Prose

Uracil Dreams - Ordinal Positioning

written by: Chrome

He looked down into the water, chest against the rotting wooden dockboards. Shiny silver and orange fish darted to the surface, picking insects and dragging them down if they weren't dead already.

four horsemen of the apocalypse

nine lives of a cat

four-and-twenty blackbirds

baker's dozen

never in a million years

Counting to himself, he considered the water, individual drops layered on top of eachother, pushing into eachother, convincing themselves to face the air or duck down to the earth so far below. To embrace the creatures that drank and played with them... To evaporate under a hot sun or sudden lightning, be stirred into foam or even freeze in sheets...

Burst violently up and onto land during a storm or beneath winds, maybe create an exciting fog when the air is so cold that relative temperature indicates relative form.

Liquid, solid, particle, wave, gas... Idea.


Twelve apostles

the eleventh hour

working twenty-four/seven

two-four of beer

five-star general


Working at the sewage plant opened his eyes and his mind, and looking at this water now he didn't see first a rotting pier or murky brine below, he saw water for what it was. Actual water. Dirt was just some construct, intangible. Disease? Untouchable? Plague? Water kept going on, with or without them, playing its elegant overture again and again.

Had he ever been able to smell anything? Would he ever want to again? "People are dogs" he thought. They run around, biting and sniffing bottoms, this activity is right this one is wrong. Strategizing, hunting in packs, howling at night, but limited by their own intelligence to a fairly short existence.

Here at the bay, alone, looking down into the depths, dogs were just some other thing. People, too. Threatening, stealing, inducing fear, chasing, haunting, sure, all of these, but still just things. Loud things that would eventually go away.

Was he afraid? Peace of mind is a treasure. When you have it, emotions seem useless. They seem cheap. Afraid to lose that, definitely, but in renouncing emotions there wasn't really even fear, not in so many words. Withdrawal, like this water, ebbing away from irritating commitments. Reaching down he twirled a finger around in the water, wondering how it might impact the fish and their insect prey. But not wondering. Feigning to wonder. Visualizing the idea of wondering, but carefully avoiding the ramifications of being responsible for the ensuing moral, temporal, occupational obligations that came with it. His finger did what it did, he looked down and let his eyes watch, and the fish looked up at times, doing what fish do.


eighteen-wheeler
two-fisted
three-pronged attack
fifteen-carat diamond


He was counting and uncounting, in no particular order because the numbers didn't matter- the results were the same. Just more stuff. All to be washed flat.

He leaned sideways and slowly stood up. To the drops of water maybe there was some sentimental value to all these numbers? Is a number a name?

Possibly.

How to remain anonymous among all the numbers, and continue to avoid attachment... Hoping enough numbers matched HIS number... And wondering what it might be. He began the familiar walk home.

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