Ain't Talkin'

The man in the white became aware of his body. He became aware of the pain. He breathed for the first time in coughing, heaving gouts of conceptual nothing and snotty cords spilling from his throat and nose and eyes. He arched to his knees, bent like a fetal child, naked and shivering and desperately, fitfully trying to grasp a full breath, an even intake and exhale of life-giving, hot breath.

He settled and fell sideways across the planar nothing of the white.

Were there sound he might have heard the approach of the two others in the nothing. Two to find him his way back.

There were larger things there, settled on misshapen haunches and watching with child-like eyes and unfinished cognizance. Their artificial beings waited patiently and did not interfere. They merely watched and listened and waited and rested on the bent string of possibility that they clung to. Neither alive nor concept, but constructed of void and substantial in the way that a thought is. They merely watched the man in the white cling nude to his own knees and sob.

A nickering.

A wide-flat tongue lapped at the man’s face. Waking him to the reality of the fact. There were things alive here besides the nothing-made-whole of the watchers in the white.

With gentle teeth the wolf tugged at the man’s arm. Get up, come on.

The nickering came again. The man sat up. He smelled a campfire.

A faithful steed with a single white fetlock had found her master and come to take him safely.

The man wished he had a drink to celebrate. He could hear the sloshing of a bottle in her saddlebags.

“Good horse. Good. . .good horse.”

ssion.

As I walked out in the mystic garden,

On a hot summer day, a hot summer lawn.

Excuse me, ma’am, I beg your pardon,

There’s no one here, the gardener is gone.

Ain’t talking, just walking,

Up the road, around the bend.

Heart burning, still yearning,

In the last outback at the world’s end.

-Bob Dylan

About the Author:

Taylor R. Powers is a native of Cooperstown, New York. He attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for Veterinary and Animal Science and Wildlife and Fisheries Conservation. After writing the first three novels of the young adult adventure series ‘The Summerswill Saga’ and a number of short stories, he decided to write something else for a while. He has since returned to the land of Sylva and the Summerswill though he has not left the world of Terra behind just yet. He is an advocate for the 4H program and has been raising and showing poultry since childhood.