Overkill #9 - Original Prose Poetry by Dave Valentine, '10

Change

"And then, just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, it became a butterfly." - Chinese Proverb

He did not remember the last time he'd seen sunlight. Perhaps it had been weeks. Perhaps days. Months. Perhaps years. He didn't, to be honest, have a very good memory. He preferred to lie here in his darkness and warmth and security, and not worry about the world outside and around.

He heard things, though. He heard cars passing by below and dogs barking, and occasionally the television of the man who lived in the room next to him would give him updates on world events, and if he'd felt like listening he might have learned that the fishing industry off the coast of Japan was in trouble because of giant jellyfish, or that in the forests of the Amazon was discovered a frog whose skin juices might someday be used to cure cancer. Of if he'd listen to the man in the room next to him talking to Sunday visitors, he might have learned that the tree outside of the man's window was an oak tree. He didn't listen, though, so he didn't know any of these things.

Sometimes, when storms came and went, he grew fearful because he thought his walls and ceiling might simply fall away and leave him helpless, open to everything and everyone and the world would be too big for him to ever manage. But this hadn't happened yet, so he was being optimistic about the rest of his existence.

He wasn't sure why he had first decided to shut himself away from everything else. It had simply seemed as though he had no other option. He might have missed things from before his isolation and confinement, but, again, his memory was so poor that such a possibility really wasn't an issue.

One day, though, he heard something very loud. And very close. An earthquake, he thought at first, an earthquake come to swallow us all and shit if I can't do anything about it. He would have liked to dismiss the idea as soon as it came to him, but the evidence continued to mount. The entire world seemed to be falling apart. The cracking sound continued and grew louder until he thought his ears would rupture and blood cover the walls of his room, the walls that now shifted dangerously, and something seemed to beat against them like a tornado outside, but he could have sworn it was coming from the inside, inside with him, but that couldn't be, and then, amongst all of this, a piercing, blinding light penetrated his walls and hurt his eyes and flooded his tiny room, and then it grew bigger and bigger, and he thought for sure this was the Ragnarök and that everything was ending and the light was that from the other end of the tunnel, and well it was a good run, wasn't it, in his tiny room in the dark.