Dragons

The silence sometimes, is deafening, and in it Chester Linch waits for the morning to arrive, when the cacophony of voices returns, because they die at night, the way the world dies at night, and he is left without the masked choir in his head, shrieking out the refrains of the origins of the universe. At night, it falls apart, crumbling like the ruins of some ancient amphitheater. In the silence he thinks he is going mad.

The television is on, but it's silenced, and throwing pitches of white static across the room, flashing like lightning and casting everything in the blue-white glow of optic noise. The snow falls outside and Chester wonders if he will ever know the calmness at the center of it. His counterpart in the world of mankind, the real world, the world of money and endeavor, is a proponent of meditation. But Chester cannot clear his mind that way, and so it fills his eyes with the static of white noise and he sits, in silence and noise, staring up into the ever darkening folds of the ceiling above him.

The shrieking is all independent. Saxophones blare in the corner, where red eyes watch from inky shadows that blur and blend into grease pens and worry. The worry hits him like a Devil, a Devil, breaking the bones and all of it falls into the vast chasm of worry. Of worry. Of worry. Chester holds himself, braces himself, in the silence and the white noise and he opens his eyes wide and the shock of the white hits his eyes like a desert wind and blasts him with sand, Sandman sand, Sandman's dust that spews from the tornado of worry. Worry. Worry. He waits for something, leather wings fluttering in the black overhead. Leather wings. Leather wings, miniature claws, growling little mouth, sniveling little mouth and she wonders overhead, like a thought balloon, like a worrisome little ghost with wings overhead and Chester worries and he worries and he worries.

The history of it, of the world, of life, of Genesis, of the Gospels, runs deep into the canyons of his brain. Horrible brains, horrible life, horrible genesis that breeds everything horrible past; a darkness and the explosion, the unbelievable rapid expanse into somethinghood, into somethingness, the rapid expanse into the void; And there was gaseous matter, ether that glowed with the voices of a million gods. Gods who coalesced from the nothing and appeared in the heavens, brilliant blue stars and brilliant red stars, and white specks of light that made belts and eyes and axes and men, a whole universe of gods. And from the gods, there was life; there was the chain of everything, hammered into place by gods, beautiful glowing gods that spent their lives so far away from everything; and there was suddenly deserts, and there were people in them, bronzed people making cities in the mountains, huge cities of clay and dust in the side of the mountains; and those people were transfixed, bronze men and women, transfixed by the crucible of dragons that roamed the planet, dragons, giant lizards, giant creatures of fire and ice, horrid things that roamed the planet and menaced each and every bronze man and woman.