Every night it was the same routine for Sparkles. 9pm. Trevant would come, watch him, feed him, turn the light off. Immersed in the darkness, Sparkles would quickly drift off into the dream...
It was always the same dream. There was always The Glow; that foreign orange glow surrounding him, like the ethereal ghosts of a thousand beautiful orange goldfish swimming in unison, dancing, beckoning him to join them.
The dream was bizarre to Sparkles, yet not unpleasant. Quite the opposite: Sparkles grew to look forward to dreamtime. In the days he would often find his thoughts drifting off to the dream and its glorious symphony of colours, colours that only the most beautiful fish wore. Over time, the dream began to take on an almost religious significance.
"What does it all mean?", Sparkles would frequently ask himself as he sucked algae off of the gravel at the bottom of the tank.
. . .
"Man, today was fucked up. It's time to light up," Trevant muttered to himself as he arrived home and slammed the door. Plopping his tired self on the sofa, Trevant lit a spliff, watched his beloved fish Sparkles for a bit and was watching the end of the Jerry Springer show when the phone rang. He set his splif down and ran to grab the phone.
The spliff rolled. Touched the TV guide. The TV guide quickly went up in flames and sent flaming bits of paper floating around the room. One landed on the sofa and began to burn. One landed on the curtains and set them ablaze.
20 minutes later, as Trevant sat on the phone in his bedroom, he smelled something funny. Something burning. He ran back into the living room. "Oh fuck!", he shouted as he found his entire living room ablaze.
. . .
Sparkles watched with excitement from the aquarium as the flames grew and grew, consuming the entire living room. The bookshelf on which his tank rested caught fire and flames surrounded the tank. As the water temperature in the tank began to rise, Sparkles fell into a fevered delerium and was filled with a sense of religious revelry. As Sparkles began to slip out of consciousness, he was overwhelmed with euphoria and a sense of completeness as he closed his eyes to the world...
nodeshell challenge