Chapter 1 

An infinite green box. Little things were demanding that I do things. It was as if they were saying, “we know who you are and you must suffer a bit or, at least, admit your guilt.” They were little buggers and I felt them attacking me from every direction. No voices only sense. I sensed what they were thinking I didn’t know for sure. Then I thought I saw a flash of my late mother’s face and when I recovered from that I knew they had powers and it worried me. I had cried out to my mother as her image flipped on by in an insidious way, not at all pleasant. She appeared as a death mask although she didn’t have one of those made, in fact, she was incinerated in a manner of speaking. Such feeling to see her again! She had had it as a life on the planet and gave up the ghost. I was told this by people who knew her in the end. She wanted to make sure I was ok, I remember them telling me that. And it wasn’t as if she decided to haunt me although I had been told to prepare for anything because a part of you dies when the mother dies. The death mask flashed and I heard the little buggers tee-heeing and felt pressure on my rear-end.

Then I felt myself plunging down. I felt elongated although couldn’t see myself, I didn’t even know whether I had a body or not. I swooped something and then a liquid began to drip on me and no matter what I did I couldn’t escape it. “So this is the punishment,” I heard myself thinking. I began to harden myself to anything that could be sprung on me. I began to understand I was dealing with larger forces than mere physical ones and it made me both curious and frightened that, in this position, seeing so many powerful things I was the most powerless around. I fought and fought. I began to think of beautiful women I had known. They were all professional women and didn’t know how powerful their beauty was. They had traded that in for mere money and by the time they discovered the truth had lost some of the beauty. But I thought of their beauty. How stimulating it was! How necessary for life, for music and art. And I was modern enough to throw in “soul” as beauty. No where now. I began to think, in my new context that human beings, their form, had a purpose. I mentally built a human form from nothing using only the forces I knew contributed to its design. Unattainable! Well, I entertained myself and then found a kind of leveling off taking place still surrounded by the dried green color but surrounded in a spacious way that was not intimidating at all.

David Eide
January 24, 2014