084 - stay

Jeffery looked at his watch. 3:15. He had been stuck here for over four hours now, and all he could feel was incredibly bored. Couldn't he just die already?

He was quickly coming to learn that the quicksand of real life was nothing like the quicksand that he had seen so many times in the movies. What Jeffery thought would happen when he accidentally set foot in the quicksand did not happen at all. He thought he would struggle for a bit, with each attempt at getting himself out actually landing himself deeper in the muck, until eventually he would be completely submerged in the quicksand, and death from suffocation only mere moments away.

It had been a dreadful thought at first: gasping for a breath of fresh air but only finding thick quicksand in its place. His mouth and lungs filling with the sludge, as his whole life passed by in an instant, and then nothingness. Now he fantasized about such an ending.

In reality, his legs had sunk in past his knees, and then he was simply stuck. No amount of effort would release him from his quicksand imprisonment, it was as if his legs were stuck in almost-set cement. To his relief, at first, his struggles and attempts to free himself from the quicksand did not seem to make him sink any further--it was as if he had already reached the bottom of whatever pit he was sinking into.

But now he was trying to find a way to make himself sink further. This was a much worse reality, he realized. Sure, the locals had all warned him before embarking on his expedition to be wary of the quicksand. Jeffery was too hasty in ignoring their words of warning, but he simply had not considered the possibility that his fate could be this grim.

It was simply so boring, he lamented. At first, he had tried to cling to hope, that someone would come and rescue him. It was still possible, he supposed, but the chances were so slim there was no point in considering it a realistic possibility.

In the time since getting stuck, he had tried every way he could conceive of to escape the quicksand, but with no success. It was possible there was some secret method to freedom that he might not have yet tried, but as the time ticked on, his energy levels were falling lower and lower. There was no way he would be able to recover his strength, so Jeffery knew his best chances of extraditing himself from this situation were probably long behind him.

So, how long could a person survive out in the wilderness? He thought about it, and he admitted that even though it had only been four hours, his boredom combined with the hopelessness of the scenario made his thinking turn into something more like wishful fantasizing. The afternoon sun had done a good job of baking him, but he wasn't sure it would be enough to kill him, yet. The night's cold might have a better chance of getting him with hypothermia, but he knew the weather had been unseasonably mild lately.

Perhaps after a few days he could bank on dehydration getting him, but Jeffery looked up at the sky with complete suffering as he envisioned having to wait out those few days. It was an unsavory thought. But what else could he hope for? Maybe a pack of wild animals would find him and rip him to shreds. It was about the best he could imagine at this point.

Great, he thought to himself. Now I'm just hoping for some hungry wolves to come along and find me. What are the chances of that?