In the Twinkle of an Eye

Mortality

An unrelenting sun shone through the slits of the blinds, shining onto Kaiser's sleeping eyes. The sun unwilling to let Kaiser sleep off last night's drinking. He rolled over, still fully clothed and put a pillow over his head in an attempt to hide from the light and just as he did, his phone started to ring.

'Hello?' Kaiser grumbled.

'Hiya mate. Just a quick call to wake you up so I wasn't getting up this early on my own. You're welcome!' Click, the phone went down.

The distinct word 'bastard' pushed its way through the fog of his mind.

He turned over and half-heartedly covered his eyes with his forearms, before submitting to the brightness of the light. He fixed his gaze towards the beams of light coming through the blinds, then scanned the room and chuckled to himself at the sun striped room which reminded him of a tiger through his still focusing vision.

He threw his legs over the edge of his bed with a great deal of effort, his upper body slumped over with the first effort to hold up his head. The laminate floor was now a scrap yard of empty beer cans, strewn around his guitar like un-organised tin soldiers awaiting the pen and pad lying on top of it for their next set of orders.

In the fog of his mind, he struggled to remember the night prior, a blissful ignorance. He looked at his pad, scratched his head and squinting read the words 'What is real?' 'Oh boy ...' Kaiser thought cringing to himself.

He stumbled towards the blinds, this time avoiding tripping over his floored guitar stand. He opened the blinds with two fingers and peered out into the world of outside. The sky was filled with grey clouds of differing shades ready to burst, only a small opening which the sun was shining its last few rays into Kaiser's grimacing face. A glimpse of clarity still shone beyond the murky day.

...

In the day's past, the memory of the strange experience of the green energy, and the obscure tramp began to fizzle and fade from his mind. Though the feeling of the sharp burst of pain in his head which somehow sharpened his his awareness had seemed to have stuck around. There seemed to be a fuzzy sharpness to his vision of the world around him like upgrading from a black and white TV to a HD. This gave him a distinct feeling that reality wasn't quite as real, as though he was inside of some kind of intense virtual reality.

Only on the odd rare occasion, would the image of striking eyes quickly drift past the eye of his mind before quickly floating away elusively. Kaiser had decided quickly that the guy must have been some kind of drug fuelled vagabond, having his fun freaking out passers-by with silly tricks and illusions. The bottle illusion, well, anybody with any sort of wits about them could see that the bottle must of had some kind of clear tube stuck into the back of the bottle, the fluid through some kind of pump. Kaiser had found light amusement in the fact that he almost fell for this cheap trick, giving his props to the strange mans' delivery.

The mysterious energy which appeared around the boy, he passed off as some kind of fluid, or trapped nerve of some sort in his brain. After all, it is speculated that we carry a dose of dimethyltryptamine which is usually released when we pass on. Perhaps it was the case that a very minute dose was released somehow. Regardless, the newfound sharpness in his vision was indubitably welcomed, and the strange, almost dreamlike effect, brought on by his statically sharpened vision was a comforting development. He wasn't taking life quite as seriously for some strange reason. Even amidst the uncomfortable feeling uneasiness which still seemed to linger somewhere in the background.

There was something strange which Kaiser has begun to notice, much like the child whom had hid behind his mother's legs peering at him, more and more people had appeared to be noticing something about him with an inclination of some unseen property, perhaps a faint glimmer of fear here and there. As he walked into the town, he would notice people watching him with disguised looks. Some would cross over to the other side of the street as though he was some kind of phantom walking amongst the living. Some appeared to have a great deal of interest in Kaiser, having no filter in order to disguise this unknown fascination, even crossing the street from the other side almost involuntarily pulled by some kind of powerful magnetic field. He had no idea why, or how these people were acting the way they were acting but this made him smirk with this new found prowess. He was quite enjoying the attention, good and bad, though he was reluctant to admit it to himself.

The growing feeling of uneasiness in the distant steadily inclined and radiated. The feeling could not be shaken, nor ignored, no matter how much Kaiser had tried to obligate his will to do so. He wrestled with his intuitive understanding which he let slip from the edge of his mind with an effort, the true source of this feeling but was unwilling to face up to it. A mental barricade, the enforcers of previous conditioning of his mind, grabbing him and turning him into another direction every time the thought of the disappearances began to arise. Yet something was telling him, for some strange reason, he had something to do with the way things were unfolding. He laughed it off as his ego thinking more of itself than it actually was, the minds recognition of its own insignificance and fighting to give itself some kind of meaning or purpose.

The strange phenomena of which whole cities, whole areas of the world had seemingly vanished into thin air had perplexed the scientists, the leaders and the thinkers of the world. Yet somehow, there seemed to be this nonchalant disregard, as if one loses their spare set of keys. How could it be possible for a whole terrain of land, with countless people, cities, towns and villages just disappear? Just like that? Where vast stretches of Earth once held a place in the world, was now vast stretches of lonesome ocean blue, an empty vacancy of which the previous occupants had flipped.

Though many people would speculate about the disappearances, they only seemed to do so for very minimal amounts of time before they moved onto the next big distraction of celebrity TV shows and gossip. The speculation tended to be shallow and immature, from terrorist plots, to ray guns which could evaporate whole terrains into other dimensions.

The speculation was quickly forgotten and people quickly moved on and comfortably fell back into their prior habits and thought patterns. Nothing would change. Nothing was being done. 'In fairness' Kaiser considered to himself, 'It is a terrifying thought to consider one's own mortality, to consider the possibility that you may be here one day and disappear into oblivion the next. And what even is oblivion? What does it consist of? All we know is that the word has mildly negative connotations, we don't have any idea what oblivion consists of!' He understood the reluctance to individually dig deeper into this nature but conflictingly resented the fact that this was an inevitable aspect of life, one which considered would perhaps ease that fear of the associations which come along with our mortality. Then he scolded himself, he was letting his mind run away again, there is nothing more any of us can know, it is what it is. It was a pointless endeavour and a waste of energy to consider. Nobody could ever really know... Could they?

Minutes turned into hours, hours turned into days and days turned into weeks and was forgotten, back to normal again. The world turned just as it had the day before and will the day after. Days turned into nights and nights turned into days for everybody. Well except for one or two ...