~o~
As Emily woke it was no surprise for her to find herself in her garden. She felt contented and twirled a pirouette like a floating ballet dancer as she crossed the lawn to the door of the cottage. She entered smiling and then stopped suddenly as her eyes fell onto something very unusual. There was a stranger in her room, a stranger sitting at her window table as if he had every right to be there. She ducked down unsure quite how to respond. This was the first person she had seen since finding herself in her personal universe. The man, she was sure he was a man, sat with a notebook computer in front of him. This was an unaccountably strange event and she felt a twinge of anger that an intruder was invading her space, her private world. She stood and moved a little closer to the figure. Suddenly drawing confidence from her indignation she raised her voice.
"Hey, what are you doing here?" She called.
The figure did not move, it was as if he could not hear her, as if he were completely unaware of her presence. Emily made an attempt to correct that situation, she tried to pick up a vase and throw it at him but somehow she could not quite get a grip on the solid object. Then as quickly as it had arisen, her brief flirtation with anger subsided, this was just one more strange event in her life, she laughed at the stupidity of trying to throw a vase.
She moved closer again until she was standing at his side. A few dust motes caught in the light from the window danced before him and she watched as he pulled off his reading glasses and lay them on the table. As he leaned back in his chair and stretched the stiffness from his back Emily thought that he looked attractive, handsome even. A distant urge, almost an ache seemed to fill her but quickly dissipated.
"Who are you?" She said in little more than a whisper "Don't you know that this is my place... what do you want here?"
The man still gave no response even when she brushed her hand across his cheek. In confusion Emily retreated to the garden to muse on this latest peculiarity. As she roamed the landscape between the cottage and the membrane, there was a change. Maybe precipitated by the shock of finding a stranger in her cottage, the memories that had been drifting across her mind, almost unnoticed, started to come into focus. Emily was starting to remember who she was and with the remembrance came a deeper intensity to her presence in this bizarre universe.
Alexander had been typing the outline of the story of his book, working out the sequence of events in the way that an artist might make a pencil sketch before applying the oil paint. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the vase on the table topple and fall onto the floor. It was saved from breaking only by the cushioning of the soft carpet. It was such a strange thing, solid objects just do not fall off tables on their own. As he stood to pick it up he thought he felt a slight draught across his cheek and had the strange feeling that a shadow had passed somewhere behind him but when he turned there was nothing.
Comatose Page 14
