The Last Stranger

The sky remains truncated above. The last stranger hears no splash from the sea below.  

The giant worm rears its head behind that backdrop of sunset, and we continuously mistake its hulking form for a mountain's. Its body is still anchored under the ocean bed. It cannot get loose yet.  

The last stranger knows that there's still time to warn us. Lacking hands, he carves patterns for us to see. We notice them on tree rings, during the change of the seasons in one of those Septembers we hide under our mattresses like some sort of reassurance, the old lines from fairy tales, the silences between the ding of an elevator bell and the opening of its doors. The cold air singes his back, a gangrened patch of flesh where his wings have been torn off. The pain keeps him awake. 

Inside their caskets, dead children continue to grow to adulthood as they wait for their names to be called. The dust mites who live under our beds and stairwells whimper incessantly until we cannot ignore them anymore. The strange horses trample the azaleas in the backyard. Creatures who have donned our faces and pilfered our memories begin to go through the motions of living our abandoned lives.  

How we tend to close our eyes each time our version of reality gets snatched away from us. We are never safe. And always, before we wake up, the last stranger has put every thing back in place so that we remember nothing about our past lives, our deaths.