~short prose thru a window~
The metro bus rumbled past below, squealing outside my windows as the driver braked to make the corner. Nash laid in bed against a stack of pillows as he listened to the bus and imagined its mix of passengers cringing from one another’s imaginary cooties and flu germs. Real ones, too, he wagered. Nash took another drag from his cigarette. Watched the smoke glide back out of his face to curl aimlessly up toward the ceiling. There he watched the smoke snake across the ceiling as ghosts of long-dead ivy. Outside above the city, bright blue sunshine hollowed out the sky to fill the man’s apartment.
Oblivious to the gargantuan maw beginning slurp at the icy cloud surrounding the solar system he dwelled within, the skies had poured rain for weeks and weeks, a damp, dreary rain. Started out romantic, tho, the kind of rain where lovers walk through the drizzle arm in arm murmuring over cups of gently sloshing hot coffee.
After one week, however, after just one lonesome week romance frayed into irritation. Another week later melancholia gripped even the cheeriest soul. Darkness more prehistoric than their sun grew closer and grew large as it sucked at tatters of soul. Many spurned lovers drank themselves dumb. Nash was glad to have quit all alcohol. Didn’t miss it much, well, maybe a little bit, yeah, the feel of a can in his hand, or a bottle, or a cup. Yeah, he knew he needed to quit these cigarettes, too. Loved his smokes, tho. Ghosts of many a death from old cancer wards swirled around the glowing end of his cigs reminding Nash of gravestones and mud and damp, musty magazines and libraries turned inside out of buildings with all their books facing into the rain. Aye, must quit those damn cigs.
Soon people began to shoot and stab each other. A darkness greater than any moon obscured compelled them to violence and lunacy. Love became unrecognizable, as if one’s heart burst with lust and devotion but mutated swiftly into shattered glass jars of strawberry jam. Nash craved one more cigarette, just one more, but the round-the-clock news media flashed one horror after another. He felt as if they were all watching plague, pox, and parasites eating up the world on TV. So many people became so numb Nash thought they may as well have been watching a spooky, goofy old movie about an apocalypse on another planet far from the world of his ancestors.
“Nash! Hey, G’Nash!” she called up to the man in the window. “Good morning!”
“Mornin’. What up?” Nash barked back thru the open windows into the big wide blue.
“Quick! Look at me!”
The man sighed a tired, lazy ass sigh, embarrassed at being caught behaving like a sloth in his own mind. He got up out of bed, snuffed out his cig, and stretched towards the ceiling. He quickly pulled down his shirt and walked over without anything else on to the window. Bathed in bright, blue sunshine, he stood in the large, open window and grinned down at the person commanding his attention.
There she stood on the street corner waving up at him thru the bright blue sunshine, waving at the man with all of her arms, waving waving waving… She was as naked as a old-style centerfold and painted blue, a dark, radiant blue, as blue as an Ancient cosmic goddess, as blue as an alien visiting from distant stars. Her hair glowed a bright lemon yellow streaked with orange, and her lips were flushed with a deep, indigo blush. Six beautiful tentacled arms fanned out from behind her head and squiggled little hellos thru locks of hair. Time shifted. Space flipped. Gravity pushed, pulled, and twisted. The city seemed to roll up into the sky to become mountains turned upside down to thrust back into the ground. Gigantic beings with multiple limbs swooped down astride vast ships spinning with whirling pinwheels of rainbow death. They invaded in search of humans of all genders to mate, to satiate a prehistoric lust as cosmic and as divine as it was primal and Edenic. For a moment, for one long, seemingly infinite moment stretched out across the arrows of time and wrapped by gravity in and out of space, the man beheld the glory of the Goddess of the Galaxy.
In this moment, within the untwisting of gravity and the dilation of time as mass penetrated matter, the Goddess of the Galaxy had only two questions for the man standing in his apartment window without any pants on. Two questions! She asked them, too, as Her blue arms and tentacles undulated in the happy blue sunshine. Both questions for the man named Nash as worlds in and out of time spun along the swirling edges of the vast accretion disk where stars shred themselves as they slip into the monstrous, Cthulhulian black hole. Both questions as Nash began to understand all living things must die to reach all of eternity.
“What is your deep life purpose? And whom do you serve?”
Nash reached out for one more cigarette to ponder a response as the sky fell down and the earth buckled into the abyss. In his last fleeting seconds, he wondered if his soul would survive entry into what came next.
William Dudley Bass
Monday 16 June 2014
Thursday 30 April 2020
Revised Friday 1 May 2020
Seattle, Washington
Cascadia
Earth (Sol 3)
Sol
Orion-Cygnus Arm
Milky Way Galaxy
Copyright © 2014, 2020 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.