Paved With Good Intentions
written by: Lee Dunn
Be very careful when eating mushrooms.
That is my best advice at this time.
I do not know how long it is that I have walked and wandered, sometimes just laying down out of weakness, hunger, and despair. I have been poisoned nearly unto death from wrong choices. Sometimes I have left my right mind, trying to get back, get back, sensing a thousand year journey of complexity.
I am a caveman of the modern day, surviving on dull wits. I remember pieces of useful information, helpful household hints, Boy Scout wisdom. How to butcher a rabbit without getting the meat tainted with its urine. How to build a simple trap to catch something live, then bludgeon it. Roast it over a deadwood flame, ignited with sunlight shone through discarded spectacles.
It is temperate here, mostly, and I cannot count the years. Such seasons as there are seem mixed up, mottled. For days at a time, I may stumble along in dirty fruit-of-the-looms, then awake in a frozen stupor, stiffly seeking shelter. I have tried to carry garments, old blankets with me, but often discard them out of tiredness.
I have not yet met any of my own species that I could talk with or walk with. Mostly they are dead, swollen, cracked. There are some shambling things, born, perhaps, of poisoned wombs, in the first days after the flashes. They do not speak my language. They are more aimless than I, with flippers for arms, or with too many heads.
Old friends, I have taken the time to write this because I have found a standing house. I have eaten all of its old food by smashing cans against rocks. I must soon leave its shelter to find something fresh with blood. Everything is open here. Foliage has given way to mostly fungus. Animals are hard to find and wary.
What if I just lay down now?
How long would it take just to go away forever?
I think I am on that fabled road that is paved with good intentions.
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