Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25547916-20150731172119

Down in hell, the devil stores a man in a cell. The man looks over his new home, his eyes roaming from the thin rusted bars back to empty stone walls and ceiling. Within the concrete confines of the room, he finds that everything he has ever had has been taken away from him except for his past and future.

 “How long must I endure this?” the man cries in despair.

“Long enough,” his future answers sadly, looking down towards the ground. When the man looks over his future a deep feeling of dread fills his soul. With darkened hungry eyes and wild un-kept hair, his future appears to embody a more animalistic version of the man.

“Is this what I must become to survive?”

“History always repeats itself,” his past answers in a hopeless murmur. The man looks curiously over his past-self, over the copy’s clean features and air of newly broken innocence.

“I’m already so different than you,” the man whispers, trying to comprehend how long he’s dwelled within the lonely cell.

The man looks back to his future, watching the being look quietly outside the bars. Beyond the rusted iron, a deep darkness wavers indefinitely beyond. Knowing that what his future holds, the man peaks out the cage as well, his sight vanishing into the un-observable abyss.

Eventually the man looks away from the bars just as his past looks out.

Grappling with his own boredom, the man watches the being staring out the cell.

When the man looks over his past, a sickening lurch of envy overcomes him; the clone already shows less sign of decay than himself. The man fights back tears, looking over his past and realizing how far he’s already fallen.

“It only gets worse,” his future growls, and as the man looks over his disheveled future he knows that it speaks the truth.

As time grinds by, the man realizes that it hurts so much more to gaze at his past than it does to his future.

“I can’t bear it!” the man cries out hysterically and races forward to his past. He grabs his past’s head, slamming it into the cold metal bars. His past-self crawls feebly over the dirty floor, too exhausted to protest against his fate.

Enraged, the man flings a fist down into his past’s skull, sending the copy into a daze. The man quickly straddles his incapacitated past and wraps his filthy hands around its clean little neck. He clenches the wind pipe shut, squeezing tight until he can feel the breaths fade into stillness.

With an exhausted cry, the man falls off his past’s lifeless body and tumbles to the floor. As he tries to catch his breath, the corpse fades into shadow, disappearing out into the emptiness beyond the cell. He stares quietly, relieved to be free from his past. His future only watches with detached curiosity, saying nothing.

They sit quietly in the cell for some time, until the devil returns.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in">“I brought you a friend,” the devil smiles, pushing a new lifeform into the room. The man gawks at the new being, seeing an even more decayed, ghastly image of his future.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in">“Who is that?” the man’s future asks with clear fear. The devil answers with a smirk:

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in">“Why, present, this is your future.” <ac_metadata title="Untitled Pasta (unreviewed)"> </ac_metadata>