You are a child.

It is August, the days agonizingly long, you are alone.

The only world you know, in the locust buzz, is the world of stubbled grass under your bare feet, the telephone pole, the Michigan dirt and gravel road, the sidewalk and the sun.

You are bored, your mind wiped clean of any possibility.

You look up at the sun, wide-eyed, watching the bright intensity sear itself into your brain, blinding. The pleasure of that, the dark pain, your eyes burning like stones. The molten plasma warbling fire. This is somehow God.

You turn away and watch the grass sear into burnt field.

You turn cold, shivering.

To warm yourself you lie down on the sidewalk, the shadow of the telephone pole slicing your body.

The pavement is blessedly warm, like a stone oven, warming your calves, your arms, your hands, the back of your hedgehog skull. This is what it is like to be thoughtless, alone, outside of time. This is what it means to be alive and not alive. The sun glows in your eyelids.

There is nothing in the world that matters.

Later, you realize that you know nothing. The world is insensate. There is nowhere to go, nowhere to get outside of this time, this world, this interregnum.