(Story Excerpt) Karma

Kathleen moved the faucet-arm for cold water and refilled her vase glass through a lens of sangfroid insomnia. Moths and various nocturnal creatures, lifeforms skipped and fluttered within the porchlight outside the kitchen window and beyond into the yard, and the modest acres of land that yielded vegetables and give or take a dozen herbs and the salvaged barn that housed their animals for milk and eggs and slaughter. She took a sip from the glass and hoped for a thought she couldn't find. Her rumination gently endured her interrogations and pleading. It edged itself like a smell of burning rubber and her heart gripped itself with bird-like terror as she wished to God she'd never see 1 A.M. like this ever again, though humbly accepting such a depth of resignation could only be pried from the confusion and internecine loathing of her own fragile heart. Her heart nagged at something caught mutely in the ephemeral oscillations of synapses that originated from everywhere and yet descended to nowhere conclusively. She set down the glass and pressed her hands on the edge of the counter, folded herself like a safety-pin and asked herself if a child could possibly make this more palatable or if it'd only be one more sound in a night barren of obvious solutions and ridiculed by the expanding emptiness that begged everything that could see to see. 

She finally relented; something inside her relented. An invisible ocean swelled and swayed and glided with mercy befitting a god and in its stolid and miniature promise all the angst in the world was redrawn to zero. Another summer in Nebraska. Fire and flu and hostility and hysteria everywhere that would have them until they wouldn't or couldn't and then they'd be cast out like itinerant farmers to employ their misanthropic whims elsewhere. Kathleen wondered what made animals suicidal, if they had such doubts about life, or if they knew some other word for self-inflicted death. 

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