Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization

  ~ ~ ~

  Somewhere there is somewhere where anywhere is someplace else.

  Logic suggests a system of rational thought based upon unsullied observations.

  It was easy to conclude she was dead.

  Successive days, nights, awakenings, sleepings allowed the luxury of conjecturing she was actually alive. Red sparkings of the clock's neon tube hovered over the dull aching of her head and the fits of a battered body, and this man, whoever he was, diligently helped her up, down, and to the toilet in a house cluttered with severe practicality. For days he unsheathed and lowered her into the water, bathed her and redressed wounds with a military precision that glowed trust if not contentment. If she had ever been a baby, this was a second infancy. Throats were still too sore and thoughts too vague to know who or how, a gathering confusion of lines and tilting ideas claimed more and more space until the night an equation-

  -planted itself smack in the middle of everything. She woke and called out. He helped her to the bathroom and, on her insistence, outside to the porch and night air. There was the silhouette of a dark car. Knees buckling, she fainted and was carried back to bed.

  In a fevered sleep, the swarthy face of someone holding a distributor cap. A sensation of pain, wind noise, and there were other distributor caps scattered about the back seat of an automobile in motion, she was lying uncomfortably in it and coughing. It spun into a vision of trying to swim or scream or breathe and a blonde balloon bounced against the side of her brain. Awakening, standing and taking impossible steps toward the door and onto the porch, there was the car, the man's legs dangling from inside. Holding herself up at a support post, she bellowed, "DEDRA! WHERE ARE YOU? HELP MEeee?" and collapsed.

  ~ ~ ~

  Death.

  Life.

  Somewhere.

  It took this long to recognize a third state of existence-the correction of an uncertainty and the certainty of who she was. The establishment of an idea that provided disillusioned souls of the world the option of another ultimate disappointment: (d).

  The equation would then be:

  And?June. Yes, her name was June.