EARTHSHINE

Light pierced his retinas like shards of glass. The war drums were not in the distance. They were in the next room. Nausea was no longer a worry. His stomach had accepted this state and no longer saw the need to protest its treatment. Headache, though, fell far short of the description of his pain. Cy struggled to sit up and saw only blurs of shadow and light about him. Rubbing his eyes, he strained to make out his surroundings. He grabbed the front door knob and wrenched himself from the floor. “Still here.” Vagueness gave way to memory as he realized what he’d done before. “Why was dreams? Where was the dream…?” He searched for a coherent thought, aware that he was far from lucid. The cobwebs polluting his mind were reluctant to clear. In exaggerated pronunciation colored by an ever-present slur he stated slowly, “Why did I think it was all a dream? Crashed in the entryway. Woke up in the entryway.” His head was clearing and memory of the day before returned. The toilet, the target practice, the vodka. Cy looked to find the toilet clean. The bottle of vodka was in the fridge with just exactly the same amount in it, label torn just so. There was not one bit of glass anywhere except perfectly clean windows and tumblers arranged neatly in the cupboard. Despite his inept state of mind, a clear and powerful fear shuddered through his body. Pure, unadulterated. There’s nothing like id fear to awaken the mind. He tried the front door again to no avail. He tried again. His head created a loud wooden thud as he leaned into the door jamb with his eyes closed. Contemplating the impossible, he opened his eyes to see, just centimeters from his face, the door and the jamb were connected. Not as in contact with one another. As in the same object. One mass. The seam between them did indent but from this close, it was clear that it was one solid continuance of matter. He looked up and down, scrutinizing the door’s perimeter to see that the entire door was just part of the wall. It all looked absolutely real, the same as it always had. Except there was no true separation between objects. Real fear. Weakness punctuated with nausea. Cy could feel his blood pressure rising, threatening to buckle his knees. He continued to explore the entire cabin in great detail. All of the objects inside his cabin were the same as they had always been. Everything but the external walls. From any distance at all you could not tell the difference, but from close it was clear that any wall, window or door to the exterior of the cabin was part of a single surface. Molded with shapes, colors and indentations to give the illusion that this was his cabin. “This can’t be happening. This isn’t real. This is not happening,” he told himself. Cy rolled his eyes perusing the entire interior of the cabin in one sweeping arc, suddenly feeling immersed under the weight of a stranger’s eyes.