First Fiction
......
he awoke with a sudden start, the kind a man jumps from after feeling a knife plunged into his chest a million times over in a reality not so different from the one he wakes into.
'what the hell...' he murmurred in disbelief.
His vision contained figures not unlike the silhouetted furniture in his bedroom, except in his dream the black shapes stood above him, surrounding his sleepless world, and suffocating his last breaths with the presence of evil manifested in physical form. it felt as if the poisoned air entering his body spontaneously generated cactus extensions and burrowed into the fragile casing of his lungs; no moreso, the very wisps of sinister wind ignited the fires of abnormal gunpowder kindling, blowing apart the thin walled vault of his very being, his sternum feeling like it was going to explode from the pressures of such damned agitation.
he immediately placed his hands on his chest, sighing the relief of a soldier waking in the hospital bed of a MASH unit on safe land after undergoing a rainstorm of mortar in an hostile foreign locale.
he staggered up, still unnerved from what had become a regular experience these last few days.
pills, he thought,
where are those goddam-- oh thats right, you flushed them all out YOU FUCKING IDIOT! what seemed like many years ago, the man was strong enough to fend off the pain-infused dreams, but now he was feeling the effects of mental fatigue, the consequences of a waning effort of defense. without those pills, the man would be at the mercy of his own internal hell.
The headaches would not cease until he found a way to forget about them, and for now, that was an impossible thing to do manually. These were the most horrible aberrations yet, and the images of his own carcass being destroyed from the inside were strong enough to make him think they would recreate themselves in his real body if he weren't careful.
the light creases of crows feet formed at the corners of his eyes as they tightly squinted shut. He unwilling concentrated on the visions out of necessity; there must be some meaning behind all this, he justified to himself. He always sought inside his own mind for the answers, yet ironically never found any.
then it happened again, the onset quick but the duration seemingly infinite; as he captured the picture of his implosion, stars flew in from distant corners of his visual universe, slowly accenting his vision, gradually sharpening it, then fully submerging it in an instant flash of blankness. What he saw became flooded with the brilliant light of flying sparks that it tingled the back of his head. it was like someone had set off a dozen firework rockets at the base of his skull, set to explode in a magnesium blaze where his seeing began.
the tingling ceased once his frame of mind faded and the flash of an internal sun became flat and subdued, leaving behind a diluted, absorbed blackness.
he sat, half squatted and half kneeled, as he always did after these horrifying premonitions -- still and nearly breathless, skin pale from trauma -- like an egg-shell porcelain Thinker on the brink of psychological collapse.
...