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The impact left low hillocks of crushed masonry and some aggravating stink of burned rubber. I ca

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Bottle #8: ~ From the Alternate Angle ~

First off, the darkness did not seem absolute, some pin-prick scintillas still oscilated here and there, and extremely dark yet slightly gray-hued streaks retained their static positions at the edges of actual blackness.

However, all that jump-n’-statics abated gradually, and dissolve, and died away substituted with solid jet-black impenetrability. The wider opened I my eyes, the more of aspic char-coaled dark entered them.

The silence wished for so eagerly just a while ago—before the ominous click of the lid—commenced to depress the ear drums muffling, little by little, the all-pervading blackness in the thick wrap of hermetic shroud of soundlessness.

“Aaaa!” I issued a desperate shout at the top of my lungs, horrified, trying to disengage myself, to kick away the sticky horror of being deaf-and-blind, which straining only brought about an even bigger fright and made me realize that atop of everything else I was mute. The scream felt like virtual, it did not reach the organs of hearing and sounded only within me. But how on earth could I be sure that it was sounding at all?

A captive in the doubled cage, twice doubled as a matter of fact – three layers of indissoluble calcium in the shell's structure added with my deaf-mute-blindness, a kinda mollusk’s mantle sack, that's what I was, fixed in, strait-jacketed, incarcerated.

The panic smacked me like the mains of 240 V, yanked hither-thither like a withered pear-tree quacking in vigorous clutch of the deuce, yet even for those violent jerks there was not room enough—my nose squeezed between the knees, unyielding bottom under my left shoulder, the right one rubs against the hard lid, and no way to stretch the legs out at least for one foot. Got trapped and nabbed by the shrewd dickens under a washing-tab!

And only my head still could enjoy the freedom of banging its back against the shell wall, without the proper revving though to certainly prevent my suicide, just like they did to the accomplice in Lincoln’s killing before the execution… a sack of thick black cloth pressed onto the head to spoil his aiming, not to let him ram his skull against the wall and smash it open and damn well ruin the high of the law-abiding crowd coming together with the hangman a-swing in his noose on the warm su

Of course, I’ve got my constant accessory on me – an old good boarding pistol from two hundred years back, the find on the smashed galleon, which I don’t part with ever since, in the sling over my chest… but no, damn! the powder must've got washed away by that mad rain… wait-wait-wait! See? there’s no softening layer on my head except for my wet hair. Ha! This is the major flaw in their calculations! That’s where the bastards have screwed up!

And I begin to pound the back of my head against the stone-hard calcium carbonate in the shell composition. The pain commingles with a hilarious triumph – aha! At least I’m able to feel it! Bas! Tard’s! Screwed! Up! Bas! Tard’s! Screwed! Up!

It’s hard to say how many times I’ve looped thru this here mantra—one potent headback-bang for every syllable in it—before the loss of consciousness wrapped mercifully everything in liberating darkness…

………………………………….

…we stood in a close circle where there were some whose names I knew and some fairly unknown though all of them I met for the first time or maybe have forgotten unintentionally…

…because of the strangely dim light everything around submerged in an unidentifiable uniform murkiness which did not allow to guess the time of day or where this strange light was coming from doubling the contour of each thing with the external additional line etching any object with a pin-thin luminescence of also gray-hued and equally inexplicable yet more bright glow…

…the downcast stares of all the present alertly followed the ongoing movement of an index finger hopping along the circle without ever hitting any chest just like a watch hand substituted with a compass arrow issuing the morbid green-gray phosphorous gleam from its head…

…a voice sounding with hollow aloofness as it happens in the thick fog which suffocates the tiniest echo of any sound accentuated every arrow's leap —

"The porch of gold was seated by : czar and czars’ so

tell us all:

tell us: tell us: tell us:

Who?

Are?

You?

…sheeshell… meeshell…

off with you!

to the DEUCE!"

………………………………….

The ascending echoless voice cut off abruptly, and ticking of the index finger spooling inside the circle got lost too together with everything else leaving behind only grayness evenly monochrome and loaded with no contours, but inside it there dawned already and spilled a paler grayness and also some light from a still not quite discernible direction.

My eyes followed the light and I made out the feet emerging from nowhere, mine, kept wide and ready to fiddle with the pitching of a ship, yet in place of the deck under them there cropped up and met my bare soles a stretch of the sunlit asphalt. I arched my neck back to raise my face up and was made squint tightly.

Where am I?

What a mistake! I should of never put my head up. Ever. The raw piercing brilliance of the shining day scorched and erased without a trace or any hope for retrieval everything it was filled with before.

All left there were just patchy clots sintered indistinctly – some horizontal lightning, some pitch-black gap of the like horizontality…

A stingy pain throbbed there in the back of my head… I must’ve scratched it against Peccy’s valves… Hold on! Who’s Peccy anyway?

Who am I?!

A desolate sun-swept street surrounds me. Rough asphalt in the road divides two serrated rows of houses opposing each other, different in size and height. All of the walls look alike. Tired. Weary of everything, up to themselves as well as of the row they belong to. Of both the dried tree stuck up from the asphalt and the bench under. Empty. Almost.

I went to it…

The old man seated there displayed astounding garrulousness. However the stream of his speaking activities hardly coalesced into a picture of any sensible coherence.

The most stupefying feature about him were his eyes filled with cartographic lines of the blood vessels drawn densely in his eyeballs the color of the powder-blue fog in which there swam brown irises ferrying wide pupils, those also swam all the time yet in more controlled way, so as not to spill overboard, into his eyes whites.

The like optics organs are not a too big rarity yet—in the same breath—the trump card among the celebrities in the business of movie production, as well as by the leading showmen of Afro-American orientation.