Alexander kept going down to the creek to check for water despite knowing without a doubt, every time, that there would be no water there. He took the same footpath, now newly wood-chipped, down into the little deeply forested valley which he had taken ever since he was shown the place so many years before. The path was busy with out-of-towners; once, with a rare spasm of extroverted charm, Alexander asked a blonde woman was there any water in the creek, to which she got confused and said she hadn't made it that far, by which Alexander understood that she had never seen the rocky creek bed with water in it before since it had been dry for a cruel five consecutive summers. The wood cushioned path came upon the creek bed perpindicularly, and then T'd off to the right and left. Therefore when Alexander came within 50 feet of this crossroads he knew immediately whether the creek was still dry or not, which of course it always was, for even  when the April downpours came and baptised the oak trees and cottonwoods for the millionth time, the thirsty dirt drank the waters greedily until they stopped, and yet each time he turned right at the T and took the 15 minute walk to a certain rock, possessed of a simple magic geometry if not occult magic energy, to see whether it was truly as dry as his eyes told him. On such walks he was occupied by fantasies of a five foot wall of water roaring violently down the dry creek bed, hurtling through the woods like an awful serpent sent as the final demonic reckoning of Sin itself. Or perhaps, he thought, that hot cracked empty rock pool below his occult sitting place was in fact a spring which would bubble and burst up with cool clear water just for him, simply because his thoughts magnetically demanded it. 
  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Little Monk wondered about a small green sphere filled with static white bubbles which attached to the end of a key chain of outrageous number and proportion that they kept clipped to a loop, sewn on for that purpose, on their pants. Monk wondered, rather than contemplating or ruminating or meditating upon as was much more their nature, because the small green sphere had changed rather drastically since the last time they looked at it, which had been very recently. It had been twice as large, was filled with two types of clear liquid of different densities, and contained a plastic green bear who had a smile on its face and its arms behind its head which was of a third density, such that the bear was floating on its back upon the denser of the two liquids, big round belly reaching up to the sky, in a continuous state of gratitude that the world should be as it is and delight that sensations should feel the way they do, or so it had appeared to little Monk.  The appearance, and physical shape, as Monk was rolling this sphere around in their fingers, had become a much smaller translucent green sphere which was solid, though filled with white bubbles which clumped around the center, as if protecting something, as if the mystical happy bear had shrunk to miniscule proportions that it might delight in the new sensations of that tiny existence and had summoned a cocoon of air about it. If the little bear was still inside, it had shrunk so small that it was no longer visible to the sensory apparatus which Monk possesed. What the little Monk wondered about was how, within the material framework of possibility known as physics which they had observed during their aeons roaming the surface and aether of Earth, the little plastic ball had transformed so quickly and drastically, or whether they were witnessing the result of a miracle. A miracle, posited the little Monk to themself, is a product of human yearning. Through a hundred thousand generations of human beings unloading enourmous psychic energy of desire into that deep well in the archetypal library called Miracle, the theoretical event had become an absolute truth in the human experience, and by the nature of absolute truth itslef, was of a dual nature, both sides of which are simultaneously true and anti-true.