Tired of the charade, I reached for my canine companion, hoping that its ambiguity would inspire a similar complexity in my own character. I had ignored it up till now, as it had shunned my presence, two sides of the same bad penny, distorted by time and distance. Perhaps it was my only chance at self discovery.

It was not to be. The ugly thing growled at me, its basso profundo thrumming in my ears like a warning from beyond the grave. We were both muddy oafs groveling under the choking skies, too cruel for comfort and too far away. It bit the hand that freed it.

Something unexpected happened again and again. Either I had shrunk to fit or the little creature had grown in stature to accommodate me. Whatever the truth was at this juncture, I was the last man on earth to know, encased as I was in my squalid beliefs. I had failed to take account of the drifting mist and the whispering treetops.

I rode my fantasy as far as I could as it galloped down memory lane and beyond the pale. It shook its great head and bellowed at the gathering storm that swept in from the mountains of madness. I was little more than an assemblage of other people’s ideas, a living, breathing, dying, weeping collage of ripped up recollections.

A rumble was the only clue that foreshadowed the extraordinary events that even now I can barely bring to mind. It was as if the very earth shivered and shook like an old dog in the snow. I could feel the resurgence of an ancient horror that was clawing its way to the surface.

Huge jaws smashed through the surface all around me, slavering maws grinding rock in a cacophony of unimaginable noise. They were part machine, like the flying creatures, and their ugly snouts clanked and whirred, intent on finding their ferrous food. In my terror I sensed that these monsters were like mining magnates gone mad, unleashed on a post apocalyptic world devoid of control.

They reared over me, drooling dust, and studied the morsel of flesh and bone that stood quavering beneath them. The world was their oyster, a prize for the taking, beyond mind and reason. I was disconnected from them, only concerned with the dissolving past and the hollow earth of my soul.

The planet was crumbling beneath my feet, yet my unconcern was a mist that shielded the truth. The behemoths bent their heads in supplication to the human god that had motivated the mayhem that had released their wild spirit. I had no idea of the power that lay dormant within the cave of pain and indifference wherein I lived.

A shadow fell across my life, sweeping through the years from the blackened past, and blocked out the sun. I looked upwards at the massive silhouette, astonished that I could still be astonished. The ground beneath my feet was a lake of dust that contained the drifting shadows like huge winged fish.

The improbability of the vision above me would have been my undoing in years past, when my cascading dreams plummeted from the heights of hope to the depths of understanding. Just because it might not be real was no reason to stop believing in my speculative thinking.

I had thought that they were birds at first but that was unlikely in the lifeless wasteland of the Apocalypse. They careened about the sky, untamed and miraculous like thoughts buffeted by the wind. Their sleek shapes frolicked above me, unfettered by logic or the sad realism of bygone generations.

It was only then I realized that they were a higher form of life, created by a pulsating desire to shed their chains and take to the heavens. Rather than birds, these rushing forms were the embodiment of machines made by nature to fly and fly forever.

In the aftermath of the Apocalypse I had been alone until I encountered, on the other side of the night, the lair of the creeping web spinner. Now I looked around and saw the nets of wonder hung to the horizon, glistening with the sticky issue of a multitude of these predators. Husks of humans hung from the membranes, ensnared along with unfortunate birds and plodding dogs, victims of the scattergun approach.

The clawing creatures loomed over the entrapped masses, manipulating their every movement, so sensitive to the slightest tug on a heart string. The great spiders had spun a drift net that trawled the world, phishing for the most delectable morsels of information that they could bundle up and feed to their young.

A black clacking beast scuttled down the wires, searching for my ideas and inspiration. I collapsed onto the barren ground and trembled at the thought of consolidation with monstrous authority. Only by keeping perfectly still could I avoid detection as these hunters could only prey on color and movement.

I crawled and dragged myself along as I had so often done before, only this time my life depended on it. I had always seen escape as the easy option but under this tangled mess it was my destiny. Rather than be subsumed by the prevailing power I chose to cut and run and lick my wounds.

The arachnid was seductive and lured me into a sense of insecurity, knowing that I would become enmeshed into its false doctrine. It clutched at straws in its search for the remaining scraps of current affairs on a crumbling planet tumbling through a disinterested universe. I really had nothing to say.

The media monster massaged me, stroking and cajoling me to lie about the truth. Who was I to resist the charms of a broken robot? I was swept up in the pathos of my own narrative, a sweeping saga of destitution and despair. It seemed natural to be drawn into the unnatural.

For my sins I was glued to the web, a victim of my own passivity and deviance. I could have avoided capture by this fiend but in my heart I was unsure that it was so wrong. Only when the strands tightened on my flesh and the nightmarish thing crawled towards me did I doubt that I was happy.

The web stretched across the ravaged world and almost held it together. I was suspended in time, a figment of my own imagination. The drooling insect was merely another side of my character, or so I thought. We were pitted together in a final showdown, the last residual life forms in the twilight of the earth.

As I skirted the village of neglected television sets, a shadow moved within a shadow. Clutching hands on multiple legs reached out and a hybrid creature scuttled over the boxes and peered at me. Logic dictated that the apparition should not exist in a sane world but it was far too late for sanity.

What had looked like a pile of junk from the distance turned out to be that and more. Someone had lovingly assembled a community of television sets, or perhaps they had wandered here of their own accord, too afraid to face life without broadcast media in this post apocalyptic era. They huddled together with their blank faces staring at the cruel world, devoid of the warming bloodstream of electrons that had so nourished them.

I was fed up with the apocalypse, so I turned my back on it and walked away. Sadly it seemed to be the next big thing and was hard to escape. By the time I had left the trashed city far in the past I was getting edgy and bored with my own company. My four legged familiar trotted next to me but was unreachable and diffident, a creature of habit.

I watched the television closely, searching for a shining pixel of truth within its armory of invention and hyperbole. A month of Sundays flew past and I twitched as I observed flapping newsreaders, croaking commentators, soaring celebrities and a flock of inanities. I was no better than any of them lying in state in the eternal motel of the mind.

Nothing much had changed since before the Apocalypse. In fact, if it wasn’t for the desolation that surrounded me, I could have been a paying customer in the cream brick dungeon of my past. There was only one thing missing from my sojourn in the disintegrated motel.