“Where the hell am I? Oh, my head! It is going to explode,” John says when he wakes up in the fields outside his village.
He tries to get up but falls back to the ground, twice. He walks slowly towards his village. He finds it strange that he can see houses on the edge of the village that were not there yesterday. It seems to him he is entering a different village. He recognizes the church. This must be his village. As he is walking towards his house he recognizes some houses but they look really old. Some houses that were liveable yesterday, stands there empty, windows broken, roofs bent, weed in the garden. He meets some people. He recognizes some people but they look 20-30 years older. Everybody looks at him.
“Good afternoon, Sir,” the bartender greets John when he enters the pub. “What can I serve you with?”
“A cup of coffee, please. No milk, no sugar.”
“Here you are, Sir. That’s 50 cents.”
“Fifty cents? It cost only 20 yesterday.”
He pays anyway and sits down to a free table in the corner.
“John, is that you?” an older man asks from another table. “Where have you been? We all thought you were dead. You are not a ghost, are you?”
“I don’t think so. Ghosts don’t drink coffee, do they? I had a bit too much to drink yesterday and I fell asleep on the fields outside the village. What the hell happened here? Everything is different, and more expensive.”
“Yes, but you, surely, have not changed.”
Originally posted 2020-06-07 18:10:00.