Down and through the flesh, I slide on my back towards a dark steepening tunnel. Warm radiating light barely penetrates the translucent membrane walls. The prior feeling of calm has slid away as I descend into the darkness. My arms reach out, and my fingers try to find a grip on the smooth, slippery surface. The tips of my short nails create no friction. I turn onto my stomach and try to press my nails into the membrane, it feels simultaneously soft and firm, and my nails barely make an indent.
The floor steepens so far as to nearly give way to freefall. My feet no longer touch the ground. With a sudden, painful jolt, my hands somehow catch the edge of a muscular ridge of cartilage. The edge is covered in slimy mucous. Sweat drips from the pores all over my body. My fingers twitch, and my arms rattle. I hear nothing but the pounding of my heart. I close my eyes and breathe deeply. A stream of mucous crawls over my fingers, across my arms, down my spine, and drips from the tips of my toes. I flap my feet around. I feel nothing in reach below me.
My muscles burn trying to save me from gravity. Glancing behind me, I try to spot anything else to hold onto. I seem to be inside a deep shaft lined with irregular ridges. The darkness obscures whatever bottom may exist. I notice some parts of the circular ridges are lower than others. Rather than surrendering to gravity, I force my hands along the cartilage, trying to get myself to its lowest point near another ridge I see faintly below. Somehow, barely still holding on, I manage. My feet barely touch the ridge below me, and I almost lose my grip relaxing my weight onto my toes. A short scream echoes from above, but I hear nothing else but my breathing and heartbeat. I carry on after a brief rest. The ridge provides just enough room for me to crouch down.
I continue down the shaft, shimmying along and carefully letting myself down each ridge. Sweat and slime smother me. My eyes sting, but nothing like they did in the pool I was born into. After traversing about half a dozen ridges, I come down to a narrow bridge of partially exposed bone spanning across the shaft. The bridge appears to be the only way to reach the next ridge below.
Another short, panicked scream echoes from somewhere above. I get on my hands and knees. I cling onto the bone, hanging upside down with my feet and arms wrapped around. I make my way across. The bone is slippery, but with both my legs and arms, I never completely lose my hold. The muculent slime drips off my back as I near the other side.
With great relief, I finish the climb across and rest my feet on the ridge below. My whole body trembles. I look up and faintly see figures slowly descending the ridges just as I did. I barely see a commotion occur higher up the shaft. One figure tumbles down, crashing into another, causing both of them to fall. One falls past the bone, and the other lands their midsection on it, splitting them and the bridge apart. My toes slip off the edge of the ridge, and I fall, but I catch the edge with my hands. The whole shaft shakes for a brief moment before the ridges start smoothing out. My grip weakens, and I fall down the shaft against its slimy walls. All the other ridges have disappeared.
I don’t land on a hard surface. Instead, the ground becomes elastic and deeply breaks my fall. It then becomes firm, yet soft, like before. The other figures drop right after me, each landing safely as I did, the ground momentarily swallowing their falls.
The two halves of the one that hit the bone sink and disappear entirely into the ground, leaving the surface bare, absent of blood or entrails. With one exception, all the others survived, even the one that fell first but missed the bone. I recognize most of them from the udder cavity. There are nine of us now. Elbowed made it, and Lucky, who descended well before any of us. Lucky checks out a horizontal slit in the wall ahead near the ground. It looks like there is just enough room to crawl inside. Behind us, the shaft’s wall is curved inward like the end of a slide.
Lucky sniffs the slit and gets on their stomach. They crawl inside, their feet slipping on the thin layer of slime. The others follow. As I step closer to the wall, I get a whiff of a pleasant smell. I crawl into the slit after the others.