Day 84: Oh to spin a yarn

Oh to spin a yarn and then weave a napkin with it. I say "napkin" because this is only a short story. If it were more, well then, it would be more. A novel, for instance could be a sheet or a blanket; depending on the thickness. A series of novels would be an entire sheet and comforter set.
But this is only a short story. By me.



Today on her ride in she thought of how things used to be. As the air flowed around her, she reminisced cool, clear water flowing from the taps at home whenever she wished. It was like magic in her mind now, the way the liquid came out sparkling and crisp and clean and ready. She usually made a point of not thinking of these things, it made the world feel sad to her, and she had a day to get through.

She usually played a game of chess in her mind with her grandfather on the rides to work. He never played chess in real life that she knew of, but that made it all the more exciting and a never ending source of surprise and wonder when she would imagine the final scene in any game and the words "check" or "check mate" would come out of her mouth or out of his eternal unmoving ever so slightly smiling lips in her mind. She never really knew that much about her grandfather. It made her feel closer to him when she imagined these games they played. She had almost an hour of a ride to work each day. Imagining the chess games from start to finish made the ride seem quicker and took her mind off the fatigue and hunger and thirst. She could mull over each move for whole minutes at a time and contemplate what the next moves might be if she moved the rook here or had her grandfather jump the knight to over there. Playing chess made things as simple as the spokes turning round and round.

In the beginning, when things really started to go bad, when she started riding the bike to work in warm weather, she found herself obsessing over what went wrong and when and how and shame on those people. It was driving her insane and she was taking it out on everyone else. Her health was starting to deteriorate. At first she contributed it solely to the contamination, but then she started to realize her own role in the demise of her mental and physical health. A friend of hers recommended recreational thinking and meditating during downtime. The way he recommended it made her feel like she were in a prison and there was a special amount of time allotted to each day for thinking and such. This, in turn, brought her to a memory of school when her history teacher had brought in a guest; a Vietnam war vet. He told of how the other men around him went insane with nothing to do in a dirty cell everyday except pay attention to the dirty cell and all the other inane men around them. He explained that he came out virtually sane only because he imagined building a fence around his lawn back home. He would imagine going out every morning and measuring out the distance to the next post, get a shovel from the shed, start digging. Sometimes he'd hit a rock and have to dig it out with his hands after which he would study the rock then place it in a pile. He said that at the end, when they let him free, he had a whole pile of rocks to part with. He had explained how doing this exercise everyday gave him something to do with his mind and creating new circumstances to deal with kept his reasoning skills active and focused on more normal circumstances. Aubry found that to be truly inspirational and when she realized she was spending two whole hours of everyday focusing on the dirty cell and the other insane men around her. She'd better start building a fence. So she made her fence be chess, and the lawn, the uncontrollable force in this fantasy, her grandfather. She loved how their relationship had grown since she'd started imagining these games. She'd never had much of a chance to know him in real life, these imagined games let him be everything she ever wanted him to be and even more. She bet he never knew he had a Japanese pen pal in grammar school, back when air mail was a really big deal. She bet he never enjoyed playing any game as much as he enjoyed their games of chess as she rode her bike in to work.

That's usually what she did with her thoughts on the ride to work, but today was different. Today she felt the full force of the unfairness that is sometimes life. Today she wanted to be angry. Today she needed to feel angry and see the awfulness that had become modern day life. Today she wanted to reminisce on all the things she had seen in her life and connect them to the downfall of civilization. Today she was glad she had an hour on the bike in the cool and biting morning air to set fire to her soul and let the anger drive her. Today was the anniversary of his death.

She thought, today, about how things had changed in her life, in everyone's life. There had been an amazing moment in society when the technological advances had become so remarkable. People were ACTUALLY changing the world with words. But with all the money going into advertising and people losing time to ruminate over what is actually happening around them: communication eventually caused their demise. All the ads saying that we need we need we need this and we need we need we need that, we never had a chance to see for ourselves if we even wanted much less needed to have what they told us. We ran out of time every day, listening to the ads just made life easier. Slowly, trickle by trickle, almost all the clean water ran out. It all went down over the course of one decade. As they spewed waves of information, entertainment and opinion over us to wash our brains of all the worry, we lost sight of how to pay attention. Now there was hardly any usable water anywhere. The animals were dying, the plants were dying, the people... the people are dying. Now they're trying to figure out ways to clean the water or ways to survive without.

But he went first, he went before all of that. His death marked the turning point for the world. Her son, her truly magnificent son, lost to Death, that asshole! Oh, but what a wonder he was, her son. He could weave a smile on a fresh widow's face. His innocence bared honesty from even the best liars. If only he had lived past 11... What had it been, 10 years? 15? More? She had no idea, she was just angry.

He could have saved them all. He could have saved the world. He would have been able to crack the earth open with his bare hands and find clean water. He could have done it, he could have found magical, sparkling, beautiful, clean water - enough for everyone. He would have been able to protect it against all harm, keep it clean and replenished and safe without violence. That's how amazing he was. That's how amazing he had been. She reeled in fury over and over again as her feet pumped, letting the fire and brimstone curse everything along her path. Even her grandfather couldn't stop her from destroying her sanity today. No one could.