Short Stories of the Unknown: The Seams

Driving through a city of silhouettes, a non-essence sort of place. Driving over and into the shadows. No roads or a direction to tell you what is up or down. No feeling for this place. But suddenly you are at your destination and not driving anymore, walking. Taking steps that are yours but in some other place that you can’t assign agency to your actions.

You wrap your hand on the door and enter a circular grey room with a rusted and empty bird cage hanging from the ceiling. This is somewhere you’ve been before, not the place you ought to be right now.

Recounting your steps, trying to remember the important ones that led you to this place you go to the next place you ought to be. Here, the darkness is overly oppressive. Here, you can’t see. And now you immediately know where you are. So you close your eyes willing yourself back awake.

Shut eyes, shut closed, shut till the black was infinite. Hoping that specter of light would appear. Hoping for a breath. Hoping for the life to return.

You try to feel life, through your shut eyes. But the difficulty of realizing your own life becomes quite apparent and worry takes a strong current within the dark space you find yourself percolating.

When did it happen? Surely you weren’t wiped off the face yet? When did it all come to pass and lead to this fabrication. Was this your new home, for eternity? How do you get used to this abandonment. This desolate infinite.

You shut your eyes again. Combining hope and will you force yourself to imagine life again in your self, wherever that was or had gone, but you knew it must be out there, at the seams of it all in your bed, in your room, in the walled estate you lived in, in Accra, Ghana, West Africa, Earth, Space, Infinite.