Lucid Waking

Archive for January 24th, 2010

Cured

        Quarantined. No one knows how long it’s been or how long it will be. For another endless day, or at least, the time in which the sun shined after he woke up, he contemplated the passage of time. Having run out of numbered blocks on his calendar, he gave up trying to mark its passage and hold on to the last bit of society he had left.
        The thing with Armageddon was that he had expected it to be much more…dramatic, flashy, even, than it really was. Perhaps, it was as T.S. Elliot thought, man did not go out with a bang, but a whisper. Or was it a whimper? He couldn’t remember. Hundreds—thousands—of years of culture had been for naught. And it was all because a scientist wasn’t careful enough with his virus samples. It seemed ironic.
        He sat down at the piano, like he did every time after he woke up and played dead composers. The music didn’t comfort him so much as the feeling of the keys and that constant connection with something that seemed to understand, or at least respond to, his feelings.
        Suddenly, a telephone rang and he jumped, upturning the piano bench and sending it sliding a little ways across the room. He ran to the phone and snatched it from the cradle.
        “Hello?”
        “Mike, listen. I think I discovered a cure.”
        “Hillary? Wh—”
        “I can’t talk now, just head outside.”
        “They’ll kill me if—”
        “Go out the back and sit in the sun.” And she hung up.
        Though this disease was eating him from the inside out and though the sheer boredom would perhaps kill him just for a change of pace, he was afraid and doubted her advice. But finally, with a last loving look at the piano, he snuck out his own house and ran to the greenhouse at the edge of his property. It was a sunny day and she was right, basking the sun was making him feel much, much better.

Author’s Note on post 339: So I decided to try something new; every day for ten minutes I would write something. I’m not sure if everything is going to be published, but this is my goal. Ten minutes. This is the first fruit of this experiment and quite frankly, I’m not fond, but it’s the act of writing that is most important. Wish me luck!