MOTIWHOND

      Do you know what a 'MOTIWHOND' is?

     You step out onto the splintered, wooden planks of your rear staircase. It is before sunrise. Unforgiving blasts of wet wind rock you back a bit on your heels.

     You've never tried to wake up this early. If you had attempted to do so of your own volition, you would have merely sat up miserably on your mattress for hardly a minute before collapsing back into a bank of crushed pillows. But, last night, you couldn't stay submerged below the water line of sleep. You continuously opened your eyes, doing so about every half hour.

     It got to the point where your dreams were no longer content to wait for you to settle into them. You fell into some kind of mental crevice between consciousness and unconsciousness. And you have been stuck there ever since.

     From the top landing of your back stairs, you look up into the sky. Instead of an atmosphere, some celestial bodies, or maybe a cloud, you see the following sequence, in which you realize you are profoundly implicated:

     There is a tall, corrugated steel awning built over a service area for diesel trucks. Near one of the awning's stanchions is a trough-like pan filled with oily water. An orange cat bursts through the liquid surface and stands trembling, its legs sending circular ripples to the rims of the pan. A cartoonish, orb-shaped fish with bulging, incongruous eyes plugs the cat's mouth after swelling to a size large enough to dislocate the feline's jaws. Soon, the deformed fish grows so rotund that it is jettisoned out into the iridescent puddle below. 

     The cat squirms, remaining in place; its eyes convey a human suffering. Then it vomits up five more gigantic golden fish. After this purge, the cat steps backward out of the trough and onto an oil-bespattered patch of asphalt. It trembles, standing. 

     The cat then rots away in a matter of seconds. The last trace of its corpse is the frontal plate of its skull, lying flat and face-up on the ground. From your vantage point beneath it, it seems to be inverted and looking down at you. That, too, disintegrates, leaving nothing behind.

     "Some cheshire," you say aloud, your voice blotted out by the moaning wind.

     You know, in that moment, that you'll never be fully awake or fully asleep again. It's just going to be like this for the foreseeable future, and may even continue after your body dies.

     "This is what eternity is," you think out loud, "one variant of eternity, at least."

     Now you know what a 'MOTIWHOND' is: a MOment in TIme that is WHOlly the eND...