strange bOUnce

They’re Here, You Know

November 27, 2012 — betting, flash fiction, inner demons, percentage of brain used, short story, superstitions, voices inside head

By Roge Slater

They’re here, you know.

You may not realize it, but they are. Sitting next to you, standing beside you, working with you – even sleeping with you – but you wouldn’t know. You might sense it, but you wouldn’t be sure. They can be here at any time, even all the time, but if you did sense it, it would only be because they let you.

They’re that strong, you see.

They can force you to think something and then discard it in an instant. All that they leave behind is that little doubt, a niggling, lingering thought gnawing away at your inner self, as you try to equate what you sense and what you see (or don’t see, actually), and then you balance that with form, with what you know, what you believe with all your heart, what you can touch, what you can feel and what your superhuman brain will allow you to work out for yourself.

Amazing, isn’t it? We have all that brain power yet use only five percent – but we will believe that five percent over instinct ninety-nine percent of the time. Something doesn’t add up. They control instinct. They pass that fleeting thought behind your eyes, to tantalize and disrupt a chain of thought or for just plain mischief. They understand because they were here, and now they are here.

When they were here, they were just like us. Now they are here again. Back at the races. Or at least, we think they are.

Do we? Our senses perhaps don’t allow us to see, feel, hear or touch them.

We would normally discard them. But then they get inside your head. An image, a sound, a word in your mind or a thought in your subconscious. Just enough to be aware…. They become tangible if we believe – then, we can put the mortgage on them…

Not sure?

Listen to them – turn off salient thought and listen to instinct. Just for a moment. Don’t use your mind or analyse and study, let instinct tell you what is the right way.

Just don’t let them know!

If they know, they’ll mislead you.

You have to follow your first instinct no matter what , and maybe you can do the same with the second, but then you have to discard the rest. By then, they will know and they will play games with your mind.

Later maybe, when you have tried and seen what instinct can do, then you’ll learn how to tell what is instinct and what is mischief, and you’ll be able to follow more and more. But they will learn too and they will make things harder. The more you learn, the harder it gets – otherwise everyone would know they were there and everyone would be able to follow.

Then all our instincts would be the same.

We’d all back the same horse, just because – at first glance, the first instinct – it would seem like the name jumped off the page.

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They’re Here, You Know by Roger Slater is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.