He senses something big is about to happen.

This is significant, for in his own life, big things have already happened. Not the kind of big things you record in a video scrapbook so you can replay them again and again. And not the kind that demand reverence and silence or quiet admiration.

No, these were the kind of things you wished you could forget. The murdering kind.

Lying on his bed, an incongruous layering of faded, thinning cotton sheets, a temperature-controlled thermo-fleece blanket, and a flexible soft-steel coverlet, he has been drifting between asleep and awake for the past twenty-three hours; longing to sleep when his eyes open to a world of devastating loss, longing to wake when his lucid dreaming fails and tortures him with once-familiar faces twisted into Picasso-esque nightmares of grotesque unfamiliarity.

He wishes he could stay in the space between - this space where he can’t quite grasp the gravity of his sin and circumstance, nor imagine anything as unreal as a life where his choices do not result in the extinction of hope.

It is in this place that he senses it.

Something big.

At first he imagines it is the trailing edge of a dream, a billowing ache that any other time might have landed him on the other side with relief, thankfulness that something so horrible could never really happen in the waking hours.

But when he sees the spinning colors in his peripheral vision, he knows this is something different.

They last only an instant, a tornado of yellow and orange whipping around a ball of fiery red.

He turns toward the fleeing colors and his eyes settle instead on his computer monitor, the nighttime screensaver displaying black raindrops dotting black pock marks onto a black puddle. He rolls to his left, closes his eyes, tries to un-imagine what he knows he would see in his inbox if he sent the puddle away with a keyclick or a voice command.

Three days of deathly silence.

Has it been only three days?

He will not click the keyboard - it is halfway across the room, not quite balanced on  a mountain of unworn clothes, empty cans, and half-read books, but still fully functional, despite the chalky dust spilling onto it from the dented drywall.

He will not issue a voice command. His mouth is too dry for words, his mind too cluttered to form a rational thought. And what would he say? There is no way to reverse a confirmation to “Delete all Emails.”

The med-pac taped to his left wrist senses his anxiety and floods his system with pseudomelatonin. He falls back into a dream.

He is standing in the middle of an ice floe, naked and shivering. People are scattered across the blinding white landscape. They, too are standing, their backs to him. He knows them all. They are people he loves. And someone he loved. The ice begins to melt, slowly at first, then with anxious, time-lapse haste. Bodies slide into the frigid cobalt blue like helpless statues. They disappear under the surface.

Just before the ice evaporates beneath his feet, he stumbles out of sleep.

The yellow and orange and red tease him again, then dematerialize as he begins to recognize the sound of his own breathing.

A sudden, unexpected wave of peace washes over him. It is unlike any he has ever known. The answer to months of prayer, perhaps.

Or something else.

He smiles.

Something big is about to happen.