Fiction Fragment 2.3
It's been a while. I'm already five weeks into the fall semester back here at USC, and just now getting around to making a new post. Thanks for visiting. The following is something I wrote, as part of a larger thing I'm writing. This piece forms part of the second chapter, the two previous parts of which can be found here (where you'll also find links to the first chapter) and here. I highly recommend reading it in order, if you read it at all. I hope you like it.
When I came to, the sun had moved past his post at the hole above me, and without his glare in my eyes I was better able to see around me -- to see, that is, that very little was around me. Four bare walls were all I could see. My heart soon quickened as the implications of this fast seeped into my barely permeable mind. Trapped! The only question was if I would be granted a coma in which to comfortably starve to death, or be left to suffer with an awareness of each slowly falling minute.
It was while I pondered this dilemma that I saw the cat's tail. The cat's tail was orange and undulated quite as if it were attached to a cat, but this particular cat's tail was pretty clearly unattached to anything. Needless to say, I did not rule out the possibility of hallucination. With relief I passed back into unconsciousness.
Waking up -- that was when I saw the cat's head. Now, this cat's head was orange and it twitched and sniffed and stared just like a cat's head might if it were attached to a cat's body. However, I saw no body. The possibility that I was hallucinating quickly offered itself as a certainty.
The cat's head stared reproachfully as I wavered between varying degrees of consciousness, always vaguely aware of that looming dread, that sleeping regret which was the backdrop to all my thoughts. I feared the waking of that regret as much as I longed for the resolution to its mystery that its waking would bring.
I will never be able to say how long I lay in just this state. That it was not brief I can write with some certainty, from the extraordinary slowness of the thing which happened next. Under watchful feline eyes the blackness, the towering chasm of void began to -- with imperceptible movement, like a glacier melting in reverse -- to resolve itself, to come together like a crystal, to become a form, a shape -- a human form.
It was then I remembered you.
When I came to, the sun had moved past his post at the hole above me, and without his glare in my eyes I was better able to see around me -- to see, that is, that very little was around me. Four bare walls were all I could see. My heart soon quickened as the implications of this fast seeped into my barely permeable mind. Trapped! The only question was if I would be granted a coma in which to comfortably starve to death, or be left to suffer with an awareness of each slowly falling minute.
It was while I pondered this dilemma that I saw the cat's tail. The cat's tail was orange and undulated quite as if it were attached to a cat, but this particular cat's tail was pretty clearly unattached to anything. Needless to say, I did not rule out the possibility of hallucination. With relief I passed back into unconsciousness.
Waking up -- that was when I saw the cat's head. Now, this cat's head was orange and it twitched and sniffed and stared just like a cat's head might if it were attached to a cat's body. However, I saw no body. The possibility that I was hallucinating quickly offered itself as a certainty.
The cat's head stared reproachfully as I wavered between varying degrees of consciousness, always vaguely aware of that looming dread, that sleeping regret which was the backdrop to all my thoughts. I feared the waking of that regret as much as I longed for the resolution to its mystery that its waking would bring.
I will never be able to say how long I lay in just this state. That it was not brief I can write with some certainty, from the extraordinary slowness of the thing which happened next. Under watchful feline eyes the blackness, the towering chasm of void began to -- with imperceptible movement, like a glacier melting in reverse -- to resolve itself, to come together like a crystal, to become a form, a shape -- a human form.
It was then I remembered you.
posted by Matthew at 11:12 PM
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