day zero

jack fell diaries 007

Open your eyes but never wake up not entire. Resurface leviathan slow then all at once up through the black past the yellow. Hurts like hell every time. Aches like being born. Don’t regain consciousness so much as thrash and flail at the torn threads of it. The internal hard drive and sense of self is a wrecked spider’s web. Tattered and dangling from a blackberry bush. Pale bright threads visible only when they catch the sun. Clutch and gather these defragged mind’s eye wisps into the hands of another self and regain nothing. Exit the black rough and unpretty, reborn as a facedown lump of stinking flesh on the floor of my closet. Every day is day zero. The walls around me are scratched with five sided stars and alchemical triangles upside down and not and spirals clockwise and not. Half cooked theory of language models meant to run right to left into a counterclockwise spiral flashes through mind’s eye. This is a false memory or alt timeline not sure which. I can see out of just one eye, the right. Left eye burns and throbs. Touch it and it’s covered by a cloth or bandage. Long shuddering breath. Not dead, not yet. Death adjacent. Near death but no idea just how near. The house is shaking. The walls boom like thunder. 

I can see the bathroom from this vantage. It looks trashed. The shower curtain is gone. The window is open and Bird hops in from the side yard. Bird is a five year old Texas heeler the color of silver and blue smoke with brindle markings. She moves like a shadow. She approaches to sniff and lick my face disapprovingly. She sniffs the eye patch and tries to get her nose under it but I flinch away. The walls tremble with crash after crash of a hammer fist against a door. Bird growls but doesn’t bark and it dawns that someone is knocking on my door. 

Not home. I’m not home. I am home but I don’t want to be. None of this is real. I just need to wake up. Now hear voices not my own. Two male voices unknown to me. The voices shout my last name. Voices hard and cold but polite just barely. Calm but not fucking around and I know that tone. I use it all the time at work. Then a low soft female voice that breaks me. Josephine. I stagger violent to my feet and throw myself hard into door frame. Shove push prod and perp walk myself forward like I’m guiding a combative patient into the seclusion room. Because I am. Through the kitchen and to the side door. The windows are blacked out but I know who’s out there. I’ve come down this path before. Two cops in uniform and Josephine, my wife. 

Ex-wife, I mutter.