Cold, wet strips of the sky fell in pieces, leaving behind darkened and discolored patches of pastel-stained air. On the ground, those shiny globs of fallen sky were almost transparent, their barely discernible pink and blue tints giving them an ethereal, ghostly appearance. Within minutes, streets and lawns and rooftops and driveways were coated with the thickening globs but, because the sky-fall occurred in the the pre-dawn hours, the village was asleep, so no one noticed. By the time people awoke to begin their days, all types of communications—telephone, short-wave, wi-fi, television…everything—had been rendered inoperable by the massive amounts of sky-fall. Residents were unable even to contact their neighbors, because the sky-fall had piled up to the tops of door frames and windows. Looking up through the slits of window glass that remained uncovered at the tops of the windows, only dark and discolored strips of pastel-stained air were visible. What had been the sky was only a vague reminder of what had once been, but was no more. At least not now. Not at this terrifying moment of utter confusion. The insurmountable distance between experience and understanding had never been more clear, nor more horrifying.
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Friday, I learned when I went to the cancer center, was a day for chemotherapy. Unlike most “chemo days,” the normal procedure—labs, followed by a visit with the oncologist, followed by the infusion—was not followed. I did not see the oncologist. Just labs and infusion. What followed, though, seemed to replicate the last “chemo-day.” Extreme fatigue, nausea, and a great deal of sleep. If memory (or consciousness) serves me correctly, I slept most of Friday afternoon, through the evening, and all through the night…until around 2:30 a.m. on Saturday (with a brief episode of dry heaves some time before midnight), when I got up for a while. I tried and failed to blog, then “rested” on the loveseat in the TV room until almost 11 a.m. I woke for a while, then napped again for most of the afternoon, before getting off the loveseat and going to bed early. I slept late this morning…until 5:30 a.m. I woke thirsty, but not in the least hungry. My vivid memory of two or three dreams has already begun to decay, so much so I cannot remember enough to document anything of substance. Something grotesque involving watching a man eating spaghetti, while several strings of the pasta slipped out of his mouth through holes in his cheeks. And another, in which I may have been interviewing as a trainee for a sales job; the remaining snippets of memory are too slippery and nonsensical to make any sense of them.
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The introductory short-short-short-short-short “story” above intentionally leaves the reader hanging. There is no explanation, no solution, no hope to escape the inescapable. The despair and panic of those experiencing the inexplicable is implied. There is no hint of a “cause,” though; the experience, the dread, just is. The experience suggests nothing could have been done to avoid it.
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Please remind me to create a questionnaire, the responses to which can be used to correctly determine the degree to which the respondent adheres to, or departs from, widely accepted beliefs about morality. The same responses should enable the questionnaire’s user to correctly determine the respondent’s placement on a scale indicating political positions (e.g., liberal, conservative, etc.). I’d like that questionnaire to be completed, in widespread use, and accepted as valid by and across all political and moral affiliations no later than the first Friday of the first month of the fifty-seven-hundredth century.
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This morning, so far, all is well. I do not feel even remotely energetic and I’m already tired, but I’m not quite ready for a nap. I’m beginning to feel a tiny bit hungry, but my interest in food is extremely limited.
