Wake Up Call

Wisps of smoke spiral upward into the detector. Instantly, the buzzing of an alarm sends a jolt through my body waking me up. Instinctually my body rolls over and my hand whips around nailing the top of the alarm clock ordering up ten pointless minutes of sleep. The noise persists. I must have left my phone in another room with the alarm on. Closing my eyes, I still hear the chirping in the back of my mind. The alarm becomes more and more distant as it fades.

Infinite grains of sand each reflect a beam of light back into my eyes. I can already feel the sun slowly begin to burn my skin. The sand mounds of the dry land erected a winding maze around me, oscillating over the horizon in no pattern, like the tips of flames in a fireplace (1). Why am I in a desert? Gazing over the land I breathe in a deep breath. The air is so dry, so hot that it burns my throat like a breath of smoke. I take another breath of air in through my nostrils. Why do I smell smoke? Where is the fire?

Stumbling up the dune I lose my footing every third step. The light begins to feel like hot needles picking upon my skin. At the top a view of the true endlessness of the desert awaits me. There is nothing; no water, no people, no hope. The fire around me continues to become hotter. Each breath becomes more painful than the last. Coughing I stumble across the emptiness. There is nothing, nothing that could save me. Crawling into the shadow of the sand dune, I collapse. The flames gently coat my skin with a trace of soot. I sit there helplessly. I hear a voice.

 The voice echoes in my head, it’s calling my name, it’s telling me to wake up. The hot arid air sucks all moisture from my lungs. I know that I should get up, that I need to wake up, but I ... I won’t. Something draws me to lie still, to give up. The flames finally conquer me. The endless barrage of knives stab my body. The kiss of the flames chars my skin into an unrecognizable blackness. Collapsing to my knees the flames engulf me.

Sharp, burning pains seemed to escape from my head down to each digit in my hand and foot (2). Total sense of feeling soon fled. My mind became free of bodily constraints. Time disappeared. Subconscious thoughts combined with conscience thoughts creating incomprehensible seas of thoughts and memories. From this from I arose- immediately, it seemed-by the draw of a familiar source upon my soul, followed by an vision of an inferno (3). I see a figure laid on a bed. Flames dance around the room as they caress the blackened victim.  A faint chirping of an alarm slowly catches my ears attention. I need to wake up.

(1)  The black bodies of the great trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective.

(2)  Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through ever fibre of his body and limbs.

(3)  From this state he was awakened-ages later, it seemed to him-by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation.