04 May, 2004 - 08:01

I was with my family at their house in the country and we were about to go off to bed with the knowledge that the world would end sometime during the night. No one knew when. My friend Emily from Japan was there as well and I remember buying her a Murakami book and offering it to her and her turning me down saying she had already read it. At some point the rest of my family came downstairs where Emily and I were talking and we heard some popping noises and assumed this was the start of the end of the world. In fact, the sound was coming from snipers running around in our yard shooting. I realised at this point that this was probably what they had meant by the end of the world. I crouched down low by a blocked off window so as to avoid getting shot, but one of the snipers saw my shadow from behind the window and I stood up to be shot.

I was arriving home to find my house door open and a shadowy foot under the kitchen door. I decided not to go in and walked down the block where my aunt Karen lived. She called me in and I told her about the weird shadowy feet while she started to grin a kind of mocking grin of disbelief. At that point my uncle arrived with a bag full of liquor of all sorts and my aunt forgot about me and decided to hunt through the bag.

I went to an adult video store on a Sunday afternoon to have sex with a guy whom I knew. I realised it was too early to meet him for sex. I looked around more and found that Alexis was sitting at the small, round table making apple peel drawings. There were four drawings of apple peels in various sizes and forms but they all had faces drawn on the white part of the peel. She asked me what I thought of them and I told her I thought they were good, except that the faces on the first two were hard to see. Suddenly I was in a car with my mum and sisters going down a country road which lead out to a very dangerous, mountaineous curve. As we approached the curve, everything started to slow down and the landscape moved in a form of visual staccato, bit by bit. Some weird public service announcement muzak started playing and the words EMERALD! EMERALD! kept playing through my head because of the dangerous curve. Finally we got past it, the car disappeared from around us and we had to begin the descent from atop the mountain via a narrow, brushy mountain trail.