011
GROUND RULES
23
Harvey Stanbrough
All right, then. A few ground rules. Before you begin dismantling and dismissing this story as some sinister mental fabrication of a full-blown fool, consider, just for a moment, there are things you do not know, and there are things you know that you will never admit, even to yourself. Or perhaps especially to yourself. Consider the cloud you occasionally see that’s so smooth, so perfectly shaped, no bubbles or bulges or straggly rain-hair hanging from it. You know it is not a natural cloud. You know, too, it is not man made, because man-made clouds, once they’ve risen in an obviously man-made column and achieved some altitude, closely resemble natural clouds, other than their various colorations. But even knowing all that, you find a way to dismiss it. And consider how your own shadow, occasionally, for a blink of an eye, acts in a way that is disproportionate to your distance and angle from the light source that created it. Think of how that makes you feel for that instant when you aren’t quite sure. But again, given the human propensity to deny fear rather than deal with it, you find a way to dismiss the thought instead of risking seeing what’s just on the other side of that shadow. Consider too that jagged fragment of a thousandth of an instant when you feel that one of your cells is about to warm in just the wrong way to just the wrong degree and explode, and that it will lead to a kind of chain reaction, a kind of immediate cancer, in which the next cell and the next cell and the next thousand million billion cells do exactly the same thing. Well, if you’re afraid to consider what might have created that cloud (and might still be hiding in it), and if you can’t bring yourself to investigate the whole timeskipping, jagged-shadow phenomenon, you certainly will find a way to laugh off the thought that your cells might become involved in a cataclysmic (to you) chain reaction that will scatter you, if not light years in space, surely at least over a city half block or so. Ignore what you will, but just for the duration of this story, obey the ground rules. Consider smooth clouds and leaping shadows and super-heated exploding cells and the millions of other