scrawled mumblings

When you die, the world keeps spinning. Time will keep going, and so will you. You can do anything you want when you die, and that's the beauty of it. You exist on another plane when you die, your soul frees itself and roams away up into the atmosphere, up past the thinnest wisps of carbon dioxide and out into the farthest reaches of the universe. The universe is vast and ever growing, but when you die you find the end.

If you like, when you die you can see your death. You can live it through your own body, through your mother’s, you father’s, your sister’s, or your brother’s bodies. It is too much for many. It will be sad. It will be hard. Most never want to see it. But maybe you will. Try not to be too sad now, it will ruin your eternity. You can watch your funeral when you die if you like, watch your friends and family cry and relive memories, watch them celebrate you, watch them mourn you. Perhaps they’ll feel you there, sense your soul. Perhaps it will give them peace, and you. You ought to watch your loved ones lay you to rest when you die, or scatter your ashes to the wind. That way you will truly be free. And it will help with the pain.

When you die you can experience anything and everything. You won’t be you, but you will be close. You can be Cleopatra when you die. You can be Joan of Arc, Caesar, Alexander the Great, one of King Arthur’s greatest knights, or even the king himself.  When you die you can be the leader of a great army, screaming war cries as your men behind you roar into battle. You have all of this leader’s skills because you have lived his life. You have trained with his father, with his brothers. You have sparred with his friends and grappled with his enemies. As you ride into battle on your great russet warhorse, your soldiers boom your name to the clouds and as you reach your first opponent you unseat him easily. Maybe you ram your sword through his helm; maybe you swing at his chest and cleave his armor in two. It depends on who you are when you die. Either way his blood coats your sword in crimson and its blade glints like red-hot coals in the late afternoon sun. Time blurs around you in a fog of blood and cries of victory and pain until you hear a horse’s scream, your horse’s scream, and you find yourself falling. You hit the ground and roll to your feet only to come face to face with a man sporting your enemy’s colors. Do you duel to the death with him? Does your fellow solider run him through from behind with a spear? It depends on who you are when you die. Either way, you fight your way through the ranks of the enemy until you find the one you have searched for, the one who you fought to destroy. Perhaps you will defeat him; perhaps he will defeat you. Anything can happen when you die.

You can even see the future when you die, if that is more interesting to you. You could see the Singularity occur. You could be the one that makes it possible. You could be the first person to ever experience it. You could wake up one morning and find that you were sharing your mind with something that wasn't you, something mechanical that someone else had put there. You could learn to live in tandem with it, learn to learn from it, merge with it, become something more than human. You could be what humanity was meant to be, you could be the key to humanity’s salvation. Or its destruction. It all depends on who you are when you die, and who else is in your head. You could also fight it, that voice in your head, tear it out of your skull, keep yourself all human, only human. Maybe you would miss that other presence in your head, that other voice that wasn't yours.

There are so many lives to live when you die, so many things that you don’t know, that maybe no one knows. These aren’t things that you find in history, not things that you find in nature. These are things that go on in the pages of someone’s imagination. You could finally find and read If on a winter’s night a traveller. You could meet Ludmilla and find the story together. You could enter the Library of Babel and find your way through each individual and infinite hexagon until you see the true meaning of the world. You could read each book, and learn everything the universe has to offer. You could fall forever past more knowledge than you could ever comprehend. You could walk the garden of forking paths and lose yourself only to become another self in another time. You could complete the manuscript that mapped a human’s relationship with time. What would you learn from these stories? When you die, would you finally know the purpose of your life? Would you know there was no purpose?

You have to make the most of death. When you die you learn everything, just not all at once. You can live as a tree when you die, reach your leaves up towards to sun and soak in the rays to grow stronger. You can feel as children clamber up your branches, laughing and ignoring the sap that sticks to their hands and clothes. You can stretch your roots towards the core of the earth and drink in its nutrients. When you are a tree you learn how to grow, learn how to find your way to the things you need to survive. You can live as a stone when you die and see life as it goes from trilobites to the highest evolution of humanity. You can watch as light slowly reaches you as a rushing river erodes your brothers and sisters away. When you die you can be the mountain that starts as the tallest on the world and finishes as the smallest speck of sand. You can feel the cold of the snow on your slopes when you die, feel the creatures that shiver in their burrows as they wait for spring, feel the soft footfalls of the beasts that still walk above the ice. When you are a stone you learn patience, that great virtue that lets you see everything pass you by, moment by moment, millennia by millennia.

If you could be any creature when you die, what would you choose? A wolf, perhaps? Beginning your new life as a mewling cub dependent on his mother, suckling milk until your eyes open and see winter’s final grasp slip away from the mountainside. You were once that mountainside. You hear the singing birds and the breathing of your sister, the soft noises your mother makes to reassure you; you see the dewdrops slip from pine needles onto wet loam, see the glint of an insect’s wings as it lands atop a budding flower. You grow quickly and soon leave to find your own pack, fighting battles to the death so that you can live. Your scars are badges of honor, but still ache when storms come, still throb with old pain on misty mornings. You’ll find a mate and live with her, rear pups with her, die long after she has. When you die you could be a bird, with wings to carry you up and away from the mountain where that wolf pup lived. You could soar on currents of wind and let them take you far away, far away to a place with open fields and lakes surrounded by rugged trees. The winds blow strongest in places like these, they coarse through the land and whip the grasses down into plaited mats that hide mice and shrews and insects. They blow across the water and make ripples that make ripples. Old birds are rare, and in this life you won’t be one. But when you die these deaths your flesh and bones will return to dirt and be food for some other life on its own journey. When you die you will live countless lives and die countless deaths.

You don’t have to stay on Earth when you die. There are so many things to see out there, like nebulae in every color imaginable. You might see one of the planets out there with life when you die. You could see gleaming cities made from crystal, spires cut from purple stone that rise into a deep blue sky littered with stars you have never seen before. You could see green oceans that wash against white grass beaches as cool wind blows through yellow leaves and animals with six legs and long black fur lap from the water with red tongues. You could see two suns set over mountains and the light of the moons that make enormous planets glow in the sky, their rings silver in the starlight. You could meet people of species you had never dreamed of when you die, people with translucent skin and bright spots of synapses firing all over their bodies, people with no eyes or ears but who can sing like nothing you have ever heard before. The universe is so large, so unbelievably large, but somewhere you could find a small rock, floating on its own, and just sit there. You could watch the birth and death of a galaxy. See the quadrillions of atoms forming trillions of life forms on billions of worlds. Does it make you feel small, seeing all of this when you die?

In the end, in the very end of your end when you’ve learned all that you can, when you die you can meet the gods. You can meet the Christian god, the Jewish god, the Muslim god, all the faces of the Hindu gods, and all the Buddhist Buddhas. But they are only the ones who have grown strong in recent centuries, grown and thrived on the worship of their disciples. There are others, there are gods who live in trees and rocks and mountains, gods who live in streams and oceans, gods who are incarnations of fire, earth, water, and air. When you die you could meet them all. You could speak to Zeus about his quarrels with Hera and Hades, about why he doomed Prometheus and the Greeks for seeking to be more like the gods. You could walk through a torii and up a hill to a tiny shrine and speak to the Kami of the hill. Maybe that Kami could tell you about the men who built the torii, about the people who had slept on that hill under the stars. You could dine in Valhalla with the All-Father Odin and Frigga and all the heroic souls brought there by the Valkyrie or walk with Skadi of the hunt beneath the branches of Yggdrasil as the nine realms glisten softly below. You could visit Loki in his cave where he lies bound until Ragnarok and ask him why he hates the Gods so much. You could hear the stories of the universe from the beings who have been there from the beginning and who have experienced more than you could imagine. No matter what you believed, when you die you will know that everything is true.

So don’t you see? Death can be a beginning, it doesn't have to be the end. It doesn't. Please, don't cry.

Author's note: This story is dedicated to my late grandfather, an air force vet. I personally am not at all pro-war or pro-military, and I hope I don't come off as such in this piece. But my grandfather was proud of his service and when he died I wanted to honor him somehow. So I wrote this. I wanted to show the brutality of war alongside the bravery/glory/whatever, and hopefully I did a decent job. Enjoy!

Boomer had finished his training in November 1950, just in time to enter the Korean War with the United States Air Force. He was a cocky young man with all the confidence of ten-year veteran. But, then again, all the recent graduates had that kind of confidence. And why shouldn't they? They had been taught to fly some of the most advanced machines ever designed and nothing builds confidence like feeling strong.

Everyone in his unit called him Boomer, a call sign he had earned when he had nearly blown out his wingman’s ear drum squawking too loudly over his helmet radio, and he didn't mind the name. It was like a rite of passage, earning your call sign.  His baby was the F-86 Sabre, a sleek fighter that could best anything it came across, as long as it had a competent pilot. It was fast and maneuverable, and when its silver sides caught the sun it was blindingly beautiful. Boomer may have lacked the combat experience of many of his comrades, but he had a natural feel for flying that could only come from a lifelong love of the air and sky. He wouldn't ever have told his unit, but he treasured those wings like he did his children.

Boomer’s wingman, called Zeus (Zero Effort Unless Supervised), was a similar kind of man, although he didn't have any children to treasure. The two were a sight to see, swaggering around as if they owned the base, even when they were the newest pilots at Suwon Air Base in South Korea and the least experienced in their unit. Theirs was the 4th Fighter-Interceptor Group, comprised of the best and brightest that the USAF had to offer. “Fourth but First” was their motto; they were always first into fray. Boomer and Zeus belonged to one of two support squadrons providing backup for the main attack squadrons. Their job was killing MiG-15s, Russian aircrafts flown by Russian, Chinese, and North Korean pilots and the only planes that could rival the Sabrejets for air superiority.

The first few months were almost easy. To Boomer, the planes were just objects. With eighteen pilots in each squadron, as long as no one from his squad went down, he could keep the stress under wraps. He didn't know those men that well, so when one of the forward squadrons lost a pilot, he tried not to think about it too much. The enemy pilots were even easier. He never even saw their faces behind their masks, goggles, and helmets. Besides, they were the enemy; it was his job to take down as many as he could. Boomer enjoyed the mid-air dogfights, all the adrenaline rushing through his system, the chitter of machine guns and the blasts of flame and smoke when a plane went up in flames. The cheers and congratulations after each mission only helped fuel his desire to kill more MiGs and move higher up the ranks. Sure, he missed his family, but he was still young, and the young feel invincible.

After two years of service Boomer’s attitude had changed entirely. He and Zeus had been transferred to one of the advance squadrons in the 4th, and both had quite impressive battle records. But those battles had taken their toll. Boomer had seen planes shot down, blown out of the sky with no chance for the pilot to eject. He had seen pilots who had had the chance to eject shot in their parachute harnesses while they were most vulnerable. He had watched botched repair jobs go up in smoke, the pilot’s screams echoing over the radio as he choked on toxic gasses. That’s the thing about being a pilot, trapped in your cockpit so high up in the air; you can’t help your friends once they've been hit. There is no pulling a wounded soldier behind a barricade to save him from enemy fire, no running for cover when you’re hopelessly out-gunned. All you can do is watch their plane burn and try to get the bastard that did your friend in. Boomer missed the old days, and he missed his family.

“I’ve got him in my sights.”

“Damn it they’re everywhere!”

“Kitty, there’s a bandit on your tail, watch your six.”

“I see him Mop-top, taking evasive action!”

“Look out look out!”

“Shit I can’t shake him I-argh!” kssh…BOOM.

Fire filled the sky. BOOM. Smoke everywhere, visibility down. BOOM. Planes dropped like flies, both Sabrejets and MiGs. BOOM. Panicked shouts over the radio reverberated in Boomer’s ears. Sounds of exploding engines crackled though his earpiece and the shockwaves rocked his plane with every blast.

Damn it.

“Damn it! Cosmo!”

“Shit, bastards!”

“Rabbit, no! Stay in formation, don't be an idiot!”

“I’ll kill you al-” kssh…BOOM.

Damn it!

It had never been like this. Never. It was complete chaos. They had never been so outnumbered, so out gunned. Sure, there had been some tough scrapes, some times when they had lost a lot of birds, but this was different. The squadron was getting wiped out, they needed to get out or risk loosing everything.

“This is Boomer to Apollo, sir we need to retreat, were getting massacred up here!”

“Negative Boomer, we’re the only things keeping these bandits off our troops down below. We’re just going to have to keep pushing.” The CAG’s voice was grim.

“But sir-”

“But nothing!” Angry now. “You've got your orders.” And finally quiet, resigned.

So, what, we’re all just supposed to die up here? Shit.

BOOM.

“NO!” Zeus’ plane was on fire, one wing completely gone, ripped away by the force of the explosion. He was spiraling, burning up, falling too quickly towards the ground.

A second later, a huge impact rocked Boomer’s plane. Suddenly all the readouts on his dashboard were flashing red red and alarms blared from all corners of the cockpit. He looked out his canopy and saw, to his left, the charred remains of what had once been his portside wing and engine casing. A moment later he was looking up at the battle as he too fell towards the trees far below.

There was something dripping onto his face. He painfully reached up to wipe it away and opened his eyes…to the wreck of his plane burning above him in the trees. Jet fuel, that's what woke him. It was cool, cold even, like an icicle melting over his head. The fire was so beautiful, dancing in and out of the smoke like undulating ribbons. It reflected off the silver sides of the fuselage, mirroring itself into infinity. The fire licked at the leaves of the surrounding trees, blackening their edges until they were nothing more than ash. The smoke clouded the sky, turning everything an odd shade of bluish-reddish-grey. His vision blurred and the world swirled above him, a mesmerizing corkscrew of grey and orange and black and green.

The sound of groaning metal and wood startled Boomer back to some semblance of reality. The Sabrejet’s weight was too much for the trees that had caught it and every time something new caught fire the whole wreck shifted and become more precarious. He lurched to his feet but a fresh wave of dizziness washed over him and he collapsed again. The branches above began to crack and pop as they gave way and Boomer scrambled backwards, yelling out as the plane crashed down just feet from his position and sending up a wall of dirt and rocks that slammed into him.

He coughed, spit blood and dirt, and looked down at himself to survey the damage. That was when he noticed the metal shard sticking out of his abdomen. He touched it gingerly, only now feeling the slicing pain as the metal’s edges dug into him.

Ah…shit…

Boomer’s head felt heavy, fuzzy. He reached up with his other hand to feel around his skull and his fingers came away with fresh blood dripping from them. He looked the rest of his body over, noting his torn and scorched flight suit, all the cuts and bruises and burns as well as the severe pain in his lower leg.

Probably…broken…

He pulled off his shirt and tore it into strips, ready to put pressure on his belly as soon as the metal came out. He pulled at it, slowly, evenly, and it finally came loose with a sucking sound and a spurt of blood. He covered it quickly, pressing to stop the flow and some of the remaining strips around abdomen. The smell of singed skin and hair, the smell of blood, he felt weak in the knees. His head was pounding as he stood, shakily, and leaned against a tree. His stomach heaved and he retched.

Zeus…

He wasn't thinking about protocol. He wasn't thinking about the fact that he didn't know where Zeus’ plane had gone down. He wasn't thinking about how unlikely rescue was if he left the plane. His only thought was of his wingman; “Never leave your wingman,” that was the mantra that had been drilled into them since the first days of the academy. He did at least have the presence of mind to get his bearings. He had been flying north, so he must have continued north as he fell. Zeus had gone down behind him, so Boomer reasoned that his wingman must be somewhere south of his position. He grabbed a broken branch to use as a crutch and began hobbling south.

Hours passed, night was falling. Boomer still had his basic survival gear, which included a flashlight and flares so he could at least see where he was going. He also had some meager rations, just dried fruit and meat and a few water-purifying tablets with a small bottle. At least he wouldn't starve or die of thirst. He walked and walked, tripping over roots and small bushes. He stopped once to fill his bottle. As he stumbled through the forest and the sun began to rise he realized he could see light up ahead. This was different from the glow of a new dawn. This was firelight! He started moving faster, ignoring the aching muscles in his good leg and the jarring pain in his bad one. He emerged into a clearing covered in debris emblazoned with the emblems of the US air force. Metal, insulation, glass, plastic, scattered everywhere and all of it blackened and smoldering.

Through the haze of smoke and fumes from burning fuel, Boomer could see a figure on the ground just lying there, too still. Avoiding chunks of burning wreckage, he moved towards his friend, a stone sinking in his gut as he got closer and saw the carnage. He hardly even looked at human, let along like Boomer’s friend. Zeus’ face was covered in burns, the skin charred and flaking away to reveal oozing wounds underneath, the red and black and sickly milky white contrasting so strangely to his blonde hair. His right leg was completely gone. The stump was singed and Boomer could see, through the bloody rags of skin, a broken bone peeking out from the folds of pink muscle. His right arm looked as if a rabid tiger had used it as a chew toy. There were deep rends in the skin of Zeus’ arm, giving Boomer a good view of the tendons and sinew of his friends forearm. Pieces of skin hung off of the wounds like curtains and blood still oozed from every break in his skin.

Boomer dropped to his knees. The trail of blood told him that Zeus had dragged himself as far as he could from the ruins of his Sabrejet and turned himself to face the sky before succumbing to the trauma.

“Zeus? Zeus please…” His voice broke as he laid his head on his friend’s chest in the vain hope of finding a heartbeat.

No no no no no! NO!

“Boom…ssat you? Can’t…see…”

“Zeus?! Yeah buddy its me, I’m going to get you out of here, I swear.”

“Hurts…can’t feel…leg…”

“It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay, promise.”

“Tell…Martha…love her…”

“No no no stay with me stay with me PLEASE!”

His mouth slackened, his eyes went dead. Zeus was gone. Boomer shook his friend’s shoulders, pounded his fists on the man’s chest. Anything, anything to bring him back.

“Damn it! Damn it damn it damn it!”

No! Don't leave me all alone out here!

He sat there, hands frozen in fists. Tears carved tracks into the grime on his face. They dotted his flight suit and splashed down onto Zeus’ chest, mixing with the blood and running down onto the dirt. He stayed there a long while, he wasn't sure how long, but the sun was high in the air when he was finally able to function again. Boomer set off one of his signal flares, hoping that a rescue team was nearby and could see over the treetops. He didn't have anything to cover his friend with, but he closed his eyes, crossed his arms over his chest, and removed his dog tags to bring home to his family.

He stood, shakily with the help of his crutch, and looked around for a viable shelter. The fuselage of the plane had burned out while he had mourned and appeared to be stable enough, so he sat down in its shade. He faced the forest and prepared to wait.

Five days went by. Boomer had eaten nearly all his food, drank nearly all his water. Thankfully it had rained enough to replenish his water supply, but now any wood he could find was too wet to build a signal fire with. He had used his remaining two flares and was tired of waiting. He changed his bandage one last time, and got to his feet, slowly and painfully.

If I’m going to die, I’d rather die moving than sitting here.

Boomer wracked his brain; the main force was west, right? Or was it farther south…He decided on going southwest, and prayed that he was headed the right way. The pain in his leg was still near blinding if he put any weight on the bone, but he had gotten better with his crutch and at least the pain in his stomach had ebbed to a dull throb. He hobbled along slowly but surely, trying to be as quiet and careful as possible so as not to alert any enemy scouts in the area.

He tried to walk through the first night, but was so tired he had to catch a few hours leaning against a tree. He woke to a pounding headache and his tongue so dry and swollen he could barely breathe. His stomach wound had opened again and was oozing blood and puss. Angry red lines snaked out from the bandage and the whole area felt hot and swollen. He had to reach help soon or hunger and thirst would be the least of his problems with a raging infection turning his body against itself. He stumbled on, head still thumping with each step. His vision grew blurrier throughout the day and the heat of the sun beat down, so bright and hot even under the trees. He kept blacking out, suddenly waking to find himself in a different part of the forest with no idea how he had gotten there. He wasn't even sure what direction he was going anymore; the sun hurt his eyes too much to reorient himself.

He kept walking, hoping against hope that he would hear men shouting for him.

“There he is, there he is!”

Yeah, that's what they would sound like…

“Quick get those medics over here with a stretcher.”

Wouldn't that be nice…a stretcher and a good sleep…

“He looks half dead, good thing we found him.”

Boomer collapsed, finally out of strength. By the time the medics reached him, he was out cold, too exhausted to greet his rescuers, oblivious to the hands lifting him onto the stretcher and carrying him away.

Our world, or what many call The Expanse, is endless. The Expanse comprises everything that has been discovered, everything that has been seen in our entire history. But the expanse is always growing, each time we believe we’ve found the edge it just continues off in the distance. Some say The Expanse is a giant sphere of land and water and that's why we are ever searching for its end. Most, though, at least those who educated people listen to, say that something else creates the land as we explore it. Something is mocking us. Or challenging us. Really it depends on who you listen to.

So many people don't think too much about The Expanse. They content themselves with their mundane lives; living in massive structures of uniform housing, going to work in identical buildings for eight hours a day before going home to their darkened apartments. They don't have the imagination to leave their cycle. Fear of the unknown is the strongest pull in their lives, and that fear holds them in place more successfully than any physical restraint ever could.

We had set out 1000 years before. Ten thousand people on warp drive ship with enough fuel to get us to a new planet and a new start. The people on the ship were the lowest of the low in the eyes of the government back home. They had been the petty criminals, the homeless, the poor, those who were thought of as less than because they had been born into families who didn't have as much. The world was too full, too crowded and choked in people and smoke. So, they put the people who they thought they didn't need into slums and ghettos so that they wouldn't put a stain on their gleaming white cities. The rich and the upper middle class didn't need these people; they had robots to do their menial labor, and robots to make their robots.

Ten years after the shantytowns were filled, scientists discovered a new planet. This planet was light years away, but the news feeds all said that water flowed on its surface and plants grew from its dirt. They said that there was oxygen and carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, nitrogen too. They showed recreations of what it looked like, almost like home with its green continents and bright blue oceans, all covered with partially transparent wisps of cloud. When I heard about Micos, as they called it, I was still in school, studying to be a pilot on a trade ship so I could see the world. I’d been lucky enough to have a doctor for a father and a scientist for a mother so I’d only heard stories about the ghettos, stories and what they showed us on the news.

A few decades later, the government decided that they were wasting resources on the people in the ghettos, so they built this ship. They had decided to empty the slums into her and others like her and send them off to build a new civilization where they could “make something of themselves.” And, when they asked for volunteers from the trade fleet to crew the mission, I stepped forward. I was still young, only sixty-three, still in the beginning of my life as far as most were concerned. And I wanted to see the galaxy.

The ship was mostly automated; all they needed us for was takeoff and landing. For the rest of the journey, we would all be in cryo-sleep, suspended in time until the ship woke us up. The government loaded it up with building supplies, growing supplies, everything we would need to start over and enough fuel to get us to Micos. I watched the videos, we all did. We watched the procession of sealed, marked boxes moving slowly into the hold of the ship.

I come to slowly, groggy and disoriented. The pinging from the center console corresponds with a blinking set of lights, telling me that we are close. I move my legs over the edge of my pod as the other four hiss and crack open across the room. I stand slowly, using the side of my pod as a crutch as my legs almost give out from under me. The massive screens in front of me flicker to life, showing the emptiness of space spotted with unfamiliar bright specks of stars.

“According to the instruments we should be able to see it coming up on the port side.”

“Is…is that it?”

"No, it can't be..."

But there it was. Brown and desolate.

This planet has no water. This planet has nothing green. This planet doesn't even have an atmosphere. They knew, how could they not have.

They sent us here to die.

As he awakens, he realizes that the light is gray this morning. Not blue gray, like the sea, and not green gray like fog creeping around tree trunks in a forest. It is a kind of pink and brown gray, as though the light of a raging fire at sunset is reflecting off the clouds. Except there are no clouds in sight this morning, none that he can see, at any rate.

The light reminds him of when he was very young, before everyone boarded up their homes and the walls went up. He had gone to the ocean with his mother, had held her hand as his little boy’s feet slid to and fro on the wet stones. The sun was setting behind the choppy surf and it bounced off the overcast sky and cast down rays of odd pink and blue light. He had laughed at the colors, letting go of his mother’s hand to run forward to the waves, making it almost to where they lapped against the shore before he slipped and fell. He had looked down at his knee in confusion, beginning to cry as the blood seeped through his torn trousers.

This morning brings a new kind of light. Usually beams of pale yellow and blue light stream through his window, waking him up rather rudely as the sunlight pierces through his closed eyelids. However, on this morning he was not rudely awakened, stumbling out of bed to squint irritably out the cracks in his boarded-up window. This morning he sleeps late, blissfully unaware of the too-soft neural prods from the out of date sleep monitor and of the scent of his premade, imitation coffee growing cold in the kitchen.

He, unfortunately, doesn't have the luxury of sleeping in, on this morning or any other. He works in the bathhouse, the only building in the complex that still has running water, cleaning up after the people who use the nicer amenities, the people who could afford to buy generators to keep their houses warm, who could afford to put up bulletproof glass over their windows instead of boarding them up.

 If he had managed to pry open his eyes and peer outside that morning, he might notice something familiar and yet distinctly unsettling in the air. Yes, the large spherical object still floats in sky, just as it has ever since he was a teenager, but this morning, it seems decidedly closer.

Pillars of fire rise from russet-orange sand, Great red stones. They ripple upwards in mountains Striped with tanned sandstone.

Great red stones, My arms in their shadows Striped with tanned sandstone. My fingers ache.

My arms in their shadows Sore from the effort of the day, My fingers ache. I lay my head down.

Sore from the effort of the day Pillars of fire rise from russet-orange sand, I lay my head down And sleep.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Let the oxygen catch.

On knees and elbows rubbed raw by salt and sand, be patient. Stand up, let the blood keep flowing, fueled by the rush that comes with feeling powerless.

Back into the surf. Dive under swells and feel the undertow pulling, pushing, pressing down. Hit each wave just right or be slapped down, the fly under the old dish towel.

Down again, shoulder scrapes the floor. Tiny scraps of snail homes dig in, rough like newly broken granite. Rolling over and over, head over heels.

On knees and elbows again, eyes closed against the grit, grinning. Chest heaves, shaky fingers clench the sand, arms tremble.

Fingers come away bloody from the shoulder blade ripped by an ill-timed argument with the swell. One knee will bruise tomorrow, the other drips red. Sand made a home in my skin.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Let the oxygen catch.

I got lost once.

There was blue everywhere, it filled up my vision, no room for anything else but blue, except for one lightning strike nearby and one very far away.

Did you know that paint has a sound?

It's a particular kind of silence, the kind that fills the ears and worms itself deep, down into the crevasses of the brain, tingling and numbing until you think of nothing else, just blue.

I looked into that blue.

I fell forever in it, past all six layers of pigment into the blue that the painter didn't paint, the blue that comes in at the corners of eyes when they look at something for too long.

The blue that hurts the head.

I watched the way that it faded from light to dark, from the blackest blue of midnight to the blue of just before sunset after a beautiful day, how it undulated like clouds in a thunderstorm or waves roiling under hurricane winds.

I sat and stared and got lost.