Numbers

He was a normal individual, living his normal life very normally. He was moderately satisfied with it, his life and his normalcy. It wasn’t great. But it had its moments. And though he could not be considered an adventurer,- In any sense of the term, not even if adventurer pills were invented and he could take them orally-, he added great joy to his life through travel.

He loved seeing new places, experiencing new things, eating new foods, wearing new garments, puking new and interestingly coloured puke, riding new vehicles, taking new diarrhoea medications, and so on and so forth. He enjoyed every last bit of it.

But then one day he noticed the numbers.

He was surprised he hadn’t noticed them before.  They seemed to be everywhere.

But then maybe they hadn’t been there before. He didn’t know.

They were strange numbers.

They were painted on rocks and on walls and on odd little tombstone like things.

They occurred in regular intervals, he saw them everywhere as he travelled. And once he had noticed them for the first time, he could never again be oblivious to their presence.

They were sequential. They seemed to be counting up, or counting down towards some mysterious end.

But strangest of all… They were fractions!

He soon became preoccupied with their significance. Where do they lead? What is at their mysterious end? Why intervals? ...  And, most pressing of all … why fractions?

He started driving around following their sequence trying to find their origin or their terrifying end.

It was then that he discovered that their end never came. They were leading to something somewhere. That he was sure. But unfortunately, they never did. Or they did, but somehow he missed it.

Always!

Just as he neared the mysterious destination … The fractions would suddenly change. And a new sequence would begin.

Sometimes it would begin halfway through the sequence.

He was very annoyed.

Both by its randomness and also by fractions in general.

Then he thought maybe the spaces in between were inaccessible, placed by someone into strange time-space pockets that one must break into with futuristic technology.

Futuristic technology was not yet futuristic enough.

He did not notice how he began to spend most of his waking life following the numbers and developing theories about their meaning and then doing outlandish things in order to achieve something only he understood.

The numbers soon drove him insane. He never found their end.

The numbers pondered about themselves.

They wondered about their purpose.

They lived their two dimensional lives, trying to understand the meaning of it all.

And forever they awaited the return of that omnipotent paintbrush in the sky.

On a bright and moonlit night, on a road far away, an immortal child runs free, revelling in the glory that is life and nature. He stops, crouches near the ground, fascinated by things that most adults cannot understand. He jumps up suddenly and breaks into the run that is the only way he knows to be.

He giggles.

“Fractions are so much fun!” he says to nobody in particular and disappears into the night, a small brush and a little can of paint held tightly in his tiny hand.