by Tomorrow's Man
You realize more than just lonliness when you're single, you have arthritis, and you can't put lotion on your back. Instead of that long gone safety, the physical pain is just another part of your failure.
I unwrapped the cellophane and it wrinkled 'n crinkled as if my grandfather's face had been a thunderstorm when he died laughing. Laying the pinkish, translucent layer flat was only an option if I chose to believe in 2D; otherwise, the square of rice paper would remain a terrain.
I lifted the Chinese flower from the center of the cellophane square. Lotus pretty, Lotus symmetry, I stopped to smell this sister to the rose. It smelled of quiet, delicate serenity; the kind you learn before you die, your face a thunderstorm at the sky.
Atop the pile of pinewood I set the flower, and around its petals I set my match to timber.
As the flames furrowed into its white petals, she became no ordinary Chinese flower (if there ever was such a thing) -- from the pyre I could surely hear the sound of wizened laughter as thunder boomed toward the crystal sky.
Mightmare
It was the Presence. It was a fist. I felt it first, then saw the blue of the TV screen in the Black Lodge as my consciousness trickled to this...this middlewhere. With my brain out of the solution, I could see right back up through my head and there it was -- the Fist. The hand of God, angry, thumping the Earth in frustration.
The veins didn't have blood, they pumped scalding fury.
I didn't feel the burn, I felt the pressure, a hurricane latched like a lamprey to my one good eardrum. It was too hot for my blood to spill. In fact, it was too hot to kill. My body evaporated in Its grasp long before this narrator winked out.
And there was my lesson: Death is about the timing of the end of the body and mind. If one slips out past the other, welcome to limbo. Welcome to otherwhere. It's usually the mind first; this is what gives us our gardens of human vegetables waiting about to rot.
The Fist gave me the rare other way out. Body gone in a blink, too quick for my mind to keep up. Now I'm a ghost. Now I'm a babble in between sound and sight. Now I'm a soldier in nowhere.
There's no evidence this is a dream.
The Albongquin Roundtable: Thoughts on the Longest Day of the Year
Bettie (The Optimist): Yay! And we've still got a whole summer left to go!
Sy (The Pessimist): So it's going to start getting darker sooner already? That figures.
The President (The Republican): I will neither confirm nor deny the possibility that henceforth the days will, in fact, be shorter. That's all, no further questions. God bless.
God (God): You're serve, Sun.
Dyve (The Goth): Like, so what -- it's about time we are no longer forced to suffer this plight exhibited on our kind. At last the days will shorten, the nights will grow with the tenacity of the power of the Mystery, and we shall further and farther dance robotically to our stilted, processed electronic beats in the dark...always in the dark.
Wystervvyl (King of the Forest People): Okay, guys, you know the drill -- PUSH!
Loneliness has a pall of rancid meat once the humidity catches up to it;
In this thick water, you can't help but feel that the most comfortable mattress is a bed of dead men's spines, and every echo is the dying chord of a threnody.
Whenever I'm sick, I live every day to be phlegmless.
Why don't people say phlemless? We're all thinking it. It deserves to be a word. I'll even donate some of my earnings from Merriam-Webster for coining a word to charity (or to Vicks, makers of NyQuil).
(Bet you didn't realize Vicks makes NyQuil. Is it only obvious to me that there should be a NyQuil you can rub on your chest?)
You heard it here phirst: phlemless.
The thing I like about being deathly ill for a week is that it makes tornadoes less scary.
The Geothermal Implications Are Staggering...
Could Jesus take a shower that was so long He would literally use up ALL the hot water?