by shaun lawton
I will enjoy eating this biscuit if only I could get it in to my lips. My hand lay paralyzed in my lap as if nothing could summon my arm up to bring the treat to my mouth. It whispered to me in evaporating traces of steam. You'll never manage to eat me it hissed. All I could do was stare at it helplessly. How it spoke to me I never could have guessed. As mysterious as its remote breathing.
Now I know a banshee is responsible, one that has been trained to throw its voice. They have been known to congregate on the west side of town. When the lower west side was abandoned due to the coronavirus in the pipes being found. It was rumored that not even the rats remained to inherit the alleyways of crumbs. Mysteriously only bats dared to lurk once in awhile in these desolate mazes.
Setting the hissing cracker down on the ground I stepped back and hid in a shadow. I watched as a stray armadillo sauntered over sniffing the ground with a course stubbled snout. It huffed and ruffled its hide while trying to find scraps of food to ingest. When it got to the cracker it inhaled it in a single lunging gulp. This lone creature wandered off with that stale communion wafer on its scaly tongue.
There hasn't been a spare moment for me to mourn fallen mankind. I've only considered the reasons in the wee hours before claiming sleep in the basement of the crumbling mall. I know the population of earth was said to have reached nearly nine billion at the peak crisis point. Before the organism of skins comprising the largest meta organ on any planet this side of the galaxy billowed out as a flag.
It was a vector line for parasitical viruses to exploit the only known resources in this astral lane. By burgeoning their size they were able to link together into a greater fabric, a bacteriological cloak of sorts to haunt the flanks of a rogue planetary body that had grown too heated for its own good. Its tectonic hide broke through with tessellation spines and the music engendered was truly hideous.
It should have served to call and harmonize with its neighboring granular clusters housing the colonization of a carbon based mantle. Instead of hiding the crucial chimerical symbiotic bestiary from the roving magnetoception of wandering stellar vultures, it exposed the interior carbuncles of an endlessly forming tapestry offered to the vicious predatory avians. Picked clean like a tray in space.
As a result the albumenic biome acidified to the point of eliminating any bony skeletal beings from existing under its ululating brilliance. Nothing left but cephalopods and sturdy specimens of jellyfish. The starlight refracted through these dappled rainbow beams along the ocean floor. On the itchy surface of the planet's hide homo sapiens would carry on with its murderous schemes no more.
By a series of mathematical elimination it made sense our species would be whittled down to one. The plague carried itself out in pairs so there was always going to be the possibility of one resistant who would be left without anyone else to pass the virus on to. I know its me because the silence that responds to my calls from the inside is stiller than the quiet splendor of the stars at night.
The fact the constellations no longer twinkle might be attributed to a clarification in the atmosphere. But I think it's because they've finally achieved full fruition into their ultimate formation. My mind's eye has opened its multifaceted prisms and allayed a vision so fantastic as to leave me petrified in its shattering myriad splendor. I've been caught in between the intersections of its reflections' stale mate.
This was to be the end game all along. One sculpture representing the major race designated captured on the surface of a barren planet to be subjected to the galaxy's forlorn song. Now that the harmony of the stellar contractions has diminished to a lull I no longer find it so easy to drift off into sleep. I realize now that's because each planet having hosted a bilateral life was thinned to a piercing shriek.
One thread issued from a pipe hole orifice at a time, held in space, spread out in a spiraling tribulation, representing the finest single line tracing a hologram in outer space that when zoomed in on is revealed to be a double helix configuration of molecules in a simultaneous state of ascension and descending into the baseline foundation of the very apex of visionary thought nailed to the head.
I've crucified the stare of my reflection. I've fallen into my image in the mirror. I'm drowning in the atmosphere of winter. I'm burning up in the ether of a star. I'm swimming down the drain into the melting sun. In eternity we haven't gotten really far. I never once yet have started the process I've begun. That's why the curtain falls only once upon a time. That's why the shield lands upon a dime.
I've drawn out the traces of an adventure. I've only just begun in time. I'm finishing the part about ever after. I find myself still being on the run. If it wasn't for the latest series of disasters I can't be sure I would've had such fun. As the lone piercing wail emitted from this sector goes, around here it's hard to tell how the whole damn operation was done. It's execution formed the memory held onto.
It's how we began thinking the war could be won. It was a matter of convincing the long lost participants to consider the other side of the matter. That a matter of fact couldn't bring the best back, nor the thought about going for a ride. It was all lost in a moment in September. It was all hung out to dry on a line. It was all we could do to remember. That it would all turn out just to be fine.
This thought is nine billion times stronger. This time nine billion times as bright. It makes sense the only one in the audience to attend is one's own son or daughter. We don't pretend to imagine we'd ever be out of this water. We only know the reality of how it's gotten much hotter. It goes to show a symphony of pain and memories. Even if we know they do refer to the legacy of a star fading.
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