Time was slow, as if oozing through the walls and seeping into the corridor of the ward. Two bold hands controlled the entire ward as they slid around the clock face at half the pace of a snail. 9:28…………9:28:01…………..

Two hours later it was 9:29.

Piper understood everything except the painfully, sluggish dripping of time. Seconds dribbled into minutes, minutes collapsed into hours. It seemed as though an hour would die of cardiac arrest before it could even consider becoming a day. But sure enough, from the moment her head hit the pillow each night, time on the ward was altered. The moon sailed through the sky on her journey and was finished in no longer than an hour. Time was a demon. The ruler of the ward. Exhaustion and fatigue were the only logical constants brought about by the monster. Cessation would never occur.

The world has lost its mind

Everywhere I turn I fear I'll find

Some nightmare even worse than those I see

Satanic demons closing in on me.

The beeping inside the phone stopped and Piper finally hung up. A young toddler stood before her and babbled in an alien language. Piper's eyes shifted frantically. She needed something that made sense. Consistency, conformity, anything!!!

The Newtonian laws of physics.

Newton's third law states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Piper pushed the child. Sure enough, he fell to the floor.

And then he screamed.

The doors flew open and in a second the room was flooded with the harshness of prickly agitation. Blurs of colour swept forwards, pulsing through the thick air and riding upon the crest of the waves of annoyance. Wave after wave crashed down around Piper, flooding her lungs and tearing at her head.

The world has gone insane Parasites are eating at my brain;

Nothing is the way it was before

A pack of wolves is howling at my door.

And then the child was gone.

In its place rested millions of atoms. His remaining scent, the particles of bacteria. Each strand of bacteria containing millions of tiny proteins. Each proteins made up of their own individual nucleus. Each individual nucleus containing protons, neutrons and electrons, which themselves comprised of millions…………….. it went on and on.

As did everything.

Further and further into the indescribable entity of nothing and everything.

Infinity...

I'm living in a non-stop nightmare, dead man's dream

Filled with screaming pain;

Turning me to mad extremes

In a world that's gone insane.

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