Another Paradigm of Gravitational Material - lost in an infinite reality and nothingness. From "Remember Me, Nothing" chapter fourteen - which details the main character's excursion on a dusty mountainous world where the only other lifeform is a small chicken. After eating one of the bird's eggs, our hero hallucinated that the bird became a monster and declared its name was not God as Bryan presumed earlier. We join Bryan waking up after this event, shocked to find his consciousness still inhabits the secluded mountain range with the hen.
As for what truly shaped the nature of these shifting settings, the transferring madness spinning my spirit across various planes of existence, nothing can be said with even an inch of certitude…
But after revisiting that room in dreamland, which contained the shadow within a mirror-window, I was curious as to where I would awake next as we fall onward deeper into the absurdity of surviving this mess. The first thing I noticed was that my cheeks were resting in dirt. When eyelids opened, I saw snowflakes still fell from a dark purple sky. Muscles caused the body and bones to arise and let eyes view a scene that shocked me, propelling perception into befuddlement. There was my makeshift stove, a small charred fire-pit stuffed with ash. Traces of smoke arose from it to flow with streams of wind flying by. The small hen still sat there, staring at me with that dumb look and its head tilted.
“Good morning, chicken,” a hoarse voice from this throat grunted. The bird did nothing in response. “I know now you are not God.”
While surprised for sure that I had managed to reach an activity resembling sleep without transposing my mind’s substance elsewhere, happiness was an absent emotion. Was this lifeless mountainous place, where my only companion so far was a chicken who pooped out eggs that apparently summoned panicked hallucinogenic visions during digestion, really the world I wanted to remain trapped in for an extensible time period? Maybe it was the food that had brought the result of sleep...
As I contemplated the matter, it made some sense that my hallucination culminated in getting destroyed by a monster as the scenery was engulfed in flames for I had been subjugated to the threatening teeth of multiple beasts already. And as for the fire, throughout ordeals, how could the subconsciousness not occasionally beckon old human archetypal concepts about the afterlife like Hell? But what had I done to deserve such tribulations?
Caught in a sudden fit of spontaneity, possibly as a method of ignoring all the thoughts about these unfavorable circumstances, I spouted at the idiot bird: “Shall we explore this world or not?” And I got up on my feet and breathed the thin air in deep.
Off into a random direction, these soles marched, unknowing if the chicken would follow, whether it be out of boredom, curiosity, or a misplaced feeling of loyalty.
Dead red-tinted dirt crunched under the coarse calluses blistering heels as I started on the trek. In a mere matter of minutes, which is an approximate duration, attention spans noticed the dirty feathered animal stalked these ankles. “I had a feeling you’d come along. Would you like to lead the way?” There was no reply.
Faint gusts of wind occasionally tickled the thick hairs decorating forearms. The light-source of this world, which tempts us to call it the Sun, never set or moved from its constant, fixed position amongst a hauntingly dark violet sky backdrop. Neither the illumination’s brightness nor any other aspect of its nature seemed to fluctuate. Thus, the reflecting photons hitting the lonely moon above did not seem to change either – the lunar object remained forever full. The sky’s depictions appeared fixated like a painting hanging inside a frame. As such, there were no days and therefore hours and minutes were harder to discern and describe. I cannot say how long the chicken and I hiked before the landscape changed from dull mountainous depictions littered with small trees, large boulders, and millions of tan rocks, but soon we found ourselves in an even duller hotter land of flat brown deserts.
The temperature change was unexpected, and the onset was unassuming. It may have been the body’s sensors merely perceiving an uptick in heat, but previous realms had boasted a constant cold so the warmth, when noticed, was surely welcomed by our skin. The translucent snow had also stopped falling long ago, it should be noted. With the previously experienced mountain range supposedly behind us, dunes of sand populated the ground now, and individual grains sharply whipped through the air for the wind swirled persistently. Views were certainly obstructed and askew as a result.
The avian companion soon clucked, sounding disgruntled. The once infinite distance surrounding us, along with the immovable sun-like light-source, were soon shrouded by an increasingly fast-paced swarm of dust-devils dancing around like small tornados. The feathers of my companion fluttered in wind while my naked muscles fought the dry storm, too. Oddly, and without warning, it abruptly seemed as if the underpinnings of the realm’s chemistry altered completely...
Like so many countless other facets of the awful endless realities I had experienced beyond Bryan’s supposed death, it is infeasible to properly divulge the exact details that could possibly convey such a sensation as the one to possess me during that small moment. It was as if the mind and body effortlessly transcended space and time to arrive in another dimension entirely, almost...
There was no external evidence to support such a statement, but if it were not true, then truth does not exist. I was somewhere else, albeit this place looked exactly the same, and the chicken stayed nearby. Sand continued to blow about, clouding any view that would otherwise be in sight, but there was an unmistakable presence of another person, felt by intuition. It felt like someone I had known in another world, and so it was to that former world, the body and mind were somehow transported, and all of matter unmistakably appeared differently to the mind.
“You’re not wearing any clothes.” It was the raspy voice of the old man, and like when I was initially introduced to him, his whereabouts were at first unknown, hiding in a cloudy surrounding while the acoustic quality of his vocals reverberated with pristine clarity. Innumerous questions clogged my throat, preventing a response.
Through the presence of the stranger, the whole world fused into another paradigm of gravitational material altogether.
“You haven’t seen any more dandelions, have you?”
Written by BW Derge, All Rights Reserved 2024
© USA
This was an excerpt from "Remember Me, Nothing" - Chapter 14: Another Paradigm of Gravitational Material - to be published in 2025
