The Neverlast
by Dorothee Lang

A bubble rises. Forty three. The next one forms. Forty seven. Then another, this time tiny. Fifty three. And another one. Fifty nine.

June turns to the other side, closes her eyes, and tells herself once more that she really aught to sleep. Now. Sleep. Now. Sleep. But the little machine in her head keeps calculating, like a program on the run. Sixty one. Sixty seven. Seventy one.

It is hopeless. And the line of prime numbers is eternal. One night, she had reached four hundred something. Her mother hadn’t believed her. “You are faking this,” she had said. Only that June wasn’t faking. She wasn’t forcing it, either. It just happened. Somewhere in her mind. Seventy three. Seventy nine. Eighty three.

At ninety seven, she opens her eyes again. At one hundred seven, she gets up, and walks to the kitchen. She pours a glass of milk, adds a spoonful of honey, and puts the mix in the micro wave. Then she opens the window, to look for the moon, but the shape of it isn’t visible. Instead, she hears voices from below. A couple walks by on the street, the man in a black suit, the woman in a lime green dress, her voice as angry and pointed as her steps, yet June can’t understand them. All she can pick up is a half sentence, “I thought that was the last,” before a car appears and drowns the rest of the words.

“I thought that was the last,” June repeats, standing at the window, sipping the warm milk. Time, she guesses. Or maybe chance.

She empties the glass, leaves it on the table, and gets back into her bed. The lava lamp, it is still birthing bubbles in an orange glow. Perfect round useless globules, born to rise and fade. Weekend of July, the machine in her mind suggests, while another bubble forms. Matter to consider. A queer one, next.

Sleepless Night.

______

Dorothee Lang is a writer and net artist. She lives in an old house with highspeed connection in South Germany, where she is editing the BluePrintReview and working on a travel novel. Her prose, poetry and web art have recently appeared in Sunday Herald and Surface, juked and Word Riot, Pedestal and Pindeldyboz, among others. To see some of her latest pieces, visit her virtual gallery at blueprint21.de.