diary entry from a mystery author

Dear Friend,

We experienced a disaster that left us with a better environment. I had not previously imagined that what appears as destruction might become restoration.

Yesterday started as any other day. Dawn came. We were hungry as the foodless night had been a bit long and dawn's arrival preceeded the slow fall of food from the sky. Red food falls first, as you no doubt know, and is our preference but we have some rather large cohabitators in our environment, so we eat only what we are able to hold in our hands. Green food and brown food also fall. We like brown food but green food is disgusting. Old Mr. Black tells us that our opinion about green food is subjective. “Look there,” says Mr. Black each morning, “that cohabitator prefers the green food over all the others. So clearly the green food isn't disgusting, but your tastebuds make it seem disgusting.” Mr. Black is too philosophical. Green food tastes icky and that's what there is to know. Mr. Black says that I am projecting my subjective reality onto others but I am happy to have survived into my teenage stage and I don't yet need to know what the word subjective means.

We enjoyed a multicolored breakfast yesterday and afterwards, while we were tending our home, cleaning those nooks and crannies that are never clean enough, the worst disaster of my life started. First, everything stopped. The background noises of daily living stopped. The air stopped moving. And in that most unnatural stillness we all froze. Then, one of Mr. Black's friends, Blue, said that she remembered this happening when she was young and not to worry because we would have a nicer home when it was over.

Our home lept into the sky and was gone! We ran in different directions, scattering ourselves among the remaining debris. As we sat in the hiding places we had found among boulders and a copse of trees, insufficient yet to call a wood, we watched helplessly our family and cohabitators disappeared into the sky. Blue and Mr. Black were among the first to disappear. I was sad to lose them! It was hard to see how Blue could have survived such trauma in her past. I decided that this must be worse than what she had previously experienced. I found a space between two boulders and in I crawled so I could not be made to disappear.

And then the disaster got worse. A storm from the sky hit into the ground, lifting boulders and tossing them about. The earth itself was impacted and our living space filled with dirt and turmoil. I ran from the path of boulders being lifted and spilled and I ran for my life as the lifting and spilling path of boulders moved toward me. I was not fast enough. Upwards I was pulled into the sky. “Oh, no, I shall be transformed into food,” I thought. Many people in moments of extreme desperation while facing total loss have experienced random thoughts of little consequence. “Will I be red food or green food,” I thought, “or brown?”

There is muck on the far side of the sky. Muck so thick and dark brown that one cannot see where one is. There were no boulders for hiding and there was a lot of dirt that hit me on the head. I had always thought that the sky was light or dark green, not a bunch of muck. “Am I dead yet?” I wondered.

And then the sky swirled and swashed and I felt as though I almost sloshed out of that muck into nothingness. I have never felt more terrified. I devoted my muscles to staying in what seemed to be the middle of the sky. Soon that was too difficult, for the sky began to empty itself into nothingness. I resisted the current for as long as I could but was eventually carried with the sky into emptiness, into the void, and then, into a net with no air. I couldn't breathe! Nothing my parents had shown me let me know how to deal with this. I jumped from the net. It was the only sane action to take under impossible circumstances.

It is hard to describe what happened next. I was lifted, but how? I was carried through the air and placed in my home with all my family and friends. “This must be heaven,” I thought. Heaven, it turns out, is extremely blue and has no boulders. It is also a lot smaller than our environment, but there is adequate space for us to move about in our house, and those cramped quarters make our cohabitators seem larger than life.

We stayed in heaven for a while. How does one measure time? Our home suddenly disappeared from heaven and then heaven itself began to empty into nothingness. I tried to cling to the blueness of heaven but my efforts were of no use. I was swept with my family through the void and into... our environment! It was our environment, but it was restored to cleanliness. And that copse of trees was still there. Our family left its old house for the large cohabitators to enjoy all those rooms, and we moved to the trees.

Thank you, Diary, for listening to my adventure. Red, green and brown food fell from the green sky this morning. Mr. Black still wants me to learn what the word subjective means, and he doesn't say why. I am glad Blue spoke truthfully about the expected results of our disaster when it started. I will follow her lead by speaking truthfully to our youth should a disaster start when I am in my old age. May your life be more boring than this story, and may your home nurture you. You shall have to share with me what nurtures a diary. You see, I don't know.

A Shrimp