We live in two worlds

                We live in two worlds. In the first world nearly everything happens in good time, model trains spinning round the tree. In this world, alarm clocks siphon away sleep at seven, car engines hum to life, children are dressed and fed and hustled out the door, and our joys and failures are nothing more than a missed traffic light, an ill-placed word with a supervisor. This world runs as it always has, or so we convince ourselves, forgetting, as everyone does, the worlds that came before, when home burials were frequent, or books were burned in Alexandria. In our minds, the first world will always be, a place where we walk briskly to the mailbox, shout a curse at a barking dog, and then go back inside to our quiet little lives.

                Another world lives just beneath the surface of this world. And when it erupts, the first world is scattered, like shards of glass from a broken mirror. When the plane dipped a second time as if let out by an expert yo-yo master, it was this second world that H entered. The fact of the matter is that when faced with the possibility of his own death all H could consider was how little he’d done. His life was a horror as he suspected most people’s lives were when looked at in the proper light, like pebbles of rain failing on the ocean, giving the impression of change before falling back into the incandescent quiet of the sea.

                The sky was wreathed in clouds and cloaked in its illusory blue. A mile below, terns were sifting through the mud, beaks awash in light. The Hawthorne and Indian Holly swayed in quiet breeze. What did it all mean? The fact that the world kept up its maniacal spinning whether you were alive or not?