Ephemeron
My journey began with a days consumption of absinthe. Enough that the green sunk into my teeth and gums and flowed till I began to submerge in sense and stimuli. The hallucinations came, each beginning and finishing in their own cycle, either a feeling or a small fiction of those in the room or those I’d known, until they grew in frequency, ones starting before others finished, others starting and sustaining, neither fading nor progressing, collectively enveloping me in a pond of experience, till I could no longer sort out what began, what was, and who.
When the mind cleared, I was with the mini-sisters. They fussed about me, complaining of the scruff on my neck, and my dirty fingernails, and unpolished shoes. Cleaning me incessantly, purging the ‘man smells’ from me as best they could. And then I was to speak with the sisters of fate.
“You are Ephemeron, not born when I wake, dead before I sleep,” she said to me.
“Yes, this I know. How do we carry on? What shall I bring back to men and their sons?”
“No more banker or lawyer types. We like a sense of humor.”
“Anything else? “
“Yes. Start spelling babe like this,” and she drew in the sand:
‘baaaabe’. “Call one another it.”
