Pieces of Peter

 The wall was mad, it made no sense, made of cement and carefully laid brick; it suddenly spoke out aloud about pieces of Peter. Blue skies and pain, and a voice that screamed for help, a voice belonging to someone called Peter, I assumed — an assumption that gave me the first clue that I was there at all in order to assume anything. But my memory was short till the very end.

It was later I noticed that another wall faced the original wall and ran parallel with it, leaving a narrow channel of no-man’s land between where there walked a few straggly sheep, sometimes halting to nibble at the scrawny weeds. It may have been winter, but it was obvious that a deep drought prevailed under a sun that had been shining in cold cloudless skies since we could all remember. And the fact that I could use the first person plural pronoun so easily now indicated that I was not alone. Walls to ‘we’ against in an uncountable amount of parallel no-man’s-land channels stretching to the blue-event horizon. Each channel with its own single variety of depleted creatures allotted their meagre grazing journeys, but journeys from where to where, I asked myself. A question to self that now showed I was further from being omniscient than I originally thought. But at least that made me think that such a thought-as-a-process was at least within my powers, however pointless any similar thoughts I happened to produce were so wide or the mark regarding truth and reality. Standing in the aisles, can you feel me? Don’t give in, without a fight.

At the moment that the last few words crystallised in my mind, I saw that my own assigned channel between walls was assigned to scrawny human beings like me, which at least gave me comfort that I was not a beast of burden nor a mindless insect in an otherwise seemingly empty channel. Which begs the question, are insects mindless? Indeed, are walls? Kafka loved slopes, you know. Wish you were here, as these narrow channels zig zag upwards to the Ark Side of Heaven. And, so, that discrete thought itself gives some credence at least to there being a retroactive meddling by a power more omniscient than myself, if not completely omniscient. And despite such illogical comparatives of omniscience, I somehow knew for certain that the walled-in channel of no-man’s-land that we followed was the optimum route to wherever we were going, if not the best. And, at the gates of dawn, I realised my name was not even Peter.