“Where am I?” said the little girl, sitting up in the sailboat to find herself in a strange, new land.
“You’re in a new story,” said the Keeper of the Stories.
“What kind of story?”
“It started with an idea. One so powerful, it became real.”
“Whose idea?”
“Yours, of course.”
“But I believe that there is an idea underlying the randomness. An idea so perfect and powerful that the cloud of infinite potentiality spontaneously sprang into being to commemorate it.”
“I just wish he didn’t have to live under the constant terror that comes with believing the world is at the mercy of a mercurial white overlord who’s just itching to pull the plug on the whole thing.”
“Oh, a doomsday preacher, huh?”
They couldn’t take their eyes off her. It was their subconscious hope that by staring at her intensely enough they might forever burn her image into their vision, to never again look upon another thing without her likeness imposed faintly over it. Anything to take away some portion of her dimming lifeforce to carry with them into the untold years and pathways ahead.
Its curved, elongated neck and the wings that folded back into the shape of a heart were the very picture of enduring grace. But it was that elegantly pointed beak which completed the swan’s stunning aesthetic. Until that was, you ventured too close to her nest and she came at you violently biting and pecking with it. Sita could not think of a better emblem for that which she must become.
Her resoluteness carried the same authority as the bellowing voice that was said to have thundered down the slopes of Mount Sinai.
“Each person and each thing in this universe—down to the very smallest of things—is like those dots of color on the movie screen. We only appear to be different. Except, instead of mirrors, we have minds. And like the mirrors in the projector, our minds trick us into believing we’re all something separate.”
“They say question everything? I say, question nothing—because where does it even get you? It gets you nowhere, that’s where. Just your head a-spinning and the world no better off for the trouble. So, I say we just skip right to the ‘fuck it all and kill it all’ part.”
The large electronic sign across the horizontal concrete beam at the top gave a subtle strobing effect to the words: “Seafaring Man: The Fossil Discovery that Sparked a Revolution”.
The fossilized remains were laid out as a near-complete jigsaw puzzle in a glass case. The softened spotlight from overhead along with the reflections of solemn faces hovering ghost-like over it evoked the scene of a deceased national hero lying in state.
The placards along the base of the glass tomb gave all the essential facts.
Seafaring Man was discovered sixty years ago along the coast of the Horn of Africa.
He was estimated to be a towering six-foot-five.
His skeletal structure was that of a mythological god of war.
But his face was deformed. Not from an accident, but from birth. One eye was set higher than the nasal cavity and one eye lower. The jaw was skewed to one side, toward that of the higher eye socket. The most curious thing about his disfigurement, according to some, was that it happened to align his facial features in near-perfect accordance with the golden ratio.
But even more interesting was the story told by the mineral deposits found in the trace amounts of soft tissue preserved with the fossil which contained minerals unique to both sides of the Red Sea: The Horn of Africa on the west and the Arabian Peninsula on the east in modern Yemen. Hence, the name, Seafaring Man. This made him the earliest intercontinental human on record, a crucial link between Homo sapiens’ ancestral continent and the lands beyond that the species would go on to explore and eventually dominate.
“If there’s one thing I want each of you to remember, it’s this: whatever is, is perfect. Because every possibility plays out in that infinite, dimensionless cloud of potentiality anyway. So there’s no need to fret over what does or does not happen in a given version. It just means that every variation is valuable, offering something that the others don’t have, so you just have to soak it in and appreciate it for what it is.”
“Yeah, imagine that,” cracked Thomas. “A burnout spouting religious nonsense on the street corner because he’s convinced the world is coming to an end. I mean, it is, but because of things we could conceivably fix if there weren’t so many fixated instead on placating their own irrational and self-serving version of the almighty white man in the sky.”
Galloway raised his hands up in the air and walked around to the side of his car. It was a drill that had become as much of a habit as code-switching.
When we successfully resisted their advances, they resorted to killing most of the buffalo we depended on for survival. It took us by surprise because it was the kind of ruthless crime against nature we would have never believed to be within the capacity of humankind to consider, much less carry out.
Joshua shuddered at the sight of those predatory green eyes, magnified through those haunting cat-eye glasses, as Sarah smiled big for the parting shot. Even as the Home Depot commercial started to play, undoubtedly one of the top sponsors of the apocalypse, he couldn’t take his eyes off the screen.
Joshua laid in bed and silently called upon every faculty he could marshal to suppress the cough tickling its way up his windpipe. Every molecule was in pain. From the matted hair on his scalp to the unclipped toenails poking through his socks. But he couldn’t even bring himself to think about the violence a cough might wreak at this point. Death by axe seemed an act of mercy by comparison.
“We are always looking for the next great leader when we should be focused on the cohesive underlying force that only occasionally and fleetingly manifests itself in heroic individual acts.”
“I like to call it the everything wave. That’s what we really are. We’re not just one thing, or one person. We’re everything!”
“So does that mean I’m a girl and a boy?” quipped a little girl with beaded braids that clicked like ice cubes in a glass whenever she head-bopped.
“Sure! And everything in between. Or neither! There’s no need to limit ourselves with labels the way movie projectors limit the everything light! Not once you know the truth of what we really are.”
Little Joshua sat in the front pew alongside his brothers and sisters, his feet dangling well short of the red-carpeted floor and itching with restless energy. But whenever they even thought about swinging, even just a little bit, his father somehow knew to shoot a stern glance his way with his lips writhing ominously before miraculously reshaping to saintly dimension upon returning his gaze to the choir which sang like angels constrained in conservative formal wear. The colossal organ towered behind them like a brass-pipe fortress. Every note bellowing in baroque severity.
It was not until the last note ran out of breath and the elderly gentleman with the Yoda aspect came shuffling to the podium that his father finally gave up on arresting him with his oppressive side-glances. Like everyone else in the tabernacle, his attention was fully engrossed on the one they called President. Or Prophet. His mother began to shine like an overly smitten cartoon princess and then she leaned over their laps and whispered, “This is it”. The prophet went on to tell one of his famous stories. Except this one was about his father. It was a story that would cast a long shadow over the remainder of his childhood and much of his adulthood for that matter. A story that would fill him at times with tremendous pride. And at other times, great annoyance.
And then there were the times it would be used as a cudgel, wielded as a weapon to beat the sense of self-worth right out of him.
They were racing up the trail toward him, enfolding another track into this enigmatic ensemble. The ground tremoring under his feet and working its way into his flesh and his bones and into every cell and synapse like some primordial force being revived from the ancient earth.
But the young mother and her son were still too bewildered to react as the throng of unfamiliar faces exerted a numbing effect on them. While most of their new friends maintained their smiles, their eyes were spinning like sprockets coming loose from their chains. A million questions caught in their throats, which their conspicuously clenched teeth struggled to hold back. Despite their best efforts, the people of Valbona could not conceal the horror seeping through the spidering cracks of their contrived façades. What they were seeing simply did not make sense.
How did these two manage to stand on the twigs they called legs?
How did they not wail in agony over the open sores eating away at their shaven heads?
And where did all their hair go, anyway?
And the most pressing question of all:
How in god’s name did they get this way?
“There is far more love and wisdom in the pure, collective will than there ever could be in a system driven by the elite few.”
For two days they traversed the barren highland plain, surrounded by towering domed peaks and the snow blowing off the tops like sinuous spirits returning to their home amongst the clouds. On the third day a small town materialized out of the arid valley floor like a mirage gaining for itself the concreteness of material being. The buildings were quaint and colorful. They gave the impression of a coastal villa having been misdelivered to the wind-beaten roof of the world.
Her skin glowed with a pale, bleak luster under the colorless sky as she lay in her final repose, with the bluish hue of her lips providing the only blush of color in an otherwise monochromatic world.
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