You find yourself in a large warehouse. It is cold, almost unbearably so, and you regret not wearing your coat this morning. Emily said you’d need it. You scowl, and walk another lap of the perimeter. The door remains bolted from the outside, and the hanging, lifeless, bloodless cows are still hung row on row from rails on the ceiling. They have almost stopped creeping you out at this point, but you still refuse to make eye contact in case one of them blinks.
Your footsteps echo eerily through the cavernous room. You think about Emily some more and warmth seems to inexplicably emanate through your chest. You do not allow yourself any happy thoughts about her, because when you argued on the phone earlier, you were a complete dick. You pull your phone from your pocket and check the time. 3:45PM. You have been locked in this freezer for almost 5 hours now. When you shut the door, you did not think about how you would get out again, did you? No. ‘Cause you’re a dickhead.
You sit down on an empty milk crate that no doubt once held milk taken from cows just like the ones currently hanging by their back legs from the ceiling. You promise yourself that once you get out of here, you will be a vegan. Then you laugh at yourself and shake your head. You wish that you had phone signal here, and curse rural landscapes and their lack of modern conveniences. You wonder briefly if Emily has noticed you’re missing. She is the only person in the world who would even maybe notice if you disappeared off the face of the planet, and you were a complete dick to her the last time the two of you talked. Good job, asshole.
You loosely cross your legs and lean forward to touch your knees to your chest. Fuck, it’s cold. You try and remember something that might be useful in this situation, but all you can think of is that monk that managed to somehow raise his body temperature through meditation. You feel like an idiot. There are guys surviving freezing temperatures through brain power and you don’t even know how to go about meditating. It can’t be that hard, you reason. It’s just thinking really hard, right? But if you think about being warm, won’t it just be more disappointing when you realise that actually no, it’s still fucking freezing? Yeah, probably. You decide to do it anyway, just in case there’s some secret monk heritage you don’t know about and ability to stay warm is genetic.
You try to sit like you have seen monks do in photos. That guy who set himself on fire and burnt to death silently in protest seemed to have a much stiffer back than you do, and his legs were crossed properly because he wasn’t sat on a milk crate. You think about moving to the floor to do this, but decide that cold concrete is not something you wanna sit on, even with your jeans between you and the best part of the cold. So you awkwardly fold your hands in your lap, and close your eyes.
Immediately you feel the dead eyes of the cattle on you. They definitely know what you’re doing and they’re laughing at you.