It’s a few weeks since I last posted a short story here. I’ve been busy with other things. But I decided I’d continue the posts of previously published stories to give them a second chance of being read. Please feel free to comment, share and like as you will.

This was published in the now defunct on-line literary magazine, Ouse Valley Poetry, as the winner of their monthly writing contest in September 2007.

I Am, Perhaps.

Void, black, silent, inert and neutral oblivion was where I started. Awareness grew in the vacuum and brought fear, doubt, uncertainty. The history of what and who and where and when I was clouds, changes and distorts, mixing what was with what might have been and what might never have been, I think.

I believe I once existed in brightness where multitude colours moved and filled the void I now inhabit. I dwelt with feeling, didn’t I? Sensation governed each choice I made and every choice others made for me.

Now I am aware I reside within space without boundaries, lacking light and colour. Yet it seems always to be moving, ceaselessly expanding and contracting, so I find no fixed abode. I am homeless, helpless, unexplained, incomprehensible. I once was an entity, identified and identifiable but I no longer know who speaks inside this space or where or what I am.

There was a time, a period, a space of my existence when I felt, knew, understood the passage of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds.

Now I know nothing.

I have only history. There is no soon, no future. Only then. And then is but vague recollection.

I exist in space with my experiences and wonder what it was that brought me here; never knowing where here is.

I might be dead. I do not know. I cannot know.

Am I alone? In Hell? In Heaven? Do I exist at all or is this another’s dream? Though I reject that idea, I do not, cannot know.

If, as I begin to wonder, I lie in that white bed alongside others who are dead but do not know and so refuse to leave, then, am I tended? Are there carers? Do they nurse and nurture me? Who are they? Do they exist? Am I fed and drained? Do plastic tubes carry fuel and vital liquids to my veins and arteries? Other pipes connect my private passageways to rigid bottles, flexible sacks to void spent fuel pumped into me? Do I feed in here? Do I shit and wet and fart and belch? Am I toileted, wiped; am I washed? I cannot tell.

If so, it is wasted time and effort and resource better lavished on those who are, for I am not.

Do you hear me? For I cannot. I cannot hear me, or any other sound. I am not!

Without sensation, robbed of sight, hearing, taste and smell, without the touch of gentle hands on willing skin, I have no knowledge of what or who or when I am.

Everything and all is thought. And even that may be illusion.

Do I dream? Do I exist? I do not know. The real Hell is I cannot ever know. Will my now go on for eternity? For ever and ever, Amen.

Eternity in ignorance is a Hell only humans know, they say. The beasts and birds suffer no such sentient awareness. All is instinct, hunger, satisfying needs of existence. They do not comprehend abstract concepts, suffer no consciousness of measured time, of past or future. They are the lucky ones. So we believe. Belief: the capacity to accept that which lacks evidence.

I believe an accident has brought me here. Whether mechanical or merely bodily dysfunction, I have no knowledge, I cannot tell. I do not even know if my belief is reasonable. But I believe it all the same. Believe I must be the victim of an accident because to not believe would raise yet more questions with no answers. For I am here. Neither dead nor living, it seems. A mess of thought without sensation, time, foundation but with belief.

Yet, I never was a true believer. Never joined a club for faith. I always speculated that, if something exists beyond humanity, there must be both creator and destroyer; one forming and one ruining the material world I believe I once inhabited. But I never named them, never had a creed or doctrine to protect me from doubt and ignorance. I did consider the possibility of supernatural forces; call them good and evil if they must be named, fighting battles in the minds, souls, hearts of sentient beings. But the concept does not help me now.

How long have I been here? How long before I may leave?

I lack control. Nothing that is mine is mine. I depend on unknown and maybe non-existent forces. Stranded. Marooned in a void without escape.

Will I go mad? Am I mad already? My mind is full of questions. Do I have a mind? Am I?

Yes, I am. I have visited that place in philosophical space where otherwise wise men postulate I might be no more than the dream of something other. I reject that proposition absolutely.

Without sensation, anchor, or material existence, I yet know I am me and I exist. That much I experience.

I am, therefore, I think: sorry Descartes.

How many seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries have passed since I returned to sentience? I feel eternity.

Time.

I recall a time when I felt the hands of women. Yes, I am or was a man. Am I yet?

Those were times. I parted fine thighs I can no longer see nor feel and filled the offered void with my hard desire. They burst around me as I burst within and we fired stars, raised flames, tasted summer as we vaulted mountains, skimmed oceans, flew above pale clouds in blues defying definition.

They were many. I can no longer count them but now they are no more, and I am lost. Though, now devoid of feeling, there might be here a dozen serving me. I will never know. Like the Paradise of all those fools who claim their martyrdom, as they die and kill for hopeless causes, expecting the reward of their exclusive heaven. Eternity, serving and served by virgins they can neither see nor feel. Fools. And what of those virgins? How do they feel about such service?

This is no Heaven. This is Hell.

If someone can resolve this endless enigma, can release me from this existence without purpose, feeling, wonder, lust, or love, release me now. It is no kindness to imprison me here. It does me no favours, only prolongs my doubts and fears, extends my anxieties. I can live nowhere but within my past and that has not been always good. I have no now I can define, control, enjoy. I am without a future.

Let me go. This does no good for you or me.

Unless you do this not for me but for yourselves. Do you believe that helping me exist is what your God desires? What sort of God would leave sentient creatures of creation in a limbo that is a sea of doubt and fear?

Or, perhaps, there are the more malicious among my carers; those who feel I deserve to be imprisoned for my sins and my failure to take membership of their specific club.

Let me go.

I want no more of this. I shall go mad.

Or, worse, I shall decline into a void without even the power of thought, to become an empty shell for you to fill with your guilt and need for need. Waste is what I always loathed most when I lived my life. Waste of time, of opportunity, of love and of resources. Now you feed me with your own perversions you call care, and I am helpless. I can do nothing, not one thing, to stop you and prevent this endless torture of the existence I am become.

Let me go!

I cannot end myself.

You must pull the plug.

Is there one out there with humanity enough, one who loves the me I am, the me I was, loves me enough to pull the plug?

Is there?