Crumbled

With a jolt the sky cracked and blue-white shards fell like confetti rain. As I ran through the arid expanse the rocks and pebbles underfoot tore my soles to shreds. The red stained wake I left with every aching step soon turned a dull purple as the powdered remains of the sky-drops blended in with the crimson fluid and light off-white soil. As the main hairline propagated through the zenith, heading dead west, the sun suddenly dropped like a guillotine, slicing into the horizon and sending the plains into an uncomfortable twilight. The stars fizzled and popped out into oblivion.

The ground gave way and I began to fall into a murky blackness. Soon, a faint glow took shape directly ahead, giving birth to an eerie tunnel vision that I could not escape. I was transfixed upon the glow. With every second, its hold on me doubled, I… I couldn’t turn away. I felt as though the moment would never end.

In a brilliant flash the glow grew so bright, that my eyes burst into flames, and I could smell my eyebrows singeing away, but somehow, I could still see and I kept staring. The light grew brighter still and then, in the center of the blinding aura, a black dot began to form like a drop of ink diffusing into wet fabric. Terror struck and my searing flesh grew icily cold. Something was coming out of the dot. Something big.

The object grew at first, like the plume of a mushroom cloud viewed from high above through a bombardier’s scope. In a split second, the plume collapsed in on itself and twenty tentacles shot out in a smoky starburst, slithering across the white hot backdrop, and each burst into brilliant red flame. The network of arms came to a stop and remained static for several seconds. It was as if I was staring at the engorged blood vessels of some giant, macabre eye, with the desolation of the smoky pupil peering directly through my soul.

The flames quickly died out, and the ashen arms lay dormant. But the pupil soon began to grow again with such force that the cinders were blown outward, to the edge of the radiant disk, and then out of my field of vision. The main plume began to take shape as it raced towards me, accelerating at an alarming rate. I could see now what it was. I knew what it was going to do.

The massive obsidian-black skull stopped several hundred yards away, but it blocked out nearly all of the brilliant white light behind it. The eye sockets gleamed with an eerie shimmer, and then were filled with the same brilliant white light I had seen before… as if the brilliance was so powerful it had drilled straight through the back of the megalithic monstrosity like a pair of perfectly spaced laser beams.

The white turned to brilliant red, and my skin began to crack. As the water in my organs began to boil, miniature geysers of steam shot out through the crevices and red ran like a lava flow seeping from cracks in the earth. The shock finally wore away, and only pain was left to replace it. I began to scream so violently, that it was the only thing I could hear. As the heat grew, my vocal cords shriveled, and all that came out was warm, dry air.

A deep vibration ran through my body, and I could feel a deep sound humming in the air. My ears were gone. I ceased to exist. Yet my eyes could still see. The skull. The skull was still staring, and its jaw dropped and rose ever so slightly. It was laughing at me. The deep, sonorous chortles abruptly died as the mouth opened wide, and the skull flew forward, engulfing the ashen remains of what was my body. Blackness returned, and all was calm and silent.

Like a phoenix, I rose from the ashes, and jumped out into the darkness that now surrounded me completely. I was whole again, in no pain.

As I exhaled my first breath, I breathed life back into the darkness and the dimly lit stars came back into focus. My feet touched down on the newly dewed grass, and my toes frolicked among the blades like long separated friends sharing an overdue embrace. My entire body wept. The tears fell to the earth and landed in the grass below. Like a time-lapsed nature film, the grass shot out in a brilliant green starburst, and filled the entire landscape in all directions. Trees sprouted up all around me and birds flew in from all directions to roost on the newly arrived branches. Deer and Elk darted through the woody maze; ground dwelling rodents of all sizes raced through the underbrush.

A bright light began to peer through the canopy as the moon waxed to full and then waned and waxed again, like a lover’s eye winking, drawing me to her.

Warmth. A pleasant warmth returned to my fingertips, and I reached out to feel the mammoth evergreen in front of me. The intricacy of the bark was ecstasy. My entire body wept a second time. The drops of joy carved a path out of the forest. My feet began to move again, and I followed the trail out into the clearing. The band of the Milky Way spread across the sky like a giant belt, holding the world together. I had never thought I’d feel this safe again.

As I gazed out over the clearing, a tiny light flickered on the horizon. I knew this place. I had been here many times before. The flicker of the fireplace was drawing me homeward, back to the comfort I once knew, and had to leave so long ago. I set my mind to the road ahead, and took the first step back to my old life. The grass was lush and padded every step. I felt my feet getting lighter with every yard of ground I covered. Soon I was running on the open prairie with a voracious determination to live.

Something struck me as odd, out of the corner of my eye. Something pale in the moonlight. As I broke my stride, I turned and veered slightly off course to inspect this luminescent object further. Lying there, alone, out of place in this new landscape that had just been reborn, was the dried, pearly white skull of an animal. A large chip was gone from the cheekbone, from what sort of blow, I could not guess. I found the fragment a few yards away and carefully locked it back into place. My finger traced a hairline crack across the brow, and as my touch glided along the bony surface, I stared awestruck as the crack vanished before my eyes. Calm and satisfied, I put my palm down on top of the newly replaced fragment. After a few seconds, I pulled my hand away to see that it, too, had healed.

Placing both hands on the skull, I lifted it from the ground and held it at chest level. Vertebrae sprouted from the base, and quickly, like a fractal racing off in infinitely more complex arms, an entire skeleton soon stood before me. As I continued to lay my hands on the forehead, I felt muscle, sinew, and flesh building up beneath my touch, and soon the entire animal was swaddled in a furry coat. The head moved, and licked my palm. Suddenly, realizing that I was a man, the calf became startled, and trotted off quickly into the night.

For some reason, part of me felt more whole than before, and I resumed the trek back to my cabin. The wind blew at a pleasant gust from the north, and cooled my body as it worked against the undulating hills of the field. At last, I arrived at the crest of the final hill. The sun had already passed through the main part of the day, and was hanging like a portrait on the west wall of the sky. Calm came over me, and I slowly walked the last several last hundred yards to the front door. My hand reached out, and grabbed the knob, and slowly turned ….

*****

“Doctor, I’ve just checked in on our patient. He seems to be about the same as he was this time yesterday.”

“Thank you, nurse…. so his vitals are still nominal?”

“Yes, sir. They’re almost exactly as they were yesterday, right before we administered his medication.”

“Well, go ahead and prep another injection, and I’ll be in a few seconds to feed it through his IV. Make sure the encephalograph is warmed up so we can catch any initial response to the drug. It seems to be working better each time we administer it.”

“Ok, I’ll double check.”

After going back to the corner room on the long-term care floor of the hospital, the nurse checks the apparatus and drugs, and takes another look at the patient’s vital signs, which have been stable over the past twenty three hours and fifty-three minutes. After feeding a newly opened roll of paper into the encephalograph, she takes a moment to re-examine the encephalograms from the last several months. Each day that the drugs have been administered, a large peak registers in the patient’s brain activity, and then dies off after a few moments. The first day, the spike lasted only a few seconds before dropping to a very low level, indicative of the deep coma the patient was (and still is) in. As the months went by, the peak became slightly broader, and yesterday, had lasted for approximately seven minutes. The hope was, that if the treatments were continued, the patient would eventually remain “in the peak” long enough to come out of the coma.

“Are we ready, nurse?”

“Yes, Doctor, here’s the syringe.”

“Alright, I’ll just push the plunger and… there we are….and there’s our friend the peak…looks like it’s a tad bit stronger than yesterday.”

“Doctor, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go on break. I’d rather not stick around until he comes down again. It still bothers me how he seems to wince toward the end of the peak.”

“Don’t worry nurse, I assure you he’s in no real pain, it’s just an autonomic response to coming down from the higher level of brain activity…nothing to worry your pretty little head about.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, I know that, it’s just hard to watch…I wonder what’s going on in his head right now?”

“Sadly, we’ll probably never know. Either the treatments won’t come to fruition and he’ll never wake, or, if God willing he does come to, he probably won’t have the foggiest. I doubt if it’s anything tangible, and even if it is, it’s probably not anything so intense that it’d leave a lasting impression in his subconscious…”

*****

As the door opens just enough to feel the first breeze of that warm, wonderful comfort that only home can offer, my calmness evaporates. The jolt comes again, as I knew it would. The doorknob crumbles to dust in my hand, and my house collapses into ruin as the doorframe falls flat on top of the rubble. The grass turns to eggshells and then crumbles into off-white dust and pebbles. I start to run towards the horizon, hoping that I can make it through today and maybe, finally, make it home tomorrow. I don’t know how much longer I can take this.

The sky is falling again.