Listen to Jonah. It is now that he realizes he is paper and ink within a world of words; not the constellated bits of a psyche bound by true flesh. Just a stretch of shadow on a cavern wall, looking for its source. A little that way where the room seems light, less obscured and hazy, his own reflection looks back, darkly. Is this my place? Is that my way? He feels that loneliness will follow him out.
And it does. The grain of reality was there within the blades of grass suddenly between his fingers and the autumnal breeze that ruffled his hair and the firm press of the oak against his back, but all that lay within his line of sight, the rest of the meadow and its spots of flowers and swellings of hills, felt to him to be the embroidery of some mirage. The perforated stitch-work of language. Jonah reached out toward the scenery and grasped nothing. The simple tangibility of things, which is root to comfort, ebbed to the influx of a greater solitude. Jonah took hold of the grass and felt a vacancy within his palm. What lies were his fingers telling him? Here is here and there is there. The narration grows more acute.
And within that moment of sudden lapse, wherein something akin to the furlough of innocence occurs, Jonah sees the perverse infinitude above and beneath him; it’s him all the way down. It is a small decay for him to realize that he is the protagonist and an even greater death to search for the comfort of the fourth wall and instead find the probing minds of others looking back. Hello, whimpers Jonah. How are you?
— Amos Warren is an idiot dreamer from the great esoteric state of Alabama. Follow him @zunklebury on Twitter.