I have repeated the same thing to the officer eight times. They don’t seem to understand. So, their faces bubbled, blackened, and burned along with their belongings, unlike my own. You, a reader, try your best to make me believe otherwise after I say it all again.
It surely is the end here, but when you come across four rabbits and it’s not quite day and not quite night, you will realize what I am talking about. All four of them were lying prone along the side of the road, not quite dead or alive.
It all started when I woke up in a hospital with no memory of how long I had been here. The nurse removed the tube from my mouth, and then the doctor sat me down to ask questions.
“Do you remember your name?”, he asked as calmly as he could.
No, I don’t. I don’t remember anything. It all seems blurry, like my wife’s face when she turned towards me in the valley.
I was hit by a car, they said. I don’t remember getting hit. Some things are acceptable in society, and I wasn’t one of them. I started to forget my lunches, my dinner, and where I work. I would take random roads to walk back home, getting lost again and again. Soon I was asked to live in this house on the outskirts of the town. It was a house with 7 or 8 rooms; I have confusion on that score.
The house was maintained by the company I work for, but soon they gave up on my ability to work for them, and now I was stuck in this giant house with 2 or 3 children. My wife and I always quarrel about our third child; sometimes the child is there, sometimes it’s not. I convince her by saying maybe the child has gone outside to play; she doesn’t understand what I am saying, and she asked me to visit a psychologist. The psychologist was able to convince me that there are certain things that one might never be ready to hear.
I wake up and count the number of rooms. They are always changing. I sometimes try to walk up to the 8th room, but the lines of the house seem too blurry, like they’re melting into the 8th room. My conscious when I am awake is dreaming fever dreams. I couldn’t say this to my wife, as she would scorn me, so I took up this habit of driving in the evening to pass the time.
I would meet a man on my walks who I believe was my imagination because he was so calm and collected, even when I would tell him my idiosyncrasies. I would tell him about how the switch felt a bit longer than before and how the walls seemed to distance themselves each day little by little, and the room felt a bit longer every day.
He would calmly listen and ask me various questions, which I would answer very enthusiastically. Since all I ever needed was a friend.
We came across four rabbits once, and he ran to give water to them, but they seemed prone and unmoving, but there was no visible injury. It was as if they would, at any moment, start to jump around and walk away as if they were alive.
The man, however, didn’t stop to check; he was quick to run for water and was filling a bottle. Aren’t they both dead and alive at this point? Had he known this realization, would he still have run for water? Is he so shocked by the truth that he can’t seem to face the fact and rather chooses to run away?
We took up the habit of smoking as we chatted away our hours. I was the one to talk; he would simply listen. I started smoking at home, but my wife would disdain me for smoking around children, so I started to smoke outside.
One faithful night, he would come to visit us for the first time. We would sit down and smoke for a bit, and then I fell asleep after a while. By the time I woke up, my house was on fire. The smoke was all over the living room, and the rest of the house seemed to be burning. The man suddenly seemed to be gone, but he was my imagination anyway.
I was the first one to get out of the house, then I remembered my wife and children were inside. It was too late to rescue them, and I called the cops. They started to look for arson cases and insurance matters when I only wanted to know where the man went. When I asked the officer how many bodies were found, they said a woman, two children, and a man.
