The Darkness, the Heat, the Darkness

Darkness overcomes me, and the heat settles softly in thin layers like disembodied kitten paws. When did this happen, this transformation from light to dark? Was I sleeping?

No. That doesn't make sense, the light of dreams is a dull, artificial luminescence, the cold flicker of underpowered fluorescent bulbs along a dingy white hallway. This tranformation from light-- this light was no light of dreams! What I've just left was the penetrating radiance of the... sun? Or maybe it was a tanning bed. EIther way, I should have been wearing a blindfold.

But it doesn't matter now. My eyes are no longer worth protecting, because I'm lying in the kind of darkness where I'm quite sure, on a rational level, that I'll never see anything again.

And with the darkness, that stifling, inescapable heat! Now pressing down like a column of kitten paws, stacked forty meters high in a silo. It occurs to me that this is my first time in a silo, although I hadn't hitherto noticed the absence of this experience in my life, however illuminating. I decide to relax for a while out here on the blazing prairie, resting my eyes without bothering to close them.