Coffe shop

Sitting in a coffee shop, I suddenly realized that I’d never seen this place before. Quickly after that realization came two more; the chair I was sitting in was awful and it felt like a thorn was stuck in the roof of my mouth.

I stood up and it was like the morning’s first stretch. I didn’t recall how I got where I was…everything felt brand new, as if all of my senses were just waking up. Not knowing what else to do, I walked over to the counter and ordered a hot chocolate. The guy behind the counter gave me a cup and I took a sip.

Pain screamed through my head. I’d forgotten about whatever was wrong with the roof of my mouth.

I reached in and felt around for anything that might cause that kind of irritation. I found something, about the size of a grain of rice. I grabbed it as best I could and gently pulled.

Out came something. And, it kept coming. As I pulled it out, my vision pooled with blood and my entire face went numb. When it finally ended, it appeared to be a needle about seven inches long. I could feel the cavity in my head that it had left in its wake.

The numbness in my face spread to my whole body and the room was red with my blood. It was a strange time for me.

I guess I should find a better chair, I thought.

Change

The night was stuffy and particularly dark. Exactly the opposite of a fresh piece of lettuce in a bright crisper drawer, I thought. I wandered, almost blinded by the blackness, down a cobblestone street. The air was so thick that it felt like I had to force my way through it, so much so that when I finally came to something that wasn’t air I didn’t realize it and just tried to push through.
When I failed and realized that it was a brick wall I threw my head around looking for any signs of anything. I saw one light, so dim that it was just inside visible, just to the left of directly above me. It looked like it was submerged under thirty feet of murky water. I followed the wall to my left until the light was just overhead and found that the wall turned to wood, and the wood had a handle.
I yanked at the handle, and nothing happened. I pushed on the wood, and nothing happened. I knocked on what I assumed to be a door, and waited.
Suddenly, a hole in the door about six inches across and two inches tall slid open. A beam of bright light from inside the wall shot out into the alley and penetrated about four feet of the haze. It was blinding. The light then subsided as something moved in front of the slot in the door. My eyes were confused and I couldn’t focus on anything, but I knew that it was a face, peering out at me.
I realized that I had fallen into a cowering position when the light came, so I righted myself and looked back at the face, waiting for it to speak.
It didn’t. It just studied me for a moment and slammed the slot shut. A few seconds later, I heard the latches on the door dancing around and suddenly it opened just a crack, flooding the alley with light again. As I pushed the door open, I looked around inside to find nothing but a chair in a small room with another door at the far end. That door also had a slot, to which the face had moved and was peering at me again. As I entered, the door closed behind me. I glanced back, only to see outside briefly, where the light from the room exposed what I think was hundreds of people stacked along all the walls of the alley.
The door clicked shut politely, and silence poured violently into the room. There was nothing but the chair, and the eyes staring at me from the next door. They were big, wet eyes. I could hear them blink.
With little else to do, I sat in the chair. It was wooden, with hand upholstered padding on the seat and back; a royal purple fabric, held in place by brass tacks. The arm rests were just a bit too high to be comfortable.
The room around me blinked out like a light bulb reaching its end. When it came back, it was something else. The tiny room had grown into a huge area. The walls had changed from brick and stone to cold metal. There were tubes and vials of some glowing green substance all around me, and some huge tanks against the walls. The chair had also changed; it was now much bigger and metal, with straps holding me to it. I struggled pointlessly a bit.
A dome lowered from the ceiling, covering me and the chair entirely. I was surrounded in solid black. Somehow, I was calm. Maybe things were happening too fast for my panic to keep pace. A din started up and slowly grew to a deafening roar. As that happened, dome flooded with something. I could feel it creeping up my legs and torso, and eventually my legs and face. Afraid to breathe, blind, and deaf, I did what anyone would do. I passed out.
When I came to, I was in what seemed to be a glass tube. I was several stories above the dome on the floor, which appeared to be doing its thing again to someone else. It finished and lifted, spilling gallons of that green stuff into surrounding drains as it broke its seal with the ground. As the dome lifted past the subject in the chair, I was startled to find out that the subject was me. I looked lifeless and cold. I tried to slam the glass with my fist, only to find that I had no fist. I looked at myself in the chair, and discovered that I wasn’t actually seeing me. I knew it was me, but sight was something I lacked. I sensed it. I had been separated from my body, but I still felt a link with it. I felt it sit in that wet chair. I felt a release under the chair, and I felt my body fall into a tube. I felt it follow the tube all the way down to the alley, and I felt it thud on a pile of other bodies.
At that point, I was just me. I forwent panic and instead studied what I had become. Before I got very far, a man approached my glass tube and grabbed it. He walked me over to a larger glass enclosure and inserted me. I could feel the man. He was the eyes that peered upon me earlier. I could also feel that the glass was not glass, but something special. Almost like as this being of pure consciousness that I had become, I could pass through anything except this glass.
I felt eternal. Living outside of time and sense, if that’s still living. All of time was mine, and I was trapped in a box.
I’m not alone in the box. Countless other entities are in here with me. We have a sort of timeless community. Every so often there’s a new addition, and we welcome it. New topics of discussion are always welcome when you have an eternity to fill.
That wet eyed bastard has an armchair set up just outside the glass, and he comes to sit with his whiskey and peer in every once in a while. I imagine this is what it feels like to be an ant in an ant farm.

Writer's Block

The white of the blank page on the computer screen filled the room with a dusty haze and shone off his face in the manner of a dull moon. One hand lay rested on the keys and the other was wrapped around a cup full of clear liquid. His gaze was fixed on the upper left hand corner of his reality, but he didn’t perceive anything. Instead he concentrated his energies inward and scratched around in his mind with a sharp metal rake looking to unearth something to fill that damn page. The rake pulled up lots of things; a song lyric, movie scenes, foggy memories of the colors of the walls in high school, old pets, and all of it was useless. He needed something new.

Taking a break from the mental yard work, he shifted focus to his eyes for just a moment. The room pulled into view, and the ceiling corner he was looking at slowly came into sight.  Something was wrong. A shadow was cast on the ceiling that shouldn’t have been. Like something spiny and dark. After a minute of watching it, he pieced together that it was pulsating and getting larger. Also, unlike a shadow, it had depth.  He slowly rose from his chair, keeping his eyes locked on this thing. He did not immediately see the humor in the fact that he’d found something new.

The dark thing grew larger and larger, eventually enveloping the room’s sole light source, the computer. In the dark, he could hear the thing creaking and growing. He backed up until he found a wall and followed the wall to a corner. The thing continued to creep through the room, though due to the newfound darkness he didn’t know what kind of progress it was making. He soon struggled to hear the thing over his fevered breathing and violent heartbeat.

Standing in a corner blind, he started to feel a presence on his chest and legs. As it grew in strength, he felt a similar pressure on his face. His panicked breaths shortened due to a lack of available air. It wasn’t long before the dark had closed in on all his senses like a second skin. The pressure was unbearable.

And suddenly the pressure was gone. It was more than gone. On the pressure scale, where the needle had been at an unreasonably high number, the needle suddenly snapped back, but didn’t stop at zero. It raced back and finally came to a stop at a similarly unreasonably low number. He could feel his parts separating in the vacuum. His eyes pulled out of his head, and everything went white. His arms and his legs tore from his torso, and his torso tore in half.  Each piece of him became two pieces, again and again.

All that was left of him was his consciousness, which had been spread to every corner of this new universe. He could simultaneously feel that this place was infinite and that it was expanding. He was inside the dark, a part of it. As it grew, he grew. He was the darkness, and he would devour everything outside before long. 

Just as he accepted what he was learning, there was a blip in reality and everything flushed away like someone had pulled the plug. He pulled his face off his keyboard, his eyes fighting to stay open and a small trail of drool following him away. On the screen was a blank page, save five characters.

nbgfv

He could feel where those keys had been pressed into his forehead.

Button

Having dropped  my keys between the couch and the wall, I reached into the gap to retrieve them. While I was feeling around, I found what felt like a button. It was round, made of cold metal, and set in a cold metal base on the floor. Without thinking, I pressed the button because that’s what you do with buttons.

The floor started to shift. Each floorboard pulled in the opposite direction of its neighbors, parting the ground like two combs separating. Beneath, there was no discernable thing, just an intense dark blue glow. Eventually, the floor opened up past the confines of the room and I realized that the floor wasn’t separating, but reality was. The walls, the couch, and my keys all slowly vanished as if they were sounds that were getting further and further away. Soon, there was nothing. There wasn’t even me, at least not a physical me.

I wanted to close my eyes, but I had no eyes. It dawned on me that I wasn’t seeing anything, so closing my eyes would be useless anyway. This was a new kind of perception, one that I had no escape from. I would just be and endure endless nothing with no distraction for the rest of time.

Life of the party

I woke up and everything was upside down. That’s not to say that in front of me was an image that had been turned over, but rather that each individual thing was upside down relative to the things around it somehow. I tried to right myself and realized I was not only already righted, but mid stride in a sprint. I suddenly felt the sensation of speed, but time was somewhere else, maybe having a smoke.

My foot contacted the ground and fled behind me as my other foot came back to the front and followed. A shelved wall full of ornate stuff was approaching, and I found myself in tune with my thoughts. I knew that I could sent a message to my legs to stop, and I could feel how long that message would take to coarse through my body and reach my legs. For one reason or another, I decided not to send the message; ornate stuff be damned.

As I made contact with the wall, a porcelain clown was what was nearest to my face. He just sat there, looking sad and upside down. Sad clowns never made much sense to me.

Crashing through, I lost my sense of being in tune with everything and regained a familiar time frame. Also, I stepped on some ornate piece of junk, sprained an ankle, and tumbled to the ground, pounding my head into a nearby car.

Lying on a concrete driveway with my ankle throbbing and my head split, I felt eyes on me. Glancing back at the doorway I just created, I saw a hoard of people in fancy dress staring back at me.

Corn

The black of the night lent itself to the explanation that all of existence had been condensed into the area illuminated by the motorcycle’s single headlight. From my vantage point behind the headlight (and therefore outside of existence), I was hypnotized by the world as it flashed through this beam of creation and destruction. The speed was enough that no single thing existed for long, and in each item’s brief life it left an impression in the back of my mind, filling me like a pitcher being dunked in the ocean.

Suddenly into the beam came a cornfield. I tried to turn the bike, but I was too slow (the ocean in my head delayed my reaction a bit.) The cornfield surrounded the bike and I, still traveling at speeds high enough to break time into moments. Without time having passed, I was out of the corn field and on my back, with a motorcycle on top of me. I lied and collected myself for a moment, scanning over my body for any specific screaming pain. Before long, I found some.

The bike’s engine was searing against my calf. In a slight panic I yanked at my leg and pushed at the bike, managing to get free. I could smell the burning flesh, but the actual injury didn’t seem that bad. I stood up and limped vaguely around to the front of the bike so I could use the headlight to examine the burn. It was pretty intense, looked like the skin had been torn off just prior to the seer. It hurt, but I could walk. I also noticed in the light a bit of blood on my shirt. I knelt down to examine where it might have come from, and found something unfortunate.

Before I continue, we should talk a bit about corn. Corn is a grain that’s grown as food all across the country. The part used for food is the grain, several dozen of which grow on a cob. Several cobs grow on a thing called a stalk. Corn stalks grow straight up out of the ground in fields. They are between 5 and 9 feet tall, and they have cobs and leaves. The leaves have a broad face and a thin edge, and often from the stalk with a springiness that allows them to gather more sun. Above a certain speed, like water which gains the consistency of concrete, those soft and gentile leaves take on the characteristics of machetes.

I had just careened through a field of machetes, and I did not come out unscathed. Across my stomach was a gash, nearly a foot long and deep…scary deep. Without knowing what else to do, I put my arm over my stomach and applied pressure, trying to keep as many of the guts inside the wound as possible. Using my other arm I righted the bike and started back down the street, with one useless leg and one arm occupied. I couldn’t shift up (my leg just wouldn’t do that motion), and so I weaved down the street drunkenly at 13 miles an hour.

Before long, I was sucked back into the thought that all existence was in the headlight. I found myself gasping for air, and before long I couldn’t fight off the big darkness that was invading from behind my eyes. I felt myself start to topple, but I didn’t feel the ground.

Moongrass

The breeze swept by and danced with the moon soaked blades of grass. Those blades tickled a bit as they brushed against my ears and neck as I laid in the field, staring at the fires that burn far away. The cool air wafted across my skin as I tuned my ears through the crickets, through the rustling of the grass, and listened carefully to the underlying silence. A deep breath revealed a scent in the air, a crisp scent like hydrogen burning miles away. The light in the sky was soft, and my body felt heavy. My eyes drifted closed and I lost time to the night.

My eyes opened, it was still night. The scent still lingered in the air, the grass still tickled my neck, and the breeze was still cool. I tore myself off the ground and rose to my feet slowly. Glancing around, I saw nothing but a boundless moon bathed field. The crickets and rustling were absent; all that remained was the silence.
Realizing that I still hadn’t found time and there wasn’t much else to do, I picked a direction and started walking. I walked for hours, or weeks, or minutes, or decades. The landscape didn’t change; it just reflected the same constant horizon of endless grass.
After a moment of thought, I took a pen out of my pocket and jammed it into the ground as a point of reference. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see it from very far in the dark of the night, I thought the sense of distance would have a reassuring effect.
I walked backwards away from the pen, keeping it in sight and gaining distance on it. As soon as I couldn’t see it anymore, I turned around and kept walking in the same direction. It did feel good, knowing that I had moved, even though the world around me didn’t show it. As I had that thought, I heard a crunch under my foot. It was a pen. Shocked, I picked it up and examined it. It was the same pen.
I panicked. I was trapped in a field of nowhere. Exits were all around me, but they led right back to the same place. Without even realizing it, I fell to the ground sat with my legs sprawled out. Not knowing what else to do, I hurled the pen as hard as I could at the horizon. It hit me in the back of the head.
I let out a sigh.
I wanted time back.
Stupid field.
The horizon burned into me with its endless gaze for what I could only assume was centuries, and then something odd happened. The horizon started to advance on me from all sides. It came at me quick, too quick for me to react to it.
Suddenly, the field was gone. Sucked out of reality along with everything else, and there was just me. It all happened really fast, but as far as I can tell, everything passed into my mind. It nestled in as fond memories which, were unique because I remember not having them.

Alone in the void, I missed the stupid field.

Bubbles

Reality is not one big cohesive entity. Each conscious thing has its own reality, a sort of reality bubble. Each action or thought of that conscious can and often does reshape that bubble in any number of ways, altering not just their perception of reality but their actual reality. What is reality other than perception anyway?

The bubbles don’t adhere to rules based in physics. They can exist in the same place, because they are no place. They can grow and shrink without a balance of energy to draw from or give to, and they only exist in the present.

The bubbles can overlap, allowing one conscious thing to experience things in the way that another conscious thing might. I find that these experiences are particularly powerful when changing the shape of a bubble. Once that conscious thing returns to its home bubble, it finds new corners and edges everywhere.

I suppose the question is, “What lies between the bubbles?”

It’s something we’ve all experienced, I think. When it’s four AM and you’re sitting on a couch with crumbs from the whole pizza you just ate scattered all down your sweat soaked shirt and your bubble just decides to go for a walk, and get away from you for a while. Things around you start to fall apart, and suddenly you’ve been a n impossibly heavy triangle your whole life and every time the glow of the TV flickers it’s like being hit by a train in the face. You squeeze one thought through the constant wreckage that has become your mind, and it’s something primal. “I have to pee.” “But I can’t pee. I’m a triangle. Triangles can’t pee, stupid.”

I’m sure there are other ways to escape your bubble and experience the void. I bet jumping out of a plane would work once or twice. I’ll have to give that one a try.

Hands

As I watch my hands scrawl across the keyboard, I realize how odd they are. Lumps of flesh with sprouts bursting from them that I can make move independently of each other with less than a thought. The sprouts are coated in a slightly damp and hairy leather that’s wrinkled where they bend, showing wear. They’re capped with protective bits of enamel that protrude from under the leather.

 

Weird things, people.

Atmospheric

Reality feels a bit wafty today.

I can reach out to grab something and watch it waft away like the smoke trickling from a single cigarette in an ashtray. The ashtray is sitting in a kitchen that’s just experiencing the first morning light creeping through the blinds, one cool fall day fifteen years ago. The smoke ascends from the ember in a bolt straight line for about two inches, then suddenly starts to dance and flurry and eventually dissipate into the air. I may grab a fork or a piece of mail or just use my hand and waft the smoke about, but in seconds it returns to its natural dance.

I like it. It’s not a bad feeling, in the same way that rain isn’t bad weather. It breeds (or, perhaps, is bred from) complacency.

Morning Airports

Airports in the early morning have a delightful eeriness about them. Huge empty corridors lined with windows that look out over empty pavement that's painted in the busiest of fashions. Beyond that, fields and rolling hills full of houses belonging to people who haven't yet considered entering the waking world.
The hallways concuss with every footstep, and in this case, every keystroke. My line of sight gobbles up thirty one gates, all of which are empty save one single man sleeping in a chair two hundred meters away. If there were carpets here, there would be a lone old woman vacuuming. The sound of the vacuum would carry through the terminal as if it was purpose built to ferry vacuum noises.
For every person here, there is more air than that person could go through in a week. Conversely, in two hours, everyone here will feel suffocated by the masses of people swarming around them. At least I'll be in a jam-packed steel tube in that disobeys gravity by then.

It was late in the day, and I'd forgotten to eat. I was reading a book. Part of the book's basis is in a war that took place between Japan, Mongolia, The U.S.S.R, and China. It's a war that I as an American don't really know about, because it had no major impact on the U.S. and therefore our schools don't teach it. That's just the way it goes with all of this rampant nationalism, I suppose.

The scene in the book that I was reading was written from a Japanese soldier's point of view. Over eight long pages, it graphically described one of his fellow soldiers getting skinned alive by the Mongols, and his own reactions while being forced to watch. Graphic is too light a word. It was high-end intense.

Before reading this book, I've never been forced into nausea by media. I've actually hunted down the grizzliest of retellings and adaptations, only to be slightly amused by the gore of it all. I honestly thought I was fully desensitized.

As I read on, a sinister feeling crept up my spine and planted itself in the back of my head. The pages started to shift, ever so slightly, left and right, as if I was viewing them on a dock from a boat in a light breeze. Warmth crept around my face like someone's hands slowly covering my eyes from behind. Amazed at the reaction, I read on.

Soon, there was a violent urge in the back of my throat. The world around the pages closed down into nothing, and soon the nothing advanced on the line and word that I was focused on. That checkerboard static pattern that you see in your eyes when you close them and press on them with your fingers was everywhere, like a snowstorm. I felt myself lose the book from my hands, and I felt my head detatch from my body and float into a ceiling fan.

With all of my focus, I realized that I had to get to a restroom. Standing up was a feat, and walking was nearly impossible. My only option was to roll my mass against the wall until I found the restroom door. It felt like controlling myself from a great distance through a cocktail straw.

I got to a restroom, sat on (fell to) the cool tile floor, and waited. After a few moments, the world came back and I could process thoughts again. I was entirely covered in a thick sheen of sweat.

I sat on that floor for a few more moments and wondered what had just happened. I still really don't know if it was the book or some other influence, but I like to think it's the book. I like to think that I'm not fully desensitized quite yet.

Creation!

All facts are fiction! Woah.

Brain beach

Someone or some ones came to me in the night. They gently tapped about the circumference of my skull until they could remove the top bit like a cap. Then, they reached in and took my brain. They got in their car, and drove to the beach, with my brain in a cooler rested upon a few water bottles and an egg salad sandwich.  They got to the beach, they drank their water, they ate their egg salad, and they rolled my brain out onto the beach. They built a sand castle around it, then played Godzilla and knocked the castle down. They did it again, and again. When the hunk of fat was thoroughly engrained with the tiny rocks, they put it back in their cooler and headed back. They came to me again, and replaced my brain, now gritty and scratchy. They welded the cap back on.

 

Of course, I remember none of this. All I have to go off of is the feeling in my skull, and this huge disfiguring scar.

BEAST

I found myself in a corner. Turning to look see what had me pinned, I could smell the odor that gets on your hands when you hold a handful of change in a sweaty palm. I knew exactly what the beast was.

It’s flesh made of green paper that wasn’t really paper, but more sort of a thin denim with men’s’ faces and numbers of all sorts printed on it. It’s eyes, which glowed like mosquitoes that someone had set aflame, were each a golden coin that I immediately recognized as the new line of presidential dollars. The foot that had me pinned as well as its other three feet were made of burlap, with big cartoonish dollar signs printed on them. I could only assume that the burlap be filled with gold bricks.

When it snarled, which it did on a non-stop basis, I could see it’s bank-teller-pen-with-the-ball-chain-still-attached teeth and its cashier’s-check tongue. With every snarl pennies came forth from the mouth, some casually dripping from the sides and down it’s chin while others came at me like rockets.

I knew it didn’t want to kill me. These types of beasts rarely do. More often than most, they just like to play with your life for a while, like it’s their little toy mouse.

I’m starting to learn that playing dead isn’t the solution. Fight your way out, I tell me. And so I listen.

Poor Buttercup

I picture a wall nigh ten feet in front of the speeding horse I ride. As that ten feet turns to zero, blood rushes through to my hands and I see the veins pulsate over my knuckles. There is no flash of my life. The horses face flattens against the wall in slow motion, with every cracked bone, broken tooth, and other detail enhanced like it was remastered.

 Poor Buttercup.

 As the horse has now stopped moving and I haven’t, I feel myself leaving the saddle, my face accelerating towards the wall at speed. Fruitlessly, I start to throw my pulsating hands up to protect my precious nose, but it’s too late. Fruitfully, I close my eyes. Again, in slow motion, I feel the pressure on my nose and cheek, knowing soon that I’ll hear cracks and pops and the pain that follows will be devastating. Something interesting happens. The pressure is suddenly relieved, in the same fashion that the pressure on a pencil might be relieved just as it punctures a piece of paper.

 My body feels like it’s being drawn through a sheet of water. The edge of what I can only assume is reality is peeling down me as I continue with my horseless forward momentum. Just as I feel that edge lapse my feet I find the will to reopen my eyes. The first thing I gaze upon is my hands, as they’re right in front of my face. Blue. Hazy. Translucent. Odd.

 I realize now that I was several feet off the ground, being without a horse. I look down to discover no ground, and pause for a moment to discover no sense of movement. I turn back to try to decipher where I am or how I got here, only to find nothing. The same nothing that is everywhere else.

 Well. Shit. I wish I had a hamburger.

 And I have a hamburger.

Maybe it’s not so bad here.