Rosie still in Heaven
In time, they sent her back to the Earth. Her task was to... But let's not jump the gun.
For the moment she sits on the edge of Heaven. And when she's not sitting, she's drifting in space, and that's how it's been days. She watches the ribbons of fog floating by. At some point she noticed that fog wasn't just a vapour. At times she felt she knew what fog really was. But those moments were just short flashes of enlightenment like the sudden glint on a water puddle, and before she had time to read and decipher the information floating in them, they disappeared and left only an empty smacking of the lips. And so Rosie sat at the edge of Heaven smacking her lips, but there was no catching those ethereal ribbons. "Screw them," said Rosie scornfully. But you know how it is. It's disturbing.
After a while, however, she gets used to it. Finally she works it out almost effortlessly. Curled up, she just watches the fog and wants to go to sleep but has no body for sleeping. She doesn't even know how it happens, but suddenly everything is clear to her.
She sees that fog is a compound of water and various ideas, that rises from Earth to Heaven after being heated.
These ideas pass in front of her eyes as a kind of quiet amorphous substance, intertwining, climbing up each other and enhancing one another. Some of them react against each other, like potash lye mixed with acid, explode and the next moment are calm once again.
The effect is like mute music. Some of the chords have an indistinct but very bright colour; while others have a slight smell that almost instantaneously turns into a gracious movement. In the stroboscopic light she can make out their chemical constitution and slightly differing physical properties - for instance the idea of cold is heavier than the others and flashes only once in a while through the ideas of food and end of the world while the idea of wealth moves much faster than the lazy Diet Coke. The idea of six ball-point pens moves in one direction and is fragmented into tiny particles, and happiness is unexpectedly small and unaggressive, too timid to take on a colour, although its cehmical formula is so original and unexpected that it could not be expressed in numbers and letters but only by certain kinds of flowers or by a large amount of liquid eraser, and then only under favourable scattering conditions.
Resting on her side, Rosie sleepily watches this gaseous panopticum. Always just about to fall asleep, because she has no body to fall asleep with. She remembers her biology teacher, Comrade Pardek, who taught her in school about the human braid and the chemical reactions that take place inside it. Would he be happy if he could see what she can see?
Pardek was the only teacher in her school who was not a woman. He was quite good looking, and thanks to an erotic orientation to young girls which was unusual in the local environment, he enjoyed many advantages. He used to call his fellow female teachers 'young girls'. Unfortunately he had a small defect, and this was small subcutaneous wen on his face, as big as a bean, that was always moving from one place to another, sometimes even at great speed. During his lectures Rosie often stopped listening and watched the wen moving from his throat to his cheek in only one short minute. She imagined a miniature mole is crawling under his skin, and sometimes she even thought she could hear the mole's muffled snuffling. Occasionally when the wen's movement became too fast, Pardek used to guide its course with two fingers while still speaking. He didn't like it when the wen decided to advance across his nose or lips because then he looked quite ludicrous, although Rosie understood that the wen was only trying to take a short cut.
"I wonder what Pardek would say," she says aloud.