Bewildering Stories

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Storms

by Eckerd Nemo

Morning.

And as the rays of sunlight wash through the room, he wakes up to the sound of storms outside, and he stands up, groggily blinking his eyes as he makes his way to the window to look outside at ...

Wasps.

A plague of wasps has arrived, their wings flickering in the breeze, and the sun is nowhere to be found as it disappears behind the sea of insects, and slowly he realizes the truth.

He runs.

Out of the room, then, and to the right, down the passageway, down the stairs, across the hall, through the open double doors, and constantly he still hears the wasps outside, their dreadful call of death striking through his head.

Outside.

He is outside, having taken a wrong turn, and now he looks up, and he sees the wasps, an entire ocean of them, and all of them are descending upon him, and so he turns and tries to flee, back through the open doors.

Storms.

The distant sound of storms strikes through his head, and he blinks his eyes, and he wakes up, and suddenly he is no longer cowering in the street beneath an ambush of wasps, but instead he is himself a wasp.

Light.

And now he is flying with them, across the plains, the purple plains, stretching from horizon to horizon, toward strange cliffs, jutting sharply into the green sky, and he begins to understand.

Brightness.

The storms rage above, continuous and incessant, their flashes streaking across the sky in an intricate web of chaos with finely structured patterns, a colossal celestial fracture of infinite dimensions and complexity, and with each successive flash, the wasp nation achieves another level of enlightenment, seeking directions among the surreal clouds, and they follow the map etched across the skies, making their way through the cold, wet air, and he becomes enlightened with the truth himself as he understands his position and how he came to be and what is his function now as they all continue onward, between land and storms, through the seemingly unreal air, and he knows the truth, for he is a wasp among wasps, alien beings flying gracefully across the land, a vast migration over the mountains toward the promised heaven on the other side.


Copyright © 2003 by Eckerd Nemo