Other Contestants.

I do not trust them, but they do not scare me.

The Other Contestants are afraid.

The Other Contestants tell me many strange and complicated things.

The Other Contestants go crazy, sometimes, and hurt each other.

Sometimes I try to make them laugh about things in the Waiting Room.

Sometimes I tell them stories to take their minds off the Waiting Room.

But I spend most of my time alone, exploring what lies beyond the doors of the Waiting Room.

Down through all the moist concrete maintenance corridors that smell of oil and plaster and make my shuffling footsteps echo in my ears.

Down through the rusting metal stairwells where the water flashes like silver under the electric lights.

The Waiting Room has many floors, and many long forgotten doors.

And the doors sometimes open on golden meadows, and waterfalls, and forests, dark and deep, rolling seas of sand, and grass, and stone, oceans of white ice and black volcanic rock, and the flat blue, purple, and orange silhouettes of snowcapped mountains in the distance.

And sometimes, on or near those doors, I find writings left behind by Previous Contestants that say many promising and hopeful things.

But I do not trust them.

And sometimes, the writings are threats and warnings, and there are bones, and the Uniforms of Previous Contestants.

But they do not scare me.

I do not tell the Other Contestants about the strange places I go, when I return to the Other Contestants in the Waiting Room.

They would not believe me even if I did.

They would think I was just trying to make them laugh.

Or telling them stories to take their minds off the Waiting Room.