The Last to Comment Wins

JayMark

JayMark

It's Not Easy Being Nobody, But Somebody Has To.
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AmbreaTaddy said:
blep
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Tempokai

Tempokai

The Overworked One
Joined
Nov 16, 2021
Messages
1,396
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The White Tomb

The world was white. Endless, featureless white. The walls stretched so high they disappeared into a blinding void. There was no sky, no wind, no sound. Just whiteness. A purgatory of sterile silence.

At first, they didn’t realize they were trapped.

They had scurried in through a crack—tiny explorers venturing into what seemed a paradise. The air smelled of dust and old wood, and the white beneath their paws was smooth, cool. The scent of food was faint but present, distant echoes of past feasts. They had done this before—slipped into places humans had long forgotten, gnawed through paper and plastic to find hidden crumbs, lived off the bounty of neglect.

But this place was different.

It was too clean. Too perfect. No crevices to burrow into, no soft insulation to shred into nests. Just gleaming, suffocating white.

And the way in? Gone.

Twitch, the smaller of the two, had been the first to panic. His little pink paws scrabbled at the walls, claws scraping uselessly against the smooth surface. He threw himself at the corners, bit at the invisible seam where the back met the floor, desperate to find the crack they had come through.

Scritch, the elder, watched in silence. He had seen this before—places that seemed safe until they weren’t. His whiskers twitched as he tested the air. No drafts. No movement. No way out.

The white place was a tomb.

They had been trapped before. Boxes, bins, the insides of walls. But always, there was some weakness, some opening they could widen, some mistake in human construction they could exploit.

Not this time.

At first, they searched.

Scritch led the way, nose to the ground, seeking the ghost of a scent. The shelf above them held nothing but forgotten fabric and dust. The walls offered nothing but cold indifference.

No food. No water. No escape.

Twitch gnawed at the white beneath them. He chewed until his teeth ached, spitting out slivers of paint and wood. But the surface was too thick, too solid.

Scritch tried too, but he knew better. This was not the kind of prison that could be bitten through.

Hunger came next.

It started as a gnawing discomfort, then grew into sharp, twisting agony. The kind that made their movements sluggish, their thoughts muddled. Twitch whimpered in his sleep, his little body curled tight to preserve warmth, his thin tail wrapped around his paws. Scritch lay beside him, offering what little comfort he could.

The world shrank.

Days passed—perhaps weeks. Time had no meaning in the white place. Their bodies withered, their bones pressing against thinning fur.

Twitch stopped moving as much. His bright eyes, once darting and full of mischief, grew dull.

Scritch knew the end was near. He had seen it before, in nests abandoned by mothers who never returned, in the trembling limbs of poisoned kin.

One night, Twitch didn’t wake.

Scritch pressed his nose to the little body, nudged him gently, waited.

Nothing.

He lay beside his brother, curled around him, listening to the empty silence of the white place.

His heart beat slower.

And then, the world faded to black.

The house was silent, save for the occasional groan of wood settling. The wardrobe stood in the corner, pristine, untouched.

Inside, on a lower shelf, two small forms lay side by side—curled together in a final embrace. Their fur had stiffened, their tiny ribs pressed tight against hollowed stomachs. Dust had settled over them like a burial shroud.

A whisper of air stirred as the door creaked open. Light flooded in.

A human gasped.

But the rats did not move.

They had been part of the white place for far too long.

The wardrobe had stood there for years, a silent monument to forgotten furniture, its pristine white exterior now dulled with time, dust, and the vague scent of neglect. It was the kind of thing people once cared about—maybe someone folded their clothes in it, hid secrets in its drawers, or even gazed at it with mild appreciation. But those days were long gone.

Now? Now, it was just in the way.

And worse? It had corpses.

Not human corpses—oh, that would have at least made for an interesting workday. No, these were mummified rat babies, petrified in a final, desperate embrace, like some tragic, rodentian version of Pompeii.

They had probably died long ago, two little explorers who had scuttled into the white abyss, never to return. A poetic tragedy for sure. Maybe a fitting metaphor for life, struggle, and inevitable demise.

But you? You weren’t in the mood for metaphors.

So you gasped, more out of reflex than horror. And then, like any sane person dealing with dried-up corpses in an abandoned wardrobe, you went:

"Meh."

Because really, what else was there to say?

With all the reverence of a god smashing an idol, you grabbed a hammer.

The wardrobe had lived a long and pointless life, and today, its sins would be atoned for in splinters.

WHAM.

The first hit sent a crack snaking through the white wood, like a lightning bolt delivering judgment.

WHAM.

A shelf collapsed, spilling dust, dried carcasses, and whatever dignity this piece of furniture had left.

WHAM.

The doors broke off, swinging uselessly before they clattered to the ground, revealing the tragic little tomb inside. The rat corpses tumbled down with a soft, brittle thunk—their last voyage, straight into oblivion.

You didn’t even feel bad. It wasn’t like they’d appreciate a burial.

WHAM.

The wardrobe officially transitioned from "old storage unit" to "abstract wooden debris."

You took a step back, surveyed the wreckage, and nodded. Yeah. That felt right.

Your boss had made it clear: this place was getting cleaned out. Every piece of useless junk was getting tossed into the abyss of a garbage truck, never to be thought about again.

And so, with all the enthusiasm of a laborer who knew they weren’t paid enough for this, you loaded the remains.

The rats, once victims of their own bad real estate decisions, got a one-way ticket to the same fate as the wardrobe. There would be no memorial, no tiny eulogies about their noble struggle. Just the relentless, metal-crunching maw of the garbage truck swallowing them whole.

And as the truck drove off, taking the remains of the white tomb and its unfortunate tenants with it, you thought:

"Well, that’s taken care of."

Then you saw your cat. Sitting nearby, tail flicking, eyes glowing with that primal satisfaction only a feline predator can have. This was her domain, and those rats—past, present, and future—were nothing but warm-up kills.

You gave her an approving nod.

She blinked, the universal cat sign for "You're welcome, peasant."

C’est la vie.
 
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