“Somebody with a runny-nose is going to die.” Some other body said and,
naturally I turned around (I had a nose and it had been running) with my
fingers crossed. As I looked it hadn’t actually been a body, at least, if
it had been he or she had also disappeared just thereafter. I thought that
perhaps it had been a television or a radio, but in fact didn’t see either
of those, then wondered if those bodies and devices for communication of
sorts were well learned in acts of disappearing. Curious as to the faults
of my education in such things I sat down on a bench just a ceiling apart
from the rain drifting from clouds I couldn’t quite see through the dark. I
felt left out, and highly visible.
To feel more “in” (as opposed to out, since I’d already been left) I stood
and made movement right, from under shelter of hanging over ceiling to join
the rain drops dropping from the clouds also transparent (or may as well
have been if not for the rain). The drops beat hollow warnings into my
forehead, though more gently than I thought they might, and a calm covered
my skin exposed, also the clothing serving purpose like a cave to hide in.
Precipitation I figured was friendly, that is, for some time until I decided
that it wasn’t.
At once I felt maligned by dripping drops and the weight they bombarded through several hundred feet of atmosphere. I began to relate with pavement, unmoving and unmoved beneath clouds unseen, buried and unmoving underneath waves of wet warnings no longer content to warn but to drown.
As quickly as this unfolded I sharply shot a glance downwards to spot and greet, possibly, the cement below my feet. Surely there was none to be spotted or greeted, as the pavement, too, was an escapist. Then the rain stopped.
I stooped to the nothing my feet stood upon and examined puddles floating in the dark, so dark I nearly couldn’t find them to splash in. The body or television or radio that had poked in gutturals from behind my back earlier, though I’m not sure how much earlier, did so again. Said “Don’t you think it’d be interesting if people could condensate? Or evaporate?” And I thought people did condensate (jumping all at once out of a building definitely burning) and hoped to find a diagram of it, perhaps, one day. I thought then that maybe the rain that had been dropping had evaporated, like so many of the people I’d known but likely never seen (and I did find a diagram of that, limbs lifted from selves, pulled heads from necks, legs
severed). Suddenly all of me was pulled taut by forces invisible, a
rubber band to it’s end just about, and snipped to it’s relief by scissors
built for just that.
In remembrance of the voice that made comments I turned and it wasn’t there as I’d expected it not to be. When that would have bothered me minutes ago I was wet and alone and the rain had it’s friends and I wasn’t one of them. The pavement maybe I could have gotten along with, though it wasn’t in existence to begin with, and the people and the radios and the televisions are figments of somebody’s imagination as he or she converses about condensation and evaporation. The voice it spoke and I didn’t turn around because it wouldn’t have made much difference anyhow (I wasn’t there, either), though unflinchingly my ears did the listening.
“The factories we’re made in, they’re called hospitals, we’re products.”
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keep it offthe cat's, yes out of the bag but who put it there in the first place?
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