a lucid interval

woke up to the sound of gunfire, thought the world around was at war. I shuddered in my sheets while strange visions flashed before my eyes: mothers birthing children, vultures descending on carrion, an icicle melting from an overhanging roof, trees falling in the forest in the face of gale winds, and I could even see the trees decompose, I could actually watch the energy transfer from the decaying wood to the soil. I was hallucinating, envisioning the cycle of life and death, maybe the proverbial "life flashing before one's eyes." but these visions were not of my own life, were they? the visions were of all of life, one interflowing watercourse, and my mind instinctively recognized that I am a part of all of life, it is all a part of me. my reverie was shattered by more gunfire, much the same pattern and rhythm as the first. I closed my eyes to shut out the horror, and flashed back to a moment in my childhood. I was at my grandmother's house in New Jersey's farming country. in fact most of my extended family was there, one of those impromptu gatherings my Italian-American family was known for. there was a terrible thunderstorm, and we all sat on the long stone porch to watch it over the fields. the lightning traced evil spindly fingers in the sky. by the time the storm had gone on for a few hours your eyes were so trained on the flashes of light you could follow each bolt from inception to nerve ending. my grandmother was nowhere to be found. i went into the house, which was darkened in the power outage, and stumbled by candelight through each room not making a sound, knowing even in my youth the holiness of a dark and silent house. my grandmother emerged from the darkness into the hallway to face me, shocking me a little bit. she came close and knelt before me. I could smell the red wine on her clothes and her fingers. in the clouded darkness she looked almost blue. she seemed to have something dire to tell me. she spoke slowly and carefully, because of the wine: "a lightning bolt is the tree of heaven rerooting on unbelieving earth, illuminating the darkness we all walk in, but only for long enough to see what we miss with our eyes closed. keep your eyes open, my son."
I came back to the present and shivered a little, though it was almost summer in the Valley. shivered at the thoughts going through my head, shivering at the thought of the gunfire right outside my door and how all these thoughts, these words, would soon amount to nothing but dust if the gunfire came any closer. another smattering of gun shots rang out, in the exact same pattern and rhythm as the first two outbreaks. my mind this time went blank. all was silent as a cathedral in between the shots. I was searching the silence and the blankness for meaning. another spat of gunfire, and immediately another, hardly a silence in between. I swore I heard a baby crying in the next apartment, and along the corridors children and mothers screamed at one another. I shivered again and waited for my benediction. like a snapping bone, my mind cleared in an instant, as did all other sound. 'was I dead?' I wondered. because I was in the same room and felt exactly the same as when I went to sleep. I felt and looked around. everything in its proper place. in the street, a car rolled over scattered gravel and the stones made loud popping sounds in the friction between tires and pavement. this was my gunfire, gravel under tires. I could have sworn I was awake for the first time.