Troubled Minutes and Dark Thoughts.

He lay in darkness. Since the electricity had decided to take a break, he could only hear the clock, the sound of which was otherwise... invisible. There was only the ticking, no tocking. No talking either. He lay on his back, almost motionless as if out of humble fear. He lay there till he could deciphire different shapes in the code of dark. He saw the lamp, in shape but out of life. The chairs, the window, the clutter in the corner, he saw it all in shape but out of life and colour. He felt lesser fear and more comfort. He recognized his room enough to make an educated guess of what lay where. He could not, however, make an educated guess of when the electricity would be called back from its recess.

Electricity, a fool's paradise almost a century ago, is now an economist's inelastic good. Kingdoms and empires were built and held strong without electricity forever before a hundred years. And yet if it's taken away now, life becomes still. Electricity is the equivalent of a beating heart, and maybe within a few years, in more ways than one.

Thoughts like these hardly ever bothered him. He was busy in demarcating the point of discomfort; the level of moisture that his shirt ought to reach in order to prompt him to get up and change. In the darkness he picked his nose and rubbed his finger on his shirt, he WAS going to change eventually; showing no confidence in the electricity's loyalty. And with fair reason, electricity acted like royalty, often sought and seldom found.

As the ticking grew monotonous it grew fainter. The beating of his heart now took center-stage. He thought of the phrase, "heart skipping a beat". And he tried, oh so hard, to skip one. However, he could only manage to make his heart beat faster and faster.

He was awake, but he hadn't moved much. He lay there like a twig in a puddle, ready to embrace whatever future it may have to endure. The negative tone and the word 'endure' reflecting the pessimisstic nature of the man. He had already thought of seven different deaths which he might end up enduring in the blackness of dark. None of them, though, was suicide and half of them involved the super-natural. Black was his favourite color, but he was secretly afraid of its essence.

Once he had completed the gory list, he decided his least favourite was getting bit by a snake in his sleep. That thought had distrubed him a great deal on an earlier occasion. He decided however, that he did not mind dieing of shock. Yes, he would not mind that.

So, he said whatever prayers he could think of and he started preparing himself for a shock.

Luckily the shock that came did not kill him. The electrical shock was back; electricity had returned. In less than a minute he had disposed off all of those ill-thoughts and changed his shirt. In another minute, the only sounds you could here from his room were that of the air-conditioner, the fan and himself. The clock became non-existant, like all that supported it; a nail in the wall.

And ( just for fuck's sake) he lived happily ever after...