Casted Light

Steps clacked in the distance to his right. If he weren’t drunk he would have believed them to belong to the reaper. In a drunken man’s reasoning, imagination hurt more than the reality, he would have had to return the morning after his hangover, the bright unforgiving light. Days before he managed to remember his last resting place. By accident he tripped over the demising hard wooden borders of a sandbox. He fell in head-burst into the yellow sand, luckily he was excessively drunk to keep his eyelids open, let alone believe collective equality could actually sound as a swell idea to stir insurrection. The following day he was found by a shirtless young girl, confident not only in her strength but in her self-determination to reject the current swindling fashionable ideas spat out by wiser men than him. She smiled at him as she pulled his hand and gradually dragging him out of the pit-box. Overwhelmed at where such immense strength originated from, he failed to notice the sand coming out of his shirt pockets.

“Mister, you shouldn’t have slept there, that is the resting place of Homura. She is an unforgiving sprite that hides behind the curtains of day, and performs her imprecating song when the masses sleep.”

She turned his back to him, leaning her head down to stare at her own shadow then she said voice deep and mature, “Those who sleep in the forest, have their soul eaten…”
Before he could ask her what meaning it held, or why she spoke in such a manner, she vanished into the lush of the park scenery, the sun’s irritating rays. As he stood up he noticed something peculiar and frightening, his left hand shivered. One thing came to his mind as he brushed away the remaining sand, he felt as if half of his body weight had ceased to exist. No matter how he looked at it no amount of vomit could ever make a man in his late twenties lose over half of his weight! His footsteps hardly took extortion of any kind from his muscles and ligaments. It took him a matter of seconds to finish dashing seven hundred meters. Little did he realize his indulgence blinded him to the fact that such an unrealistic turn of fortune could ever happen. He pinched his cheeks until they were raw. Still. No change. His feet were lighter than the dried yellow leaves falling at the beginning of autumn.

Although knowledgeable enough to know that pond water would give him the runs later, he eagerly took in all the microscopic pathogens into the sanctity of his newly, he thought adjusted biologically superior monolith. He splashed some water through his rich brown oily shampoo-deprived hair. Euphoria rushed throughout his body, feeling eccentric enough to run another kilometer in just a matter of seconds became his current objective.

As he finally decided to run for it, his muscles petrified at the sight of something more hair-raising than finding out his wife cheating on him with his former best bar buddy. His shadow! The blob of darkness most people care as much as they do for the gum sticking to the soles of their shoes. An existence manipulated by children to create living forms from the bases of their hands under a beacon of light. A necessity to have for one to identify themselves as… human. GONE!

He panicked wondering how such a thing could have happened. Picking out the pieces, flipping them as if part of a puzzle he never bothered finishing the night before, nor the night before that one, and so on. All of his future plans shattered before him as if it were made of thin sheetrock half-crafted out of depth handiwork and the other half…

One thought darted through his head, and as soon as he considered it, he knelt down realizing that gravity had also betrayed him. Then parts of the earlier conversation he had with the shirtless young girl echoed through his ear canals.

If only knowledge was always available our decisions rational and our hearts kept at bay. The things we keep even the insignificant ones when lost bewilder the mind and trouble us. Depression surely follows thereafter. What have you lost and how has it impacted your decision making? The above was an original work created by yours truly in spirit of narratives and story telling.