The Sand Castle

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Drinking tea while gazing down the neon streets of the chrysanthemum city. I am a stranger in this land. A white devil of the barbarian West. I smile to the waiters and gaze out at the endless throng of people bustling through the streets. For the first time in a very long time I feel truly lost. I think about the reasons that brought me here and they now seem so removed from me. It would be easy for me to believe that my whole life prior to now was a dream. I have no connection to my life here. The metropolis of the East surrounds me with noise.

Then my phone rings. I flip it open with a quick “Hello” and hear my daughter’s voice respond with a cheery greeting. She chatters on about school, dance class, and what’s been happening in my absence and the slow smile that creeps across my face reaches through my heart and down to the foundations of time. Just like that I have been reconnected to the world. I tell her I love her and that I’ll be home soon. We exchange other words but they don’t matter. The contact has been made. We hang up and I depart the tea shop. The city holds no sway over me now. Its noise breaks around me like cobwebs and the stares of strangers hold no heat.

The world is not an objective thing, nor is the mind totally subjective. There is a continuum of reality. In this neon maze I have become more real than the world around me. The road rises to meet me. It knows me.

Mr. J.: Yo. Dude, who the hell is that?

Mr. D.: Not sure, he was dead when I got here.

Mr. J.: What about the new guy?

Mr. S.: Oi say we chop ‘im up inta little bits, fry ‘im up in sum awlive oil with gahlic ‘n gingah, and serve ‘im wit’ toasted prawns!

Mr. D.: …

Mr. J.: …

Mr. D.: … yeah. Well he’s new isn’t he.

Even now I hear them. Like rats in the walls they scurry around my brain. Poisoning my thoughts. God! how they fidget. I had thought to drown them in drink, or perhaps in a stronger brew. A concoction of pharmacological potency that would render numb my ego.

But there is no escape. At the very edge of my limits I can make them out still. In fact it’s worse. There I can begin to discern words. There is nowhere I can go that they will not find me not hound me not waken my drowsing self to the concentrated horror of seeing the world as it truly is. What we have revealed. What we have discovered. These are just crumbs of the universe. Such immensity is the home for intelligences other than us. Things of alien urge and twisted intent, only half real by our standards, by our pathetically limited science.

Who could have ever dreamt that they would not need the poor currency of physical presence. They have pursued paths of the mind unimaginable to the sapien race. Between stars they flit like ephemeral bats their conciousnesses circling ultraviolet stars, drawn to the life of our warm sphere. They are among us. They live in the world beneath the waking day. Only in the dark night of dreams do we catch the occaisional glimpse. A quick glance that brings us rapidly to waking screams covered in the sweat of instincive flight! Ai! They will not stop! They have seen themselves reflected in my eyes!

They come for me. The circle slowly, like wolves around wounded prey. I don’t know how it got so dark in here, so quiet. I can barely hear the tapping of the keys as I try to record this moment. There is an abyss opening beneath me that I cannot see or escape. Soon they will pull me down.

What is that on the ceiling fvf

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Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood! Oh God the blood!