Death of a Moonman

Peter suddenly found himself prostrate in the middle of a large field; he was vomitting. What the hell had just happened? He sat up brushing himself off, as the awareness of something truly wrong fumbled its way through his addled brain.

“I”
“huh”
“Maybe?….no”
“Maybe I was asleep and now I just woke up. But why would I be in a field? Well my head is killing me and I was throwing up. It’s possible that I got extremely drunk and this is the rather unfortunate aftermath. But where the hell am I, and why do I not remember having anything to drink for several weeks?”

The drinking story was the only thing he could come up with which seemed even vaguely plausable and yet he knew that it wasn’t the truth. Only moments before, he had been in a comfortable chair typing horribly affected prose and self-congratulatory pontifications into his laptop. Now? Now he was in a field. Vomiting? What the fuck?

He grabbed a clump of dirt and weeds as if to somehow to reassure himself that it was actually there and he was actually sitting in it and this, this totally disregard for the rules of reason and sense and understanding was actually the situation he was now in.

He sat and he stared.

Slowly a smile crept into the corners of his mouth: “well shit, I never really liked reality anyway.”

He layed back down, resting his still pounding head. Staring up ponderously at the cloud cluttered sky, he sharply sat up again, then got to his feet: “might as well find out where I am and what exactly just happened”

With the sun on his back, he started off through the field.

Peter had been walking for about ten minutes, entertaining himself with the most absurd speculation about where he was and what had just occured, when he saw a dirt path. He started to follow it, randomly turning left. Eventually he climbed a slight ridge out of the valley he had been in up to this point and caught sight of someone coming towards him. “well at least I’m not completely in the middle of nowhere” he thought. The fugure was about a mile off so details were difficult to make out but it seemed to either be a humpback or to be carrying a large amorphous sack on its back. The small adrenaline rush that accompanies encountering a stranger on a dirt road in an unkown place, fueled speculations about aliens and alternate universes and time warps that fought tentatively for acceptance in his now thoroughly disconcerted mind. “We’ll just have to see,” he told all the thoughts swirling around him.

Somewhat resolutely and somewhat incredulous that all this was actually going on, he started towards the distant figure who was walking in his direction. As they got nearer to each other Peter decided that it was at least a human being, but it appeared to be some sort of peasant who was indeed carrying a sack.

“A peasant?”
“have I really…yeah, it looks like it. Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve gone back in time?”

All the half-concieved but thoroughly ominous and confounding implications about his life and his family and his sanity and his very notions of the universe that such a realization implied, resolved themselves instead into a prodigous stream of confused explitives that seemed to sum up the situation as well or better than any full and articulated thought could have done. It was in fact hard to doubt his analysis. The man was barefoot, he was wearing what Peter could only describe as pantaloons and he had on a large loose fitting smock of a shirt that looked like someone had cut three holes in a burlap bag. Maybe he was in some foreign country but for some reason he didn’t think so. When they got within about twenty meters of each other they both stopped.

Under the bewildered stare of the man before him, Peter for the first time, became acutely aware of his own appearance. He was wearing a pair of heavy workboots with no socks which he had put on in the morning to take the dog out and fortunately hadn’t taken off, he had on the remnants of a pair of black sweatpants which he had cut off at the knee and also which he had slept in the night before, and he was wearing a white tee shirt with the word Hi written on the back. It was one of those sorts of shirts that was so stupid on so many levels that he couldn’t help but take some kind of sick pleasure in it. Though the first and only time he had actually worn the shirt in public, he ended up in front of an old guy in a long line at the grocery store who took his shirt as an open invitation to say a lot of incomprehensible things and punctuate each of them with a disconcerting laugh that was somehow a mix of blissful ignorance and deperate plea for human affection. It was, as stated before, the last time he wore the shirt in public. Peter concluded that he would look rather rediculous even in his world and must look downright absurd in this one.

“krhevizh, han gorral” The peasant blurted out.

“oh hell” replied Peter with an irritated sigh. “English?” He ventured.

“……..”

“DO-YOU-SPEAK-ENGLISH” Peter exhorted in desperation, simultaneously thinking about all the fictional people he had mocked for speaking in that exact manner.

“Han, na. Nil wrietzan”

“Well this is going to be fun”