When You Breathe Out by Kevin Meyer
“my hand on your chest now, to keep you under”
Fiction by Kevin Meyer
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If you want to know what asthma is like, you’ll need a bathtub and a straw. Not one of those fat pipes you get in your soda at McDonald’s. A narrow one, the kind you use to stir your coffee.
Fill the bathtub with cold water and climb in. Do it like you’re jumping into a cold lake, your entire body and your head underwater all at once, where you can’t take a breath or you’ll suck water into your lungs. Your muscles seize up. Your heart screams. But don’t go clawing your way out, soaking wet, gasping for breath, because you and me, we’re going to be down here for a while.
I’ll give you a count of twenty before I reach down into that cold water and hand you your straw. Your last chance to take a full breath. Suck it in, fill your lungs up until they’re ready to burst, and put the straw between your lips.
If you really want to know, you can't cheat. I'm going to put my hand on your chest now, to keep you under. Hold your breath as long as you want. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to breathe, and all you have is your thin straw.
First thing you notice, you're not pulling in much air. Eventually, your lungs will feel full again. It’s when you try to breathe out that you’re fucked. All that dead air in your lungs, there’s nowhere for it to go. How long it took to breathe in, that’s how long it’s going to take to breathe the dead air out.
A lifetime.
The pain starts the moment you've emptied your lungs, right before you take your next breath. You can't fill your lungs back up quickly enough. Scientists, they call that a vacuum.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
When you realize how bad it gets, you’re going to fight me. But your muscles are weak because you can't breathe. There's my hand on your chest, pushing you back under.
That's when you panic.
You stop thinking. You stop being a human being. You're not even an animal anymore, you're an engine, designed for one purpose.
To breathe.
You tear at my arm with your fingernails. You punch and kick and bite. Anything to survive. I’m going to come away from this with scars. That’s okay. You need to know.
Fight me all you want. I’ll use both hands. One over your heart. Smash your lungs until there’s no room left to hold what little air you suck through your shitty fucking straw.
My other hand, that one’s around your throat.
You’ll open your eyes, and the way you see me through the ripples of the water is exactly the same way I see the world when I'm drowning in a sea of air.
Your fingernails and your lips turn this ugly shade of gray-blue.
You’re dying.
Go head, keep fighting.
Fuck you.
I’m not going to let you go.
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Kevin Meyer is a writer and student teacher in Tom Spanbauer's Dangerous Writers workshop. Writing dangerously for over a decade, his work has been published in The Frozen Moment: Contemporary Writers on the Choices That Change Our Lives. His novel-in-progress, currently titled Two Shots, explores asthma, domestic violence, and why it's not such a good idea to keep easy access to firearms on the worst day of your life.