The piece below is speculative fiction. I am asking questions. It also makes references to war and drugs that might be triggering. I apologise in advance.
Photograph by moi using my Android phone
It begins with that unsettling whine the door makes when the breeze seeks entry, as two shadows walk under my gate. I look at them and try to attach the voices escorting them to each shadow but you know shadows: they never show their faces. Anyway, the sun is almost done settling in for dusk but I am out still reeling from seeing a photograph of moss, I captured with my Android phone. It looks like a planet ripe with green life, when zoomed close. I wonder; how will the aliens see us? Like these miniature trees & colonies of rocks & quartz: actually minute rocks that are scattered across the concrete floor of my yard?
I wonder if anyone really wants human beings on their planets anyway; do you see the havoc we find pleasure in creating? What if the aliens have never heard of war, fossil fuel, chemical waste, casual genocide, heresy, racism, classicism, ethnicism & all the different isms with which we use to defend our hunger for abuse? As I dream of aliens & how hidden we are from space or exposed—where are all the trees?—I remember seeing burnt moss on the fence behind my room window. The sun must have scorched the earth there. The moss was burnt black & lank, & I think, what will it feel like to smoke moss, to roll the grass into something tubelike & smoke it? Will it have a song? Everything has a song. For a second, I wonder what my song is, how do I sing it, can anyone hear it? I almost sound alien in my quest or rather someone tripping on something terribly strong & dangerous.
Anywho, by the time these deep existential questions get dislodged from my brain & I begin to write this tale, the sun is a orange shade behind fourteen closely grown trees, I like to call deities. They remind me of a forgotten pantheon, some cultural edifice that no one remembers the name for. Like those faces at Solomon islands: are they people or gods? I digress, the breeze has increased somewhat but it can't seem to nudge the door this time or maybe what wants to enter is already in. What ghost sleeps with me tonight, I wonder.
Above, among the blue, a small unnamed bird flutters, hurrying to its nest, I suppose. If I was a painter, will I paint it into the canvas? I mean must there be a character in every story we tell? What if the story is the character? What if the canvas is filled with blue sky & that is it? Will it make it less intriguing? Or maybe, I mean less distracting? For instance, I write a character: a man, a black man, with uncombed hair & rough beard, sitting outside his apartment, in the midst of a slowly ending day, hearing the music of bodies moving in & out of silence, the distant melody of life playing—will it make the tale more glorious, more entertaining?
If I add a brown sofa leaning slantwise against a fence, gathering dust & mitochondria from rainfall & sunshine, will it increase curiosity? Will the story become something strong, like a cup of coffee taken without sugar or milk? Will it hit a reader somewhere tender? I think not. So I add this: the man walks into his apartment & locks the door. What happens outside after this singular action, I do not know, neither do I care. I have to deal with the ghosts lying on my bed, faceless like only shadows can be. Don't you see how dangerous my life is? Don't you just see it?
So the aliens & moss are a trick of light, camera & action, something to situate this story, so you believe that what I say is true but don't you forget the moss; never forget that beautiful moss. I want you to wonder what it must be like to smoke that moss & if I have tried it & if I have, what sort of journey did it take me through & why in all the saints of Oreorokpe did I think of such a dirty thing to do. But it is a story & there are stories of people who have tried other substances in their quest for something unnamed. They are all stories like me. It is all just one convoluted plot from my lonely life. How else can I get you to pay me attention? How else, eh?