Somewhere, Someone, In space and Time.

Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1

Curled on the sagging couch in her cold and cheerless flat, she hugs herself to prevent the unseemly disgorging of her entrails. For surely they must be on the verge of falling out onto the worn carpet.

Despite the chill, she sweats apprehension and who’d have guessed one could produce so much? There must be an end to it, mustn’t there? Who can produce an eternal supply of dread?

Yet it seems she can. And with artificial sleep her only escape, she recounts the pills left on the silvery card. Each transparent bubble another eight hours of reprieve. What will she do when they run out? Never sleep again?

Never. Sleep. Again.

A faulty washer on the kitchen tap has turned atomic clock and gives out the seconds with perfect tinny precision. A draft from somewhere lifts up ashes from the overflowing ashtray and scatters them like dirty snow on the scarred surface of the wooden table.

The phone also lies on the table, hateful, mute. The black plastic embodiment of human frailty. Smug and secretive, it’s sleek, squared-off shape taunting the organic disorder of hope.

Change occurs without meaning to. All around, states flip and switch, begin and end, are born and die and are reborn. Signals are sent and received. But in the crystalline cocoon of fear the ice age has come and everything is caught in profound stillness.

Except for the entrails, of course. They threaten endless and incipient escape. Newborn snakelets roiling in a dying womb. It’s uncanny how long breath can be held when one is convinced that to exhale will blow a butterfly off course in Brazil.

The triumph of determinism.