Those damn dogs. Barking. Barking. Barking. And me. Walking. Walking. Walking...Towards the park, and the trees, and the trails. Towards the hope and the promises of a new beginning. Towards the dreams of shattered needs and the feelings inside of desperate seeds. Seeds of fire and passion. Seeds of fragmented time broken into images that we call reality. What is between the reality we see? Buried in the frames that flash before our eyes as our brains try to process what it can not understand. Perhaps the trees know. I will sing them a song, a song with no words, filled of power and useless desire. Filled of passion for the hope they bring to the people in the sky. A hope that someday the battle will end. The battle of the clouds. The dragon flies over, his head constantly changing, his face distorted as he chases the lamb across the sky in an endless battle of dew and precipitation. The immortal battle for energy and love, for possession of what can not be possessed.

I once knew a man who only ate rice and seaweed. Rice covered in salt with a bit of pepper, or shaped into a ball and wrapped in seaweed, or shaped into a saucer and dried into a cake, or mashed until it became dough and turned into bread. He loved rice and seaweed, and nothing else. He hated people, birds, trees, cats, ants, everything. He hated it all, except rice. He hated it all because he would never become them, for he was nothing. He was not even real; he was not even a ghost. He was a god. An immortal god with no beginning he could remember, no end he could wish for. He had seen it all, heard it all, and he hated it all, except rice and seaweed, so that was all he ate. He hardly told anyone of his godly powers, for he did not care to impress, and once he got to know me, he realized I did not care to be impressed, so he told me, and he taught me some things. Rather strange things.

The trees are around me now. The park and the dogs, the people playing on the swings: they are all hidden from me as I sit in the tree clustered area that no one ever enters. There I sit, leaning against a giant tree, with thoughts of my godly friend leaving my brain. It is time to fly; time to go to the place beyond where the stars are not visible, and the light is nothing but the dream of darkness. The darkness that fills the motion of reality. Filler. Filled up, filled in. We walk here, the gods, and those that the gods teach. We walk in the darkness between the seconds. Here we walk and we go wherever we want, around a second, through a minute, back a few hours, or years, or light years. We walk here and we watch, and learn, and teach, and make sure that the delicate flower of existence continues on. Why do we do this? Well, for the sake of survival. Just to survive and make sure all of existence continues to survive. We are the survivors of eternity, and without the reality that people consider normal, there would be no frames needed to hold it all together. If existence stops at any point along the chain of time, it will all vanish without a bang. We are here to make sure that does not happen.

I slowly close my eyes, walking backwards through the last second and into the one before it, jumping across the gap of eternity: into the past. Here I fly, soaring high above the clouds as the tiny oceans of Mars move gently below my dangling toes.

By Jeff Nolan