by William Salsman

Created on: July 27, 2008   Last Updated: October 29, 2008

The Glass Jar

Forty-nine unconscious dwellers floated freely in a ball of wax they called home. They had made a habit of rising with the bigger, fiery ball they could rely on as being there like the way they kept on breathing. One morning, however, the big fiery ball did not quite appear. It only gave the hint of appearing. There was just this very dim light and nothing else, which was constant and appeared to be stuck there as time marched on and on. Though it was nice to be in that soft and very low infusing of the light, they longed for the days when the cycles of life performed like clockwork.

So they took a mental journey back to the previous dawn when the big fiery ball would appear on schedule, and to the dawn before that one, and so on and on into that backwards infinity. As they journeyed a certain intuition manifested and they discovered that they must have died before they were born since there was a time they had no memory of at a point on the line of infinity. There were numerous dreams that occurred as they encountered each of the many thresholds of the finite, which had been leading them further back into infinity. These dreams took on a different meaning for them than they normally would, of a life lived inside of itself. They came to see that what they thought was finite had not really been the end nor the beginning of anything. There was always just this ongoing undercurrent of one dream after another at every stage of realization.

This one morning as they waited the journey was itself in the form of a dream. But the life inside of itself, the dream, could not explain the outside life. The outside life had been suspended on a point somewhere between the dark and the light. This they could not understand, and it made them anxious, implicitly. Likewise, they are situated between the past and the forgotten future. They are wondering where the sun is. They are wondering why they must wait and what is going on. Yet, they all appear to be anticipating and in readiness to rejoice, but rather like corpses, each with that frozen expression reflecting its apparent state of mind.

A deep forest man-creature moves in among them as they are huddled together in that predawn light. It moves closer and closer and then stops at a certain safe distance. It is fully visible in the scopes of their rifles but they do not shoot it. They see the teeth in its mouth as it growls, and the redness of its gums. They see the bloodening of its watery eyes, and the human-like

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