In Restless Dreams

This is a continuation of another post you can read here: Hello Darkness.

His spirit wandered through a desert which knew no mediation either of the overbearing fury of the sun, nor the icy bareness of night, for when he found it day—as day and night were immortal moments he was tossed between—it had always been day, and in the night, it would always be night. Such was this purgatory he had discovered, a homeless ever shifting progression toward an always retreating goal. Right now it was day, and the endless plain stretched out before him in all its unquenchable dryness.

His undying flesh, withered for want of water, browned, splitting open in unnatural seams as it shrunk around his immutable bones. These—how terrible is that which nature disguises when it is unveiled—protruding symbols of death, contrasted a bright white with his sunburnt skin. He was going blind too, not that there was anything to see but endless dunes, slow waves of a moisterless ocean.

Such are his thoughts:

I am become one of them, am indistinguishable from a shambler. What is this hopeless hope of mine, that I should find one grain of sand among these? Were I to parse each grain, could hold each separate from all the others, should I then know the one I seek? Each is alike to me. Yet, such an hope I clung to, jumped upon, embraced as a lover. Curse me for my hope!

But closer this day than any other was he to what he sought. Coming over a dune, his bleary eyes—decries he this truth as mirage—saw the drowning pit where sand endlessly fell into a bottomless darkness. So far across was it that his diming sight revealed to him a borderless abyss, that he was an ant at the edge of a table. The image was not far off, for the breadth of this hole, extending into the bleary horizon, was measureless to most eyes.

Whether his legs, having taken weary step after weary step without rest in this ever-time world continued dumbly forward heedless of what was before, or the shifting particles beneath him, cascading into that depthlessness, gave the wayfarer over to the foundationless air, or the mysteries of that world simply decreed his fall, he found himself weightless, descending into the void.

Falling, falling, falling. . .

The belt, tethering me to my perch in this evergreen, digs deeply into the softness below my ribs as I fall from the limb upon which I sleepily reclined. Having in my dreams rolled over, the leather harness catches me in my descent. Rubbing my eyes, perhaps I was still dreaming, I cleared them of some sandy, grisly film that had covered them in the night, like a leftover of that desert vision. Blearily, I saw the hints of a sunrise.

I am dangling over three of them; their outstretched arms, it’s almost comic, desperately reach for me, clutching at the air. In a little time, I know by the warming glow remorselessly eviscerating the black shadows, they will seek out some cave or shelter, and wait docile for eventide. I stay where I am, like the last ornament upon a Christmas tree, waiting for the day to show its strength and repel them.