large blank area hung above the horizon, quite as if the sky had
forgotten what it was supposed to portray. There was a slight feeling of
constriction within my chest, and so I attempted a deep breath. My ears began
to hum. I attempted another, but it was interrupted by an uncomfortable fit of
coughing. On the third attempt, the dry air instigated an irritating tickle
deep in my sinus cavity: my chest convulsed and my eyes began to water. A
monstrous sneeze was wrenched from my interior, and something immense came out.
Despite my tear-blurred eyes, I distinctly saw a form of some kind raise itself
up from the wreckage my sneeze, and scuttle away into a drainage vent. I did
not recognise it. I stood quietly for awhile, the sky mirroring perfectly the
blank expanse inhabiting my thoughts.As no succourance for my disturbed state was forthcoming from within, I turned my attention to the objects around me. The wrinkled bark of a lifeless tree collaborated with shadows to form an intricate and impenetrable alphabet. A few stray strands of spider's web slowly waved out abstract, sensual semaphore. A meandering thread of ants, itself a vital communicative praxis, snaked about the pavement in suggestive outlines. None of these things conveyed any helpful information to me, nor did they serve to address the troubling question that persisted in my thoughts, branded as they were by vivid after-image of the event that had spawned it: what was it I had just unleashed upon the world?
I wandered back towards my house in a meandering line that mimicked the
course of the swarming ants. The featureless sky seemed to hang above me like a
massive concrete block, poised to drop at any moment and extinguish all
questions in an act of final, absolute punctuation. Upon reaching my front
porch, I discovered a small plaster statuette of a goggle-eyed frog sitting
upon the 'o' of my welcome mat. I carried it inside with me, and made a
thorough check of the house to insure that all windows and doors were tightly
secured. That night, I slept on the floor with the silly-looking frog under my
pillow. I am certain that, several times during the course of the night, I
could hear it quietly chuckling to itself.
M7b