A Philosophical Morning (Short Story)

The bug crawled on the inside of the window. I blinked. The bug crawled outside the window. Between spheres. Between worlds. Perception could be, and often was tricked. Perception by its nature was a trick. Perception cast mirages. I couldn’t say whether I was perceiving wrongly, or with new and lasting clarity. The ruse sustained as much as dismantled the separations. It informed me that there were worlds which may be describable and objective – and then again they weren’t. There were worlds which seemed have interiors/ exteriors. There was a vast world which blurred, or, with a flash negated the demarcations.

I had fallen for a ruse. Or I could finally be perceiving the whole truth. I stirred from the bed, I approached the bedroom window.

I approached, with my fingers spread. Reality instructed me: I drew closer. Pointed. I heard the bug humming. This led me to suspect it must be on my side of the glass. It’s inside the house. I could be wrong. I make a finger regardless. I resembled Jehovah casting a judgement. God’s massive pointer thrust threateningly at a speck. It buzzed. That could be the way all prayers sounded to God, mindless, ineffectual buzzing. He pointed regardless. His blessings. His curses. At Adam. At Solomon. Noah. Job. No. Just a black fly. It was lowly life, life that was conscious –by the least standard – but that by my standards was so marginally sentient it was closer to dirt. I still wasn’t sure about much else. I was an ironic God. I most certainly was not the Great Power offering the gift of life. My intentions this time around were malevolent. Death.

I still wasn’t sure which world was which, if the fly was with me in here, or there. There could be a crack in the window.

Then I realized that I might as well be God, who probably can’t see well enough, given his hoariness, and lack of celestial glasses. God probably can’t fathom the layers upon layers dimensional. God guesses sometimes. Hm. God probably guesses most of the time, given the complexity of the layers of reality. It’s too much to separate them: to fathom them singularly: then interdependently: fly, household and human realities – and especially the perceptional problems that human identity and morality cast upon world and wonder.

. I should act fast, ready to swat it, in fact, I should have already made my move because I wanted to end this: and just then the buzzing seemed much, much farther away, and I believed I possibly was hearing it through a nick in the window. The fly was free. It sucked on the transparent glass. That’s all. Then I resisted any conclusions. Conclusions seemed as irrelevant as morality. Yet I suddenly, or contrarily believed with a Godlike fanaticism that the fly had to exist inside this prison which was the world because so did I; and I supposed I was God’s agent in terms of relative power over life, death, and dust. The fly had to suffer the absurd consequences. It was a goner. Except of course if it’s already safe – safe all along, and buzz, buzz, buzz, laughing at God.