Prologue

     Thoughts are sometimes like detailed blueprints. They are crafted, sometimes over long periods of time, by using advanced reasoning and applying large amounts of varied and complex knowledge. There are other thoughts that are not created, but more so emerge onto the centerstage of the mind. Those thoughts are more like escaped, innocent prisoners who turn into menaces of society because of how it treated them.

            Chapter I: Pretty Paintings in a Colorful Castle
     I enjoyed my job. My father always wanted me to become a professor, and I fulfilled his wish. In his youth, he was obsessed with the concept of teaching people on an advanced level, but he never managed to put in enough effort into his schoolwork when he was younger. I doubt he ever figured out exactly what sparked a passion for teaching in him, since he never mentioned it. I chose to be a professor of biology, but I certainly can’t explain why.
     Coming home from the college was simply beautiful. Giving lectures while wearing a blazer, dress pants, and dress shoes was exhausting to me. I knew no feeling as satisfying as the feeling I got when I changed into less serious clothing, and sat down with a cup of tea and a slice of cake on my patio.
     My garden, in itself, makes life in the suburbs perfect. It was organized as though it was designed in virtual reality, but had all the aesthetics that one would expect from nature. I had three separate beds of flowers, all very evenly spaced and in a horizontal line across the width of the garden. They were as circular as if drawn with a compass, and sectioned off from the grass with rocks. I grew simple-colored flowers: roses, violets, and yellow chrysanthemums; I always liked the name of those flowers. These beds were relatively close to the patio, which I refused to ever paint. I kept a strange array of plants in the far back of this rectangular garden. Surrounded from three sides by fencing and from one side by my line of rocks, the spot was mostly dirt, but there were six clusters of six different types of plants, all of course evenly spaced. The grass was always short, and the rocks were placed so that I could kneel and place my knee on absolutely any of them, comfortably, for at least a moment. My garden was a wonderful blend of what I appreciated most: nature’s beauty and man-made order.
     It might be said that I spent almost too much time sitting on my patio and tending my garden. At times, I admit that I crafted excuses thinner than air and weaker than a legless man’s kick. On one particular day, a very strange day, I pretended to be fascinated in the way I could use my fingers to mimic different walks. Tip-toeing, moonwalking, literally moon-walking, and walking backwards are all simple to mimic, I found. I began thinking back to my soccer games in high school. There ha’n’t been a goalkeeper as slick as you in years, the coach would say.  
     A fly sat upon my table, entering my modest little country illegally. Its dark mass, even if it was small, disrupted the stillness of my patio and garden, so I felt compelled to swat it. I always kept a fly swatter under the table on my patio in case a flying blemish settled itself anywhere on my patio. I gave the fly, a marvel of nature just like my plants, a look of sympathy before swatting it.
     The fly swatter, for some subconscious reason, reminded me of the bow I played the violin with when I was younger. Violin playing was something I was exellent at, and some of my school teachers probably thought I was going to play violin professionally. I began feeling as though I was sinking in nostalgia quicksand. I managed to escape by looking at the towering tree that was located nearby, and that might sound very strange to many people.
     As someone who had a considerable portion of the field of biology understood, I was able to place lenses of knowledge over my eyes to see living things in a completely different way. Nature is to the interior of living things as society is to cities like Paris and New York City. As I peered into the tree, I envisioned the nutrients flowing through it like snakes through a pipe system, which is a rough comparison. Using nature to describe human creations is much easier than using human creations to describe nature. 
     Just to bask in it, I inspected my garden. On that particular day, I went directly to the back of the garden and touched a leaf on one of the plants. Leaves can be very different in size, color, and texture, but I was completely confident that what the leaves of that plant were becoming was unnatural for a plant that was sold for such a cheap price. The edges were quickly splitting into dozens of hair-like strands that looked sharp. The edge after a moment looked, not razor sharp, but like a real, green razor’s edge. With excessive curiosity, I touched the edge, almost cutting my finger.

                             Chapter II: Castle Siege
     I all of sudden felt more embarrassed than I ever had before, and I had no idea why. I felt like an amateur actor who, with the completely wrong facial expression, went to the completely wrong spot on stage and said the completely wrong line in the completely wrong way while looking in the completely wrong direction, all of this being during the actor’s audition for the actor’s very first role. It was paralyzing.
     After a moment, I heard a voice that sounded as though it came from the ground, the sky, the house, the leaves, and from the inside of me. It was a deep, echoey, grizzly voice that spoke only one ghastly word:
     “You!” said the voice. Hearing that horrible voice and being so irrationally embarrassed made hearing that word feel more like flying on a glider across all of Hell and seeing screeching faces dotted among the field of fire. I fell to my left into the dirt next to the strange-leafed plants.
     That scientific curiosity of mine locked my pupils onto the plants. What I saw next was the plants giving themselves what looked like a new and complexly detailed pattern of white lines. That was overly optimistic. The green tiles simply ejected themselves from the plants all at once and broke down into dust, which faded into nothingness. The plants did not show their insides, and they instead were all-black like obsidian recently forged by nature deep inside a furious volcano.
     I managed to take my eyes off the glaring, black menaces in my garden, and glanced at the sky. The sky was my friend. It was familiar and jovial. The sky had lumpy clouds that looked like they were brought into the sky out of a preschooler’s drawing. The clouds, in just a few demoralizing seconds, dropped their white surface just the like the plants did, and turned black. They became more akin to smoke clouds wrought from the dark, towering chimneys of a repulsive factory. The blue sky, as expected, cracked like it was glass. The blueness of the sky, like the whiteness of the clouds and the greenness of the plants, was lost.
     The sun followed suit with the clouds, the sky, and the plants. It cracked and lost its blinding skin. Under it, what was revealed was a red surface with dark stains that made it look like a circular, infected heart resting upon the roof of my house, the details of which were indiscernible in the night-like darkness of this new daylight.
     It was as if the world had decided not to be beautiful anymore. The reality I thought I knew had evaporated. The world I had been living in was all wrong. This new sun was about as bright as the old moon, and I was afraid even to think of what the new moon looked like. These new plants were not as colorful or pleasant as the old plants. This new sky was blank and boring. It had no clouds or stars dotting it.
     To complete the scenery, my three beds of flowers changed. As if an invisible man poured invisible oil on them and threw an invisible, burning match, all three beds lit up in flames and burned like campfires. To obtain the aesthetically disturbing touch that the surrounding world had, the fires decided to be different colors. One was a green that was almost believably natural.  Another was a brown that looked wooden. The last one, easily the strangest one, was black in some spots and white in other spots. I should have already taken shelter in my basement or responded in some other way, but I could not. Unexplained embarrassment was holding me still with very strong hands.  

                          Chapter III: The New Reign
     The fires on the flower beds each spat one ember at the same spot just above the roof of my home. I have read about flying fire being produced from immense fires in the woods and setting houses ablaze, but these fires were the size of campfires. Surely they were not large enough, but this did not surprise me after seeing the sky shatter and the sun become a heart.
     My eyes were now on the green, black, white, and brown lump of fire framed in the heart-sun on my roof. The fire quickly stopped burning, and there was now a black square sitting, sitting on my house’s roof. As though this world whispered words into my ear, it all of sudden entered my mind that the square was a rusty door of steel with countless broken locks. With painfully loud squeaking, the door opened slowly, and a dark mass hopped out and landed in the yard. After it took some steps, the central fire revealed that the mass was shaped like a person, but its head was still out of the light’s reach. The figure wore dark pants and a dark coat, giving the figure the look of a businessman or a poet from the Victorian era.
     The poet-businessman proceeded to interrogate me very elaborately. First, he extended his arm out in my direction, and he then began closing his fingers. The slow way in which he closed each finger, except the index finger, made it seem as though he was just starting to remembering how to move. I heard that dreadful voice from everywhere saying,
     “You! What... have you been doing?” it asked. The voice sounded like a starving, angry rat demanding food. I felt hands of embarrassment loosen their grip, and I gained the ability to speak. The problem was, I did not know how to respond. It was not because of the intentional vagueness that covered the voice’s words. It was like the question was in a code that only I understood. Understanding what I was being asked did not help me at all in answering.
     “I’ve just... you know... I’ve just been living they way I do,” I said. The hand of the figure rotated like a valve, and the hand opened. The figure, like the voice, now seemed to be expecting something of me. It was something that I did not have, that I never bothered to think of. My life was collapsing in my mind at the hands of that question, just as my world collapsed before my eyes over the past couple minutes.
     ”You! What... have... you... been... doing?” the voice said.
     “Just what I’ve been able to,” I said. That felt true. The figure extended its other arm out, and started opening and closing its hands. He dropped to his knees, and I saw his long, grey hair. I knew only at this point that it was a man, and I felt a strange connection to him. He seemed like an old friend.
     “Approach!” said the voice. I got up from the dirt, stepped over the rock line, and walked across the garden. I felt even closer to the man. He became like a brother when I passed the fires, and it is impossible to explain what I felt he was beyond the fires. I kneeled in front of him, and tucked the hair on his face behind his ears slowly. He still pointed his face at the ground and had his eyes closed. I tried not to look at the wrinkles on his face. I felt like a sculptor who made a horrible error. He spoke in a gentle, weak voice, and his words were oddly familiar and quaint.
     “And our soul from out those fires that lie blazing in these beds...” he said. He placed his hands on my cheeks and pointed my face directly at his. His head was up, and his eyes, I felt, were open. I still could not bare to look him in the eye. We were perfectly still for what felt like a day, and it very well might have been. I eventually reasoned that I had to look him in the eyes or remain like this forever.
     I gazed into just one of his eyes. What I saw was my own reflection, and it was in vivid color. The man’s next words were spoken by us both. I joined him in the finishing of the sentence, and we embraced every word: And our soul from out those fires that lie blazing in these beds...
     “Shall be lifted-nevermore!”
                                        THE END