Pt. 3

***Part 3 of a moral-less allegory. Please read Part 1 and Part 2 first.***

There were stones in Dirvin's passway, and the road laid before him was dark.

The darkness was nothing new, having spent such a time beneath his paper shroud, but the rubble stubbing his toes was a disconcerting augury. And the darkness wasn't velvety depth it should have been...

He had awoken on the floor, which in itself was not out of the ordinary, but he had no recollection of retiring. An unfamiliar draft chilled him. He stretched his legs, plowing dusty detritus into neat little mounds with his velcro strap shoes.

Dirvin drooped his bag-head and pressed his bag-face into his hands. And felt something wet. Bringing his moistened fingers up into his very personal space and tapping them against his tongue, the tang of iron told him it was blood. As his digits revisited the gore they discovered something even more distressing: a hole. Desperately desiring to concentrate on recalling the previous evening, this new aperture was the supreme distraction. It required repair, posthaste.

Following the probing feelers of his long loafers, Dirvin made his way to the tumbling towers of yellow hogging the better portion of the room. Folding himself cross-legged, hunched like a crumpled Buddha among the thousand Carnation cartons, he began the task at hand. One by one, he would locate the blue and white adhesive tag applied by Rose General Market for pricing. Delicately, he would pry up the sticker and purposefully place it, slowly fashioning a bandage for his paper carapace.

And as the puncture began to fill over, Dirvin's mind began to relax.

Breathing deep and steady, he attempted to recount the evening's unfolding. He sighed and shivered and eventually slumbered, sleeping a grimy and grey sleep, splayed across a bright cardboard bed. And awoke in a panic.

His arousal was violent, as if some subconscious malice pressed a hot flint to his earlobe, and his flailing legs sent a plume of mildewed rot blowing away in the wind. As his fingers patterned dust into uniform ridges with their nervous scraping, memory flooded in like a backwash. Memories of a storm. A great storm. Memories of a thundering elemental colossus, the shuddering pitch of the floor, the choking black of his paper bag as he stumbled, and the great groan of the very earth he stood upon.

And it was pondering these newly found memories beneath his newly patched cap that Dirvin stumbled into the outdoors. After several minutes of investigation, it became clear that his outbuilding was no longer connected, it's aluminum and tin umbilical cord shorn jaggedly. After several more minutes he was aware that something much larger was amiss, for the sandy rut that had once led to town now only brought him to a void, an empty space where his slipper-tips dangled over the big blue sea.