"INITIATION"By now it had to have been more than a minute.
Connie’s prospective sorority sisters had promised her that, having completed all her previous initiation challenges to their satisfaction –– but often to her own embarrassment and discomfort –– her passing this final test would guarantee her acceptance in their house. They called it a “trust test,” one wherein she would prove to her sisters that she trusted them with her very life. They had led her blindfolded to a dismal, depressing place well off-campus called Deadwood Swamp and explained her final task to her: She was to step into the middle of a deep mudflat (“quickmud,” they called it) between the towering remains of skeletal trees and stand stock still as she began to sink. No struggling, no flailing of her arms, no writhing of her body; she was to stand as straight as one of the dead trees surrounding her while she descended into the ooze with her arms held out to her sides. Waiting at the edge of the muddy area, her prospective sisters would use long sticks with pads at the ends (“to prevent bruising,” they had said) with which they would press down on her shoulders to ensure that she would sink all the way beneath the surface and then some. She was to remain entombed this way in the grasp of the mud, “dying” to her previous commitments, with no panicking, no struggling to escape, until a full minute had passed, after which the sisters would then reach down into the muck and take hold of her outstretched arms to heave their muddy yet newly-minted sister back to the surface, “reborn” from the earth as a full member of their sorority.
But by now it had to have been more than a minute… and she still felt no movement in the mud above her.
Connie’s lungs were already burning from a lack of fresh oxygen as she strove to remain perfectly still within the depths of the miry morass enveloping her in the hope of demonstrating unquestionably to her prospective sisters that she truly was worthy of their sisterhood, that she did indeed trust them to the end. She would complete this final test, she vowed to herself, as she had all the previous ones. But as uncountable seconds continued to pass within the oppressive blackness of the weighty muck pressing in heavily all around her ––
Surely it’s been more than a minute now! –– she realized that her prior certainty in the sisters’ desire for her to join them was giving way to an unthinkable, horrifying suspicion as her increasingly tormented mind finally dared to ask the question that she now recognized that she should have asked herself from the very beginning: Did her prospective sisters
deserve her trust?
Suddenly the apparent absence of the sisters at the surface above her no longer mattered, nor did her promised membership in their sorority; all that mattered was her next breath of air. In a fervor of defiance against her imminent suffocation Connie drove her arms downward into the muddy depths, propelling herself upward against the thick ooze clutching at her as she forcefully expelled carbon dioxide-laden air through her mouth and nose, hoping against hope that her next desperate inhalation would fill her tortured lungs with sweet oxygen and not suffocating muck. To her gasping relief her determined effort brought her upturned face back to the surface… but just barely, the heavy mud cleaving thickly and gummily to her long hair and body as she rose. Her diaphragm contracted involuntarily, oblivious to the flowing gunk that it drew into her mouth along with the precious air that she craved while her lips and tongue fought to repel the invading ooze. Far below, the deep suction of the quickmud rebounded against the upward thrust generated by her arms as it strove to reclaim its prize, grasping her body in a frenzied contest between her will to live and the gooey vise of its viscous grip.
Her prospective “sisters” were nowhere to be seen.
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