The brine sloshed and licked my feet like it was a mutt and I'd stepped in peanut butter. The living spaces of my neighbors to the right were fish boxes, those to my left were in the norm such as was Then. They existed this way according to gravity's implications and the fact that I made my life on the incline of Steeple Valley, now beachfront property.
It was the beginning of today's reign, and sun's bald, haze-shrouded pink forehead poked up next to a former mountain, now gull perch. I connected my eyeballs towards the Mirror Sky and watched a little speck, which was me, watching me. I did this for no more than a few minutes as was told for me by my educated friend, Doc. A few of my neighbors had made themselves dead by watching themselves such. They stopped nourishing themselves because the sky was so weird and interesting and incorrect that they couldn't refuse to look for even a second. I'd come close to doing the same back when the sky decided to pretend like it was the Earth. This was sometime during Calamity's end, a couple months back. I stayed watching for a few days, becoming really very in need of water and nourishment. I didn't know anything in those hours, pardoning the Mirror Sky. It was a swell fact that Doc lived not four walks to my left. He came on over peeling his eyes for us "meta-narsacists", the term he'd come to call those that became obsessive over the now-sky. He came over down the middle of the street with his trembling Parkinson's hands and his baggy cargo pockets clacking and jingling with patented nick-nacks and patty-wacks. His thorough near-sightedness and lack of correctional lenses lent to jerky head turns as he eye-painted the homes to his left and right. He found me planted in my proud weed garden. I'd self-fertalized after finding myself there for so long and my neck was snapped into position like a lego. Doc had to un-snap it himself. He also had to slap me and clean me and water me and give me food because he figured I wasn't fit to exist as a plant on account of my life being on a thin fiber at that moment. I lost ten pounds, developed a fungus on my thighs and pubic region, and I'm still having eye difficulties from longterm sky-staring, but Doc says that it'll probably be away with itself within weeks.
Doc's twenty-five years old and looks at least fifty. He was Then a double biological and psycological major at a university. The university's to my right somwhere. It doesn't exist too much these days. Doc says he took what he needed from it, though. Calamity started during his third year there, but a degree doesn't credit one much now, so he doesn't throw about any care for missing out on that. We knitted ourselves together aft the life saving business. All of the Doc's friends and family had been culled, like mine, by Calamity. He possesed copious luck managing an escape from the sea like he did. Somehow he'd made possible a journey from his university, a hundred miles east, up and up here to his hometown to find friends and family in the midst of Calamity and her weirdening. He doesn't speak to me about what Calamity made of his parents, what he found in his home when he got there, but his glazed eyes tell me it something awful whenever the mention comes up. Awful's an understatement, no doubt.
Mine own were featured in interesting, if not mind-fuckingly awful, death circumstances. Mom was afflicted with a Calamity-induced obssesion at the very beginning. Hers was for teeth. She bought a handgun in the turning phase between Then and Calamity. She bought it like normal, like she was afraid of criminals and wanted protection. The next week she culled neighborhood cats and dogs and took their cuspids. Later she did people. She pushed the teeth into her gums in the places behind her own. When she ran out of space there, she pushed them in skin, surrounding her mouth. We did all possible to make things seem normal to outside people. We tried to keep her at home, but she threatened to do herself in if she couldn't access her crop. So we let her shoot people at night. My mom is smart, she used to help prevent folk sewing Malpragdis suits for docs, true life-invested docs, not like the way Doc is a doc. She knew how the world worked, she took people away from city lights so she didn't get caught by the law. Her face was more teeth than Mom within a month and my older brother and my dad and me were worried and scared and mind-fucked. Then she shot my brother in the leg one day in the afternoon because he wasn't letting her go into the air and her cravings had grown bastardly bigger. Dad shot her back after that and took my brother and I here to Steeple Valley. The weirdening was just blossoming then. Mom was one of the first effects of Calamity. Then it was thought that she just possesed madness. Soon it spread. Calamity spread it like a pound of butter on a flaming peice of toast.
A week after we found a homestead here, Dad became a boy again. He climbed out of his second story window with a carton of eggs and some painting spray-cans. He used a makeshift rope of his skin to substitute the popular bedsheet method and descended down to meet up with a few other red/purple/pink man/boys to vandalize the highschool for ten minutes before expiring. My brother, Toby, took care of me like a new Dad after that. Calamity fixed him into looking the role soon, too. Started to look like Dad, then Grandpa, then Grandpa in his box. He was in a box of his own within a month. I managed to get one for him before they were all taken. My family all had boxes. That's one thing I can absotively say we were lucked with. I even have one saved in the cellar for myself. Mahogany. Silk lining. A pillow (just in case the feelings are still perked after my expiration date).
The weirdness melted immediatly when it touched our world and tucked itself into all the nooks and cranies, soaking our brains in and out. In and out.