Reality

He blankly stared at her lying there all blue-faced in a tangled heap on the red sofa. Unsurprisingly, she looked like she had just been strangled. He wondered how he was feeling. Hungry, he thought. And so he left the scene for the kitchen.

Into a cup of white flour, two slimy eggs were broken and mixed and mixed and mixed furiously until the slime transformed into a thick dough. The veins in his arm and hand throbbed from the exertion. In splashed half a cup of milk, half a cup of water and then the mixing continued, his hand spinning into a blur. Just a bit of salt and some melted butter and then the mix was ready for the pan; the first lot was poured in immediately and the pan swirled around until an evenly thin layer lined the bottom. The smell of frying dough came up from the stove. And then a wait. A flip over. And another wait, but soon the waiting was over, and what followed was relentless: crepe was flipped onto plate; mix for the next was poured into the swirling pan; apple sauce, cinnamon and suger were spread onto now cooled crepe on plate which was rolled up and lifted to his mouth and by the time he'd munched halfway down the roll the next one was ready to flip over. The rest of the current crepe was munched down; water was gulped from a bottomless glass. And then the repeat. And on and on and on went the production until it slowed down when the last crepe hit the plate and no mix remained. He slowed down too now. He was full and warm. He gazed out the kitchen window with the last crepe in hand and mouth and saw the blue, cloudless sky outside and realised that he needed to get out.

So out he went. He decided on a direction and stuck to it, a direction that soon led to a long canal of black water sparsely dotted with swans. Huge creatures, he thought. Huge white things. They slid gloriously along the black surface of the water. Look at those long necks, he thought. Or rather don't. He didn't feel like thinking of necks right now---no more necks.

What a world it was in this perfect weather: under a sky-blue sky, walking over grass-green grass, wading through the sweet, wet smell from the trees and the soil and the canal and duck and swan crap. It occurred to him that he was living in a beautiful world and the best thing to do in such a beautiful world was to walk on through and admire it and love it and smile in the knowledge the the world is beautiful, but why hadn't he done this before, this walking on through and loving the world? It didn't matter because he was doing it now and he wouldn't stop---nothing was going to stop him. And so he walked and walked, along the canal, past the old palace, through the gardens and out the other end, through the suburbs behind it and on and on until the surroundings were fields and farmhouses, livestock and barns. And still the sky was blue.

He sat down to rest on a rock on the side of the country lane he was walking along. Presently, a bird caught his attention. It hopped slowly closer to him, showed no fear, no tendency like other birds to instantly take flight at his slightest movement. The bird was black; it had a perfectly yellow beak and perfectly orange feet. And black eyes. He assumed the bird had two eyes, because all birds he'd previously seen in his life had two eyes, but on this bird he saw only one, the eye turned to him, the eye coldly staring at him. Coldly? He wasn't sure if it was a cold stare. It seemed more like a stare of disdain. Or disgust.

The black bird with yellow beak and orange feet stopped hopping and instead stayed glaring at him from a position about half a metre from his shoe. And then the bird spoke to him. Its beak didn't open, nor was any sound heard, but rather it spoke in such a way that the words skipped the air and the ears to go straight into the man's mind without having travelled the distance in between. Words? No, they weren't distinct words--they were thoughts, but that's too weak a term for what they were, for they brought utter, utter despair to him although he wasn't even quite able to resolve exactly what was said.
"Oh God, this bird!" he cried and stamped his foot on the ground to chase it away, but it took only a few short hops away and then stayed put once again with the black eye trained on him. It was futile, the bird told him. This was the end; it was real (oh how he wished it were a mere terrifying nightmare!) and there was nothing he could do to change it.