Retirement suited him surprisingly well, he found. Not having to be on alert at all times left him free to admire the pattern of fallen leaves on the ground, or the fall of light through the windows.
But there were aspects of his old life that he couldn't escape entirely. The flickers of shadow in his peripheral vision, for instance. And the inability to sleep for a solid eight hours -- he'd been sleeping in snatches for so long it had become part of his system.
He had a lot more time on his hands now.
(Not that he hadn't tried to go back. He couldn't. Because he didn't know where he was, and without that, he had nothing.)
He'd taken up painting for a while, but the fact was that he just wasn't suited to it.
Poetry seemed the next logical choice -- haiku, the first choice in poetry.
But he kept returning to the same things again and again, and something about his poetry never seemed to work right.
He was restless. And he had questions he couldn't answer.
How he had gotten there was the most prominent one.
And where, exactly, "here" was, was the next most important one.
It was a small island. He knew that much. No one else was there, and he'd never seen boats or even planes passing.
There was nothing but the house, the trees, the sea, and him.
The obvious conclusion, given what little he knew for certain, was that he was dead and this was... an afterlife of some kind,
But that didn't jibe. He still had a pulse. The stab wound was healing.
And there was fresh food in the kitchen. Footprints in the sand that definitely weren't his.
But for the time being, he had no reason to worry about such things. He had begun to think of it as a vacation of sorts, with no need to worry about his ordinary life.
The nightmares had stopped, for one thing.
Actually started writing this at a local con about three weeks ago, but didn't finish until earlier today.