Painted Sky
Elsie had never quite found God. Or maybe she had – in the idea that kept her up at night – that life was a toy in unseen hands or a game played by unknown players.
The Matrix movies terrified her. Too possible. Was she really just a body floating in goo? Being harvested while she played the game unawares? She read Flatland and wondered if other people were Spheres and looked down, literally, on her, the unaware circle.
Was she paranoid or was she the only one who truly understood? Free will was an illusion, and the sky a painted backdrop.
Extroduction
There is a certain way a skylike can present itself that always looks more like painted backdrop than reality to me. Like someone did an amazing job of realism, but couldn’t quite get perspective to work. Ironically, that’s the thing I now find hardest about painting. And now I live by a lake that occasionally suffers from Fata Morgana (ships apparently flying in the sky above the horizon) and always looks like the water is higher than the coast. The movie ‘The Truman Show’ rocked me because I could believe it was real, that I was in fact being puppetted by unseen masters and, like the Matrix, the world was designed to gaslight me out of recognizing the seams.
Anyway, all those thoughts led to my story above, which is really about me, not Elsie, but flowed better in the third person. Writing, I get to be the puppeteer after all!
I am obsessed with the ‘dancing’ of the audience in this clip. No wonder the screaming reception of for the Beatles caused such a stir if this was considered clubbing in 1967!
elmowrites 
