
STILL LIFE WITH ROTATING ELEMENTS
The situation right now is I’m sinking into wet concrete and no one is going to help me. I somehow got put into the middle of a stupid little patch of it somewhere in the middle of an infinite flatmap while I was busy trying to drink an energy drink. It’s just barely too big for me to grab the edge falling forward. I’m totally stuck.
There’s four Bonemasons standing around me and that’s it. If I freecam out it’s nothing but wandering tire tracks and patches of dead grass as far as I can see. The sky is dark red and never gets any closer, of course. I’m sinking incredibly slowly, about one inch every 65 hours, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am sinking and that no one is going to help me. The Bonemasons are wearing their long black cloaks that flap around even when there’s no wind and are poking at me with thorny sticks. I keep trying to grab them but my hand just passes right through with a fizzy green flicker and somehow gets scratched anyway. Both my palms are covered in cuts now and leaking shiny red.
Time speeds up and in a few minutes I’m up to my knees in the concrete. I can feel microfractures starting to happen in my feet from the weight. Pretty soon they’ll be as flat as two sheets of cardboard. It’s going to be morning soon. My family will be waking up and wondering what happened to me. They’ll yawn and squint at the sun and pour milk and cereal all over the counter because I wasn’t there to get the bowls out. And then while our dog Gargoyle of Perdition is making herself sick trying to lick it all up a man in a green military uniform is going to knock at the door. He’ll have a square jaw and an alcoholic’s eyes and he’ll tell my family that I’m sinking into wet concrete and no one is going to help me. The sun will be behind him and it will cast his shadow across my family and onto the wall behind them, onto the picture of the President that we hung there when we first moved in, so it would be the first thing visitors would see when they entered our beautiful home. My family will cry, quietly at first, and then loudly, and then they’ll all fall over and shining roots will come up out of the wall-to-wall carpeting and pull them into the earth and Gargoyle of Perdition will starve to death because they won’t be there to feed her anymore. The man in the green military uniform will carefully close the front door and put a big yellow “CONDEMNED” sticker on it and get in his car and drive away. The sun will drive off with him and never come back. Meanwhile, I’ll keep sinking into this wet concrete until it blocks all my airways and asphyxiates me.