Hyperaware

You know what's not healthy? Having a budding writer who is already jumpy about thinking he's a literary thief use wikipedia, and thereby learning how much ground previous genre authors have covered. Oh, that'll make the twitchy scribe even more squirrelly, oh yes it will. It'll have him thinking very terrible things, ideas that will make him miserable but will make his therapist staggeringly rich.

That said, after the writer had a profound mid-morning panic, he found himself in a rushed calm, as if the eye of the storm had passed over him, and there was this false tranquility, the kind where the wind stops in the hurricane and sun comes out, luring future Darwin Award winners out of their ravaged shelters to be of good cheer long enough for the rear wall of the storm to hit, sucking all the poor chumps up into oblivion.

The writer waited for the rear wall, but it didn't come. Waited a little longer, nothing. He pulled up a lawn chair and watched the sky go from a curtain of steel blue to a light azure, with fishbones of high clouds overhead. The wind picked up one or twice, carrying the smell of salt and the humidity over him, through his shirt and around his ankles, but it too faded, as the sky wall did. The sounds of cicadas chirped from the grass. A seagull registered in a lazy circle over what would be the ocean, probably scoping for storm-killed fish bobbing on the surface.

He took a deep breath, looked over the streets in front of him, and picked up his notebook and returned to writing, post-storm. The sun kept him warm for hours, gave him enough light to fill a dozen pages before the sky turned into a languid bruise. Orion was visible in the horizon, and he could hear more seagulls, diving into the sea foam, where a feast of dead fish awaited them. The writer could hear children now, playing in the street. He set down the pages to see his neighbors emerge from their shelters, taking an assessment of the damages with frowns and long stares. The writer picked up his notebook again, and with the scent of the ocean and the orange trees dancing in the breeze, he put his chair away and went in for the night.