Joan's Apocalypse
In the oubliette, Joan opens her eyes from her intense dream only to find herself in immediate despair. Brick walls and bars surround Joan, who is thoroughly beaten and tortured and she know it won't end until the day of execution comes. The old voice of God does not reach her ears. Only a fragment of the dream she saw moments before echoes abstractly in her mind. A dream in which she was a mermaid, swimming through the seven seas along with countless numbers of creatures she had never seen before. The dream was neither a nightmare nor a happy dream, but a little of both. She tries to remember, through her oblivion, the other parts of the dream, but in vain. Soon after her mind is deep in its desperate drifting, several guards walk towards her cell, every footstep crackling with the sound of their armour. She takes a heavy breath, tries to keep herself sane at the end of her oracular life.
The crowd murmurs loudly as Joan walks among guards into the square. There she is tightly tied to a pole placed at the centre of the square. A priest-like man says something about her being sacrilegious behaviour being the reason of her execution but it does not concern her. She would never admit to such sophistry. God knows all. The fire is lit. The flame surrounds her. For one last time she looks up at the sky in questioning.
The sun shines even stronger and the skies are smeared with wan colour, adorned with trailing remnants of thin clouds. The high wind is carrying whatever is up there day after day, and now moving as fast as a muddy stream after a devastating storm, but without unity in direction, like hundreds of years lost and retrieved simultaneously in a mere second, accelerating. It is impossible to tell where they are heading off, if not the semi-endless cycle of creation and destruction. The sun and moon rush their own revolutions and cycles as if they were the wheels of all dynamics of time and nature. Up high in the sky appear geometric designs and mysterious figures, wheeling round and round at each centre. The apocalyptic phenomenon is causing hysterics in people, who have no sense of what is going on but only an intuitive sense of ultimate horror and despair coming to them. Her intuition tells her it is the end of the world; probably God is angered by this ruthless act of men directed toward her. The stars are falling and the earth is cracking, and people are being burnt alive in the fire endlessly welling up from the earth, and sublimating in the air, vanishing. And she too, is burning in the fire, but she suffers no pain, and feels almighty, like one of the Creator who knows it all, and younger, like a baby who has been just born without a memory of lifetime, but she too, is vanishing in the air.
One day, a man in the future or past, somewhere in the world, wakes up with the memory of Joan, there he struggles to recollect the parts of memory lost in the oblivion, but only to find himself in vain. But in this inexplicable, irretrievable oblivion a sense of epiphany rises in his heart; the answer is offered... He gets himself out of bed, and runs out of his room in his pink pyjamas. On the street people stare at him but he does not pay attention; he keeps running until he reaches a destination, a local church, where he withdraws his knife and attempts to cut his own throat in front of the people bent in prayer. I do not know, if he successfully completes the attempt, but I can tell you, life never is complete, in the infinite, unbreakable chain of dreams.