Lag time

There is often a gap, a brief lull in the universe when the planet spins a few milliseconds too quickly

and then everything sits still.

And then your bed feels like a burrow, and the air is quiet, and the second hand on the wall ticks as mechanically as you move. One, two, one, two, tick, tock, left, right.

Then the sky starts to look as glassy and lifeless as your reflection in the morning, and the night has an odd texture to it. Gritty, tasteless. Powdery like the sawdust you eat for breakfast every morning, like the sawdust that make up the little wooden people all around you.

Cheery little puppets, marionettes on silver strings. Uniform smiles and uniform eyes walking around at a uniform pace. And then they move in jerky segments like programmed automatons and speak in metallic voices

and the globe sits at a complete stop on its axis, in its orbit.

And then you're scared.

Because you have to get away quickly before they come after you, or worse, before you become like them. But you can't run so fast when the world is at a stop and each step you take sinks you into the crumbling powdery cement. And then the sidewalk ends and you've got nowhere else to go except backwards.

So you unravel, like a ball of yarn, a roll of paper, film tape on rewind. Faster and faster until you roll off the edge and into space

floating, suspended, and you wait.

You wait for the earth to start spinning again so it can catch you back in its orbit, its arms a cradle for your barren mind.