Allister Cromley's Fairweather Belle (Bedtime Stories For Grownups To Tell)
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The Absence

11/12/2008

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There was a period in Allister's life when he was absent. This is not to say that he missed some appointments or that he avoided human contact for a while. But, there was a point of time, during Allister's life, where he simply was not there. He, for the life of him, could not remember anything that happened within this time. It was all a haze, but not even that. A haze at least had vagueness attached to it and this point of Allister's life had-nothing. It was a void in his memory. 

Allister thought maybe life had stopped for everyone. That our exhausted world, for once, stopped spinning. And everything on it, in respect, stopped too. All was perfectly still. In Allister's theory, the globe just slipped into a coma and fought off its depression in the lull of a long nap. As the globe slept, it began to deflate into what Allister could only describe as a black hole. To bystanders in other planets, it would seem that our world had ended, that this beast of a black hole had found easy prey and was feasting on the earth. But, just as the predator was about to engulf it's prey, the earth snapped awake. The instinctual recoil of the earth reacted in seconds, inflating the earth so quickly that the black hole was knocked into another galaxy and the earth spun back into its orbit.

But, when Allister questioned people who were around during that time, they all had memories of dances and games and laughter and tears and rain and heat and all things that, by Allister's theory, should have been frozen as the earth slept. Some people even had pictures. Allister looked at the pictures, longing to know where he was. He read book upon book about anything that happened during the time in the hopes that it would spark some remnant of a memory or, in the very least, that he could fill his void with artificial memories. But, nothing worked. No memories grew and the artificial ones would not hold. 

Allister began to see himself in the theory of the globe-that he had, in exhaustion and depression, slipped into a coma and slowly deflated. His body sagging into itself, until at the last moment, an instinctual recoil snapped him alive. What depressed him so, he never did find out. 

For a while, it bothered him to the point where he would lose sleep-fearing that even the shortest of naps could bring about that darkening coma. But, the earth's slow rotation, began to sooth Allister and eventually he was coaxed to rest. There was reassurance in the turn of the globe. For the first time, he realized how sturdy the world was. How solid it was. A new theory was needed. As long as the earth was filled with more than just air, it could not deflate. And, so it must be for everything else. With his new theory intact, Allister woke up the next morning with the intent of making his life solid, too.
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