Undergrounded

Tom dreamt that he stooped over and did a somersault in the air and kept tumbling upward until he was flying flat out over the clouds looking down at what one of us might see looking out the window of a modern airliner even though neither he nor anyone else had yet been in that spot and lived. He looked at the bumps and smears and veins and trails and hanging mists and cracks and wrinkles suspended in the complicated vapor scape and decided that, as a part of nature, as he, as well as his language were a part of nature that it, as much as anything else that he could speak or otherwise create, must have meaning.

If he strained his neck, much as if one of us, a taller one of us, would have to do to see out the window of a modern airliner all the way to the horizon, he could see the line between the cloud cover and the sky and this too spoke to him; it meant that there was indeed a line, a limit. He had been drinking a little bit that night and feeling still emotional, like someone slammed back into the world after they thought they were already dead, so a high sound came out from the back of his throat as he slept, like a teakettle, and burning water squirted from Pink Squishy pads in the corners of his eyes.

The concept was since he was a natural animal and the clouds that hung in the sky below him or the air that he breathed were also natural, just as natural was the language which grew out of him, that he spit and spewed, as Real as Phlegm, and it would be arrogant to think there was no meaning in any of it.

When Tom woke up, it turned out he actually was on a plane. He sighed and saw his breath on the glass of the little oval window. He realized that some of his previous breaths might even be contained in the broken-up Chunks of Orange and brown clouds he was flying over now. There were veins of snow on the Brown Dirt that covered the planet west of the Chanks. The White Veins seemed to follow the water runoff. He could probably see millions of trees from that vantage point. When snow became general, water running was marked with the absence of snow. He had not yet seen an animal, but as far as he could see there was only terrain with trees and rocks and snow, and then no rocks, which seemed like a place where animals would want to go.