I’m still fighting off a cold, and now my asthmatic lungs have decided to house whatever germs have been partying in my exhausted sinuses. The obvious remedy is whiskey, but downing my bourbon before writing this blog post may have been a mistake. Although, given the label on my bottle, this could be better than I thought.

Anyway, very little proof (80 proof to be exact) reading has gone into this installment, so please bear with me.

Check out the update to The Eyes of God:

As I pull myself out of the pit, the rasping voice above me—invisible, as if from heaven—professes, “The prophet saw and spoke the Mountain’s judgment, but the people would not see.”

I reach over the ledge, but the loose gravel crumbles in my grasp. Falling backward, I hang by a solitary root, swinging to face the ravine. The bugs are gone. Scanning the barren rock, I find its surface cleared, not a smudge of blood, nor hint of crawling insect remains. Twisting my neck, I try to descry the corpse from which they issued. At the strain I feel the root slipping, my body descending back into the waterless, lifeless hole.

Grabbing another root, I turn and face the wall in earnest. My arms quake as I lift myself, one handhold at a time, up to the ledge, the final step out of this pit. Blindly, my hand searches above for something to grasp. Brushing the frayed end of a cord, my fingers curl around the rough coils of a rope.