Walk into my parents' house to find puddles all over. At first, I'm angry, hunt for whoever made the mess to tell them "mop it up!" But the soaking garden and the salt water lapping in the canyon below the house, hundreds of feet higher than it should be, slowly force me to conclude: global warming's gotten so bad that at high tide, the water rose all the way up the hill to the house and flooded it.

No one to blame but the jerks who buy gas-hog cars. And they never mop up their messes.

I go into my old bedroom to find another mess. The mirror's shattered! Seven years bad luck, eh? Glass shards all over the floor... and my sister Althea's just sitting there with a toddler! The mirror's far above the baby's reach, so Althea must have done it. But why? At least it's clearly her responsibility to clean up! I'm perversely pleased to have someone to blame for SOMETHING.

But Althea mutely points to a pitted stone on the floor. Less than an inch wide, no more than a fat bullet, but still smoking hot. There's a hole in the roof. A meteor.

My neck starts prickling. The universe itself has smashed my mirror! Like a death threat from God.

I always thought "No one is out to get you" was a reassuring phrase... but no longer.

After all, who's deadlier than No One?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Parents' house = I've been feeling ill, and holed up this week to avoid stress--as I did as a kid.
• Flood = allergic stress. Seasonal, cumulative. If it passes a threshhold (my parents' back door is a literal "threshhold") I get sick.
• Mirror = I went to hypnotherapy and visualized myself with a girlfriend. Exciting but stressful too.
• Althea = my tough sister, who ignores her fears and feelings, doing what she must. When I try that, I get sick.
• The meteor-bullet = Fritz Leiber has a story of a man shot between the eyes. He finds he's a ghost. He wants to live. So he goes back in time and warns himself! Prevents his shooting, but then SOMEONE ELSE kills him. Again he goes back, changes the past, and a THIRD person shoots him. Next he succeeds in grabbing the gun, but it misfires--he shoots HIMSELF. On the Nth try, he covers all possibilities... and a meteor drills him between the eyes. The time-stream wants him dead! He gives up--he's proven he can duck each punch the universe throws, but life will mean an endless siege. Mind you, I reject that view of time as one-track; people acting on premonitions or predictive dreams can in fact change their fates, implying some form of multiverse (see Sally Rhine-Feather's study The Gift).
• Warning! Misled by doctors and therapists (Freud and successors have much to answer for!) I thought my illness was mostly psychosomatic--"stress". Specifically, my inner mom punishing me for breaking her rules that I stay single, poor, a leftist saint. Wrong! I'm sick from physical causes, probably allergic, and I need to do manage it as such, or face constant attacks. Happy thoughts won't block allergens--or meteors through the roof.

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