Most days the man rose before dawn, moving in the dark to his small toilet to perform his morning ablutions. During this punctilious ritual, he would decide how he would tend to the grass around his home, checking for weeds and varmints, and make plans for a garden he never seemed to start.
Most days the sun was bright and he happily worked in the lawn. He only tended the cottage’s immediate vicinity, for the grass stretched out around his home in a vast sea of green, unblemished by neighbors, roads, or trees. He was uncertain as to how he had arrived at this state of affairs, for he had no recollection of arriving there. This didn’t concern him, though.
Most days this was true until the buzzing started. It would begin somewhere beyond the horizon, then rise like an unseen cloud, moving towards his home. Then he would sigh, and straighten up on creaking knees, and move back into the house. There he’d prepare tea for the strangers he knew would be arriving shortly.
Most days, the visitors were shades that would swirl about his home. They would ask questions about his well-being and his memory, but he didn’t care for their intrusions. He smiled and nodded, their questions becoming an incessant bombination that would only cause him to hope they would leave. Eventually their noise would reach a crescendo and they would finally vanish as quickly as they had arrived. The silence that followed always left behind a bubble in his ears and an empty ache in his bones.
Most days it went on like this, but some days, after washing his hands and scrubbing his face, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, a dark face going to gray, with bags under its eyes, hair receding from the temples. He would find himself transfixed by the image of a much younger man interposing itself. The young man who lived in a countryside village, raised by a loving couple, amongst friends and neighbors, who grew up exploring the woods around the town. Under the forest’s canopy of leaves, he planned a future with so many possibilities he could hardly choose between them. Until the buzzing sounded, like no other insect, with lights weaving between the patches of sky, moving as randomly as a child’s sparkler, closer and brighter until he was blinded. Then there, on the forest floor, revealed as the veil of darkness was peeled back, a small house. Like a home of a Victorian doll, it was intricate and detailed, made all the more strange by its appearance of always having been there, its base covered in the same green moss as the forest floor, its perfection only ruined by the buzzing issuing forth.
Those days, he tore his gaze from the mirror by shaking himself so strongly he might have been breaking the hold of an attacker. He turned then, in the dark, reaching for the bathroom’s doorknob, jamming his fingers into the solid wood of the door, grasping his pained fingers as a child might, staring into the dark as if the door had betrayed him. After a time, he tentatively reached out to what he knew was in front of him, a solid wooden door, with a single doorknob on the left, its hinges on the right. He placed the palm of his uninjured hand on the smooth wood of the door, above where he knew the doorknob was, and slid his hand down. On that slow descent, his hand encountered nothing but the long, vertical grain of the wood.
Forgetting the pain of his knuckles, he pawed at the door, searching where he knew the knob should be, hands straying into the dark to search areas the doorknob simply couldn’t be. As his heartbeat began to thunder, his fingers would find the door’s seam, searching along it for some space, some handhold, a place he could pry it open, only ceasing to search for the doorknob again, blindly hoping that it might somehow reappear. When neither wood nor seam of the door yielded anything, he would pull at the hinges until his fingernails were reduced to bloody splinters.
Covered in sweat and panic, he would attack the door, kicking and punching it, only bruising knuckles and cracking bones on its immutable surface. This clatter of this was only broken by the buzzing sound returning, emanating from every corner of the room until he had to stop his assault on the door to press his palms to his temples, falling to his knees. In the piercing clarity of that moment he could hear the questions.
[Identity?]
“Go away.”
[How maintain existence with knowledge of corporeal dissipation?]
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”
[Function of dissolution?]
“I don’t know!”
[With mono view of time/space manifold, selection of future choices?]
“I just want to tend the grass!”
[Measurement of accomplishments within species’ limited confines?]
“Let me go!”
[Is function of regret?]
The questions would continue, like mandibles burrowing into his brain, until a scream boiled out of him, issuing from a space so primal that it banished the mechanical arthropod buzzing and the voices that issued forth. Their sudden withdrawal pulled the bones out of his body and he would collapse on the bathroom floor, slipping into unconsciousness on the cool tiles. When he awoke, the room would be bright with daylight, the doorknob visible in its rightful place. He would grasp it, grateful when it turned in his hands, wanting to get away from the mirror and the buzzing. He didn’t have the answers to their questions.
Most days he didn’t think about them.
See the author’s published work here.
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