Afternoon, half a world away

Forevermore whenever I ride my bicycle down any road lined on either side with a colonnade of old and stately trees, I will always be riding somewhere else. I will be riding in Zanzibar half a world away, between Stonetown and the east beaches, in the middle of nowhere, sheltered from the fierce light of the equatorial Sun beneath the shade of ancient mango trees, pedaling in the still silence of a torpid afternoon.

Woman finds giant sinkhole under her bed

As the old woman lays sleeping, there comes a sound from beneath her four post bed, a sound coming from beneath the blue and white tiled floor that looks like a checkerboard. Beneath the rusty bed, beneath the tiles that are perfectly square, the sound of the earth falling away as she sleeps, a sinkhole grows; a perfectly round hole in the great sphere of the Earth. The scraping sound of a few of the tiles falling away as they are swallowed by the widening hole awakens her. She listens to the echoes of banging rise from the depths in the darkness as the tiles collide with the walls of earth.

She does not yet know that what was once firm and solid is now gone; a deep chasm in its place. She lights the lantern on her nightstand, puts her pale bare feet upon the smooth cool floor. she kneels and crawls on hands and feet to look under her bed. Bewildered, terrified, she discovers the hole and in the cool damp air the taste of dirt that smells of decay. Timidly she lifts the lantern over the hole and peers into the depths. She sees only darkness.

"Helloooooo?" she calls down.

Her call is swallowed up. Suddenly she is horrified. The lantern slips from her fingers. Paralyzed she watches the lantern's light travel down, down, down.

Fading, fading, fading.

Becoming

a single

point
.

diminishing in luminosity until like a dying ember

it is gone.

Her arms and legs give out.

She topples in, somersaulting slowing through the cool damp air. It whistles in her ears.

Falling.

Accelerating into the darkness, she is too bewildered to mind.

She loses consciousness.

She gains consciousness.

She sees the light of her lantern, and struggles towards it. The air is hot and humid. The walls are fleshy, they contract around her thrusting her toward the light.

Slowly.

Painfully.

She is born.

poured out

I am poured out, all my waters I have poured out. I have poured them out on a parched and barren land with an insatiable thirst. I have poured them out and not one seed did grow. Not one seed. I am an empty vessel, and the land has drunk me up without effect, but my waters flow on, through the sands and are purified. They've leached out the salts, and the toxins, and have left them behind. The fierce sun in the burning heat of afternoon has evaporated the waters, and have made them vapors, and the vapors rise, and unbound by the limits of shape, are free. They dance in the heat and dissipate into the heights, high into the rarefied air, and coalesce into the great white clouds which are pure and untouched. They merge into one with all the other waters, and like tears rain down in other places. And the vessel? either someone will find it and fill it once again with waters or they will not and it will eventually over the eons become one with the barren land and so affect it.