Bus Stop | Alexander T. Damle

            On September 31st, 1893, William Cormac walked out the front door of his farm house, inside which, down a hall, up stairs that a decade and a half earlier he had constructed carefully with his own hands, nails and boards bought with coin made from working in other mens fields, lay his two sleeping children, he their sole watchmen after the death of their mother, and he walked five miles down the road, and sat down by its edge to wait for the gold line bus. He sat crosslegged and stared out down the long road towards Denver, expectantly, anticipating the invention of the internal combustion engine, the birth of the bus, the creation of the Denver bus system, the laying of routes this far out into the countryside. He knew it would take a great time, but he would wait. What else was he going to do?

            After one week’s time in which he did not move from his spot, Thomas Crittenden walked up to him and spoke to his old friend.

            “William, why then doth thou set here when there are crops to tend?”

            “I must wait here for the bus. If I leave to tend my crops, I may miss it.”

            “In this then I see sense.”

            “As in all things born out of the internal combustion engine.”

            “The future.”

            “Yes.”

            So then Thomas walked on for he had his own crops to tend, and, after all, not all men may be blessed at being the great diviners of future-tech and hangers on to the end times. As he tended his crops, William remained sat waiting for the bus.

            One year later as William Cormac still sat waited, his eyes not once shuttered, his legs not once stretched, he received a second visitor, and he rode a pale horse, for it had a condition which limited the amount of pigmentation in its skin, and William greeted the rider, Pastor Jonathan Radley.

            “William, man, how’s it hanging dude?”

            “I wait for the gold line bus.”

            “Far out, man. Listen, I’ve gotta tell you something, and it’s some seriously bad news man.”

            “Yes, father?”

            “Your kids man... dude, they’re, like, totally dead, man.”
            “May I ask how?”

            “They, like, starved, because there were no crops. They didn’t, like, want to go look for food because they were, like, waiting for you to come back, man.”

            “This is sad, but understood. After all, what are we if we do not wait? I must not leave my post for fear that I may miss the bus, and they could not leave the home for fear that they may miss me.”

            “Radical, dude.”

            The years wore on, like a carousel revolving about its axis, its forward progress an inevitability, lit up under fairground lights, ground sticky with dropped cotton candy, crunch with spilled popcorn, screams of ecstasy fill the air, young couples losing themselves into each others eyes, parents looking with passivity after their children in a place of safety, while behind the men’s room a strange man approaches a boy who has become cut off from his parents, but the lights of the fair ground are lit up all the brighter, people sing and laugh and dance, because no one goes behind the men’s room, and still William waits.

            In 1914, the first car rattles past the bus stop, and William waves his hand slightly at man’s forward progress, though he knows still that his bus is a long way off, and still he has not even begun to stir from his spot, not let his eyes drift closed.

            One day a few years on  from that first car, a man sees William’s spot on the ground, passes him, turns, then walks back to him.

            “Are you the prophet William Cormac.”

            “We are all then prophets in waiting.”

            “But you have waited the longest of all.”

            “No. Those in the grave and those unborn, they are the ones that truly.”

            “How then, how may I find grace?”
            “You may sit as I do, but most men eventually will stir. Only in death will you find true peace.”

            So the man took a gun out from in amongst the folds of his clothes and blew his brains out, a fine red mist carried on the breeze into William’s face, a mist that William politely wipes away.

            Time moves more slowly now, as change comes faster, and the road is widened, then paved, and in 1934, the first pilgrims begin to move slowly past William, in cars hacked together from pieces of burned out souls, the bits of salvage of lives now owned by the banks in this time of near-oblivion and grand desperation, when the only hope is in the west because we have now conquered all else, save that beneath the seas and up in deep space. These pilgrims pass William without remark, only occasionally asking him for a bit of food or maybe a place to stay on the long road of their endless journey, but William declines each as the last. These people are waiting as he is, though they wait for death or salvation that will not come, and Tom Joad will be forgotten on the beaches of Normandy, across the fields of Europe, deep into the heart of Germany, blood and fire and steel, and then the young men who lived through hell shall come back and they shall again wait for salvation in the form of the office and the nine-five, but still though William shall not stir for he knows in waiting he will find what all they search for, and in waiting he need not age, and he need not fight, and he need not eat, and he must simply sit and keep eyes open, turned towards the road.

            In 1963, men come and work around William, and they build over the farms, over the crops awaiting harvest, create that which are called skyscrapers, tall buildings, glass and steel and concrete, and one of them, on his lunch break, takes his little brown bag, contents: one bottle Coca Cola, one ham and cheese sandwich, one Gala apple, sits down next to William, and engages William in his first conversation since the dead man.

            “What’s your name?”

            “William Cormac. And what is yours?”

            “I don’t remember.”

            “That’s a shame.”

            “Truly it is. I lost my name along with my bible up a prostitute’s cunt.”

            “How did they end up there?”

            “The same way I ended up here.”

            “Ah yes, this would make sense. May I ask what you’re building here?”

            “Sodom and Jerusalem.”

            “Is it not Sodom and Gomorrah?”

            “We all lost our bibles, so we had to improvise.”

            “I see. Well, I think your friends are going back to work.”

            “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

            “Until then.”

            The man never returned to William, for the next day he awoke and remembered that his name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and he was supposed to be president. The construction crew was sorry to lose the unnamed man, being as it was that he had the strength of ten normal men, but that, they supposed, was one of the benefits that came with the presidency.

            More years flittered by like old newspaper caught up in between buildings in a big city as the spot in which William waited now was, great buildings built up high, man trying to escape his chaining to the devil. More now asked William what he waited for, in his old fashioned clothes and slicked back hair, like no vagrant they’d ever known, and still he told them he just waited for the gold line bus. They told him the bus did not stop there, until 1976, when men came in to install a bus stop. This was the first time William had moved since 1893, and he found his legs were cramped upon standing, but once they had the stop in place he was able to go on waiting in greater comfort.

            Eventually a young cop came along.

            “Sir, you cannot sleep here.”

            “I’m waiting for the bus.” The cop looked at the bus schedule posted on a sign next to the bench.

            “What line, sir?”

            “The gold line.”

            “There is no gold line bus in Denver.”

            “That’s why I’m waiting for it.”

            “I suppose that makes sense. I’m sorry I disturbed you.” The cop paused and looked at William. “Do you want me to bring you a book or something?”

            “How could I wait if I had something to do.”

            “Of course, my mistake, I’m sorry.”

            “Don’t be sorry. After all, I’m only waiting. Some day I will stop waiting, and so will you.”

            The cop walked on to continue his beat, the usual non-actions of a patrol in a nice area of a big city, until he turned down an alley at the end of his shift to take a short cut to his favorite diner, in which there was a pretty young waitress by the name of Jo, who would serve him pie and flirt with him, and today he would ask to go to the pictures with him, but on his way down the alley he saw a gang of young men beating up an old dog, and when he approached them to try to help the dog, one of them took out a pistol and shot him in the head, and his brains exited through a hole in the back of his skull, and later the young men would go into the diner, point their guns around, ask for the money, and Jo would try to go for the door, but the same young man would shoot her, then watch her bleed out through the hole in her stomach.

            William of course didn’t know any of this and it affected him not at all, after all, he was only waiting for a bus.

            Time went on, other buses stopped, drivers asked him where he was headed, and when he told them he was waiting for the gold line, they simply shut their doors and drove on.

            The years, so many years, drifting past, forgotten by dead men, held onto like a gift from a long lost love by live men.

            Once a thief tried to take William’s wallet. William gave it to him, but when the thief looked at in his hand, it turned to ash.

            “What’s all this then.”

            “I’ve been waiting here a long time. Wait long enough, and we lose hold of object permanence.”

            “Yes, that’s obvious, of course. I have a degree in theoretical psychology from Harvard, after all. My question was why ash?”

            “I don’t make the rules.”

            “Yes, you are right in that.” Then the thief went on.

            On the twelfth of April, 2015, a young man with a stylish haircut and dark clothes came up to William and sat next to him on the bench, looked him up and down. After they sat there together for a while, the young man began to speak to William.

            “Look man, are you going to give up on this soon? I’m really getting tired of this.”

            “Who are you?”

            “Well, I’m the writer, I suppose.”

            “Ah, yes. Well, you created me. That doesn’t mean you can kill me.”

            “If I could kill you, I already would have done. I’m just asking you as your father if you could just give this up.”

            “You’re too young to be my father.”

            “How old do you think you are?” Then William was two days old, the genesis of an idea to it’s expression on paper.

            “That’s a neat trick, but it doesn’t solve your problem. Why do you want to end this?”

            “I’m running out of things to write.”

            “You’re a writer. When you run out of things to write, then you are nothing. But I have a solution to both of our problems.”

            “Yes?”
            “Give me my bus.”

            “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?”

            “Because you’re scared and you’re lonely and you’re only doing this to stop you from thinking.” Then the writer got up and left.

            A few hours later, WIlliam found himself very tired, and, reckoning that he’d been waiting one hundred and twenty two years, the bus wouldn’t just happen to come if he closed his eyes for a few moments.

            He woke up ten minutes later to see the gold line pulling away without him

No Escape From Reality | Theland E. Thomas

My bed is black, my room is black, the space behind my eyelids is black, but there are shades of light floating, spinning, changing, barely visible in the black. Heavy eyelids are not the cause as much as another state of mind. I feel my mentality shift from processing alertness to the calmness of flowing waves, and in this state, I lose sense of my heavy body and begin to drift out to sea to a new world not quite bound to the one I’m tethered to in wakefulness. I’m traveling on the black sea of my mind, the faint buzzing of electricity crashing about me, moving me deeper into tranquil numbness, silence, sleep.

I travel on the waves with the content knowledge of past experience. I know where I’m going, but I don’t know what I’ll find there. Soon, I arrive on the shores of a new reality. I know when I arrive, I won’t be fully aware I’m dreaming. That it will be just like wakefulness, but with a different set of rules that make complete sense in context. I hear the tick of the clock on my wall distort until each tick is a piercing, metallic ring, like the pounding of steel beams against each other. The black quickly deteriorates from the middle, another scene bleeding through.

It’s a bookstore. I’ve just entered, and I walk past the popular fiction display at the front, the smell of coffee wafting from the shop on my left. I love bookstores. They’re almost too much - a place stacked with shelves and shelves of thousands upon thousands of books with pages upon pages of alternate realities, differing perspectives of life, love, sorrow, and happiness. It’s a place of infinite possibilities. I remember days of youth spent in libraries and bookstores, reading books without buying them, the new book smell, fast food, essays and quietly waving goodbye, the second-to-last person to leave.

I take a step toward the fiction section but for some reason am compelled to look to my left. There, I see a girl I know but am afraid to recognize. I can see emotions battling on her face, eyebrows knitting as she starts to smile, then her face softening with worried, hopeful eyes. She lifts a hand. “Hi.”

This inevitable meeting is something I’ve consistently prevented myself from thinking of, and now, confronted with it, I don’t know what to do. She might disappear if I turn away, so I do that. Everything behind me fades into a blur of grey as I walk around the display Now, before me is a man in a trenchcoat with a hat pulled low over his face. He seems to be smoking, but I can’t smell anything but the delicious new book smell blending with the coffee. The man reaches into his coat and pulls out a container. “Hey, man, you want some hummus?”

“Actually, I do.” I take the container from him, and he gives me a spoon.

“This is going to be the best damn hummus you’ve ever tasted.”

I pry the lid open and eat a spoonful, realizing that this is, in fact, the best hummus I’ve ever tasted. I remark, “You’re right, this is the best hummus I’ve ever tasted.”

“Told you,” he said. “That’ll be just ten dollars.”

I nearly choked on my second scoop. “What? I’m not paying ten dollars for -”

“Look, you took the hummus. It’s ten dollars.”

“I don’t want it.”

I try to give him back the container, but he refuses to take it. “Hey, I offer you some hummus, and you take it, and then you don’t want to pay me. What kind of a person are you?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have ten dollars.” I wag the container in my hand, but when he doesn’t take it, I drop it, turn around, and walk away.

The girl is gone. I escape into rows of bookshelves, keeping my head bent, scanning the spines. What I’m looking for, I don’t know, but I’ll recognize it when I find it. I search thoroughly, scanning each individual title, author. I search row by row, up, down, and across, but I still can’t find it. I move to the next row and stop, startled by who’s standing there.

My heart plummets and races at the same time. It’s my dad. He’s spent eight years avoiding me, and I’ve spent eight avoiding him, and here he is, casually browsing through a bookstore as if he has a life outside of my supposed construction of him. He sees me, and his face lights up. He says my name, and I frown in disgust. He takes a step forward, and I take a step back. I don’t want to deal with this right now, so I turn my back and walk away, hiding a frenetic impulse to run with a collected demeanor.

I turn between the bookcases until I feel I’ve lost him. I slow, along with the thumping in my chest, and turn one more time. There she is again. Ana. I nearly jump when I see her. This time, the hope in her face has been eclipsed with sadness. She utters a dejected, “Hey.”

“Hey.” I stand fair distance from her, an asinine precaution considering that she can hurt me from any distance. The mature thing to do would be to stay and talk things out, but a little, red alarm is screaming in the back of my mind.

“So,” she starts, “how are you doing?”

Ana stands immediately before me, and there are books on either side, but beyond that is a blur of grey. She’s looking at me, awaiting my reply, and I can feel the tension of an unstable reality pulling me at the seams. I need to escape somehow. I need to change the course. Time seems to stand still, and I have the odd sense of the gears in another part of my head turning. I’m thinking, but I can’t access what I’m thinking about. And that’s when I realize that this is a dream.

I turn away from Ana and walk deeper into the store. I don’t want run from her just to bump into my dad again. At the same time, I’m pushing to find a way out. I’m straining to get back to that state of blackness, back to the sea through which I can bubble to wakefulness. But, it’s no use - I’m stuck here. In the middle of the store is the man in the trenchcoat standing behind a small stand that holds canisters of coffee.

Coffee! That’s what I need! Coffee can wake me up! I approach the stand and ask, “Can I have some coffee?”

“Yeah,” the man says from below the brim of his hat, “for twenty dollars.”

“Twenty dollars! You know there’s a cheaper coffee shop right over there, right!”

“But that coffee won’t keep you awake. This one will.”

“Fine.” I pull a twenty from my pocket and lay it on the table. What flavors do you have?”

“Got regular, decaf, and hot water.”

I take the regular and sip it vigorously as I make my way back toward the door, bracing against the searing heat that burns my mouth and raises the bumps on my tongue. The shop grows fuzzy in my peripheral as I approach the exit. Black spots swim in my vision, and, though I’m standing, I feel as though I’m not upright. My eyelids are heavy as I feel myself drifting from the dream and repopulating my body. Finally, I push on the door…

And it’s locked. I snap back to the bookstore with a sense of dread. The door shifts and buckles against my futile pushes. Dread crashes over me, an uneasy swimming feeling. I’m trapped. I turn from the door and scan the building. Leaking coffee slides down my fingers, drips from the cup, and disappears into the stylish, spotted carpet.

I don’t see my dad, Ana, or the trenchcoat guy, so I pick a armchair in the corner and pretend to read a titleless book from the shelf. I hold it in front of my face so I can peer over it, but then I hear a voice to my left. Of course, it’s Ana. I gulp, my throat suddenly dry.

“Oh, hi,” I say, “what a coincidence running into you here.” I look at the book, realizing that no one could have gotten three-fourths of the way through in such a short amount of time. Nervously, I stand, placing the book upside-down on the chair’s arm. I grip the coffee, using it as a barrier between myself and her.

“Hey,” she says. She’s nervous too. She’s wringing her hands and biting her lip. Despite the cold front I put on, something inside of me goes soft. I want to embrace her, to be close to her again. To tell her everything’s okay. To forgive her.

She continues. “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, but…” she looks down at her feet. I’m not ready for this. I know what she’s about to say, but I’m not ready to forgive and forget or to let go of the acidic pain I’ve been clutching. “...I’m really really sorry for what happened. How I treated you… it wasn’t right, and I’m so sorry.”

The tears welling up in her eyes trigger my own, and I don’t try to wipe them back as they fall. I try to say something, but the words won’t come. I desperately need to get out of here. I take swig of coffee.

Suddenly, a shadow overtakes Ana. It’s my dad, I recognize more through implication than through form. He’s eschewed his human form for that of a shadow that towers tall and spreads wide and bleeds in disappearing currents. Fear strikes to the core of my being, and I turn to run, but the shadow expands, enveloping Ana and everything around me until I’m floating in a completely black space. Before me, I see remnants of my dad’s distorted face hanging in the air, his eyes, nose, and mouth disassociated from any physical body, his features one with the darkness.

“Son,” he says, his voice muted by surrounding black, “We should make some time to talk.”

I cross my arms, and I know if I turn my back or close my eyes, his face will still be right there in front of me. “I don’t want to talk to you,” I say.

“Son, you have to understand. I am a sinner. Will you please hear me out?”

Anger and pain rushes to the forefront, and I hate that it manifests as hot, seething tears. “Why should I?” My sobbing voice can’t convey the hatred and bitterness I feel, though I try to squeeze it into every word.

“Because I’m your father,” he pleads.

“No,” I shout, the anger bursting forth. “You were my father before you left, but you threw that all away. I’ll never forgive you!”

With that, my dad’s face dissolves, and the black seems to swirl to a central point, releasing me into the bookstore. The light blares into my squinting eyes, and I hear a horrible sound - a collective wail, sorrowful, heartfelt weeping from an entire crowd. What’s going on? My eyes adjust, and I see the man in the trenchcoat looking down on me from under his hat, shaking his head. Behind him, is the weeping crowd - my family and friends - my mother, brothers and sisters, my best friend, my grandparents, Ana, and my dad - all crying uncontrollably, all covering their faces. My mother holds my grandma as she sobs, staring at me with the black make-up smearing down her face. My best friend covers his mouth and shakes his head at me. Ana hugs herself and rocks back and forth, unable to meet my gaze, and my dad sits cradling his face, his tears soaking his shirt.

The weeping is horrible and overwhelming. It rattles me to the core until I’m weeping too, crumbling to my knees, and I lose grip of the coffee and shut my eyes as the tears stream and flow like water from a creek flowing naturally between rocks at night, traveling in aimlessly in a direct route going further and further and deeper and deeper and closer and closer until I open my eyes in my dark room with a heavy heart and a gasp.

I roll onto my side and find my phone, prompting its cold light that cuts the night. New message from Ana: “Hey”.

I open it up and type a cautious reply. Then I delete what I was writing. Then I delete her message. Then I delete her contact information. Then I roll over and go back to sleep.

Form/Reform | Alexander T. Damle

            When people tell me they fear death, I look at them funny, as if they’d just told me they were afraid of breakfast. Every morning, I wake up, workout, shower, eat breakfast, get on with my day. Every morning, without fail, as do we all, or, at least, most. And thus I say, with the total assurance of a man with a great love of waffles, that death and breakfast are much the same. They are total inevitabilities, not some sum calculation of a long process of choices and coincidences, not the force of a bullet ripped headlong through flesh, but waffles pulling you out of a groggy state of exhaustion, accompanied by a tea or coffee or orange juice, as set by personal taste.

            This claim usually gets met with a look even more confused and, after ascertaining that the individual in question isn’t just a fan of pancakes, I go on by going back. Far back, all the way back, as all the way back as my liberal arts degree allows me to go.

            I go back to the first atoms of carbon on a new born earth, roiling magma and unformed gas, seas boiling and land a flying car, just a few atoms of carbon, about in the ether, existence as yet unmolded into blueprint or purpose, a mere fever dream of something grand yet to come.

            And then it begins.

            Forming and reforming, forming and reforming, something then nothing, nothing then something, in and back and over and again. And the carbon has grown, evolved, become something, simple, at first, a single cell, but the beginning. The beginning and the end for, as the cells are formed, they are unformed, born and dead in the flap of a butterfly’s wings. But this is not the end because then it just begins again.

            Forming and reforming, forming and reforming, over and over for a time unreckonable, over and over for the same length of time that man has stood and looked out over the earth. And out of this eon of change comes something bigger, grander, more cells, more processes, a firing of nerves and electrons that some would some day call a brain and others a computer, but that which is really just another stage in the form and reform. The creature swims slow, its vision foggy, maybe blind, and it swims and it eats and it mates, it’s born and it loves and it dies, but this, too, is not the end. The seas change, the waters cool and our little bundle of carbon changes right along with them, forming and reforming, made and unmade, born and unborn.

            When next we meet it, the carbon walks on four legs, short, stumpy, slow, stupid, but with sight and smell and taste, birth and life and death, over and over again, a million million generations of short stumpy stupids, until short and stumpy gets a little bigger and a little smarter, forming and reforming, forming and reforming.

            A great beast, scaled and magnificent, stands towering over long grasslands, jaw the size of a six year old kid. The biggest badass in a time made for badasses, hunting, fighting, mating, living, dying, how our carbon has changed. But still it does not stop, and still the process continues, forming and reforming, a million more great lizards, until fire falls from the sky and the lizards are gone, replaced with beasts more modest, less direct affronts to the gods. In shape, that is. In mind they aim to, one day, challenge the gods, build cities stretching so tall that they may scratch god’s balls, then take a strong grip on them and ask what the hell this is all about.

            But that’s jumping ahead.

            So the carbon forms and reforms and soon the lizards become mammals, from small, scurrying things, eventually come those that deign to wander on two legs. Forming and reforming, forming and reforming until the two-leggers begin to pick up sticks and stones and begin to fight and kill for, they reckon, they are the apex.

            But, as always, they form and reform, form and reform.

            The beasts learn speech, and from speech they invent their makers, and from their makers they invent art and love, and this, they say, is the apex, we, they say, are the chosen ones. And yet still they form and reform, begin and end, live and die. Over and over, forming and reforming, the carbon mixing and molding, always a constant across creatures uncountable, those same small atoms of carbon, born and dead a billion times over, but still our carbon kicks about, forming and reforming.

            The carbon is part of a farmer, then a leader, then a soldier, then the bricklayer who builds their first great city, a place called Babylon. But this is not the end. That which does not truly begin, can never truly end.

            So, still then, the carbon forms and reforms, itself uncaring at its ultimate destination, a passive traveller in a great cosmic soup.

            And then, once more, the carbon is born, formed, made anew, this time as a creature known as you. You are born screaming and crying, looking desperately for a something to latch out onto, something to give you a creator and a meaning and a purpose, a beginning and an end. And you find a mother, and she is warmth and light and comfort, she is that which you call god. And you find a father, your soldier, your shield against the darkness, your rock, and he is what you call protector, and in your father you find the way of standing, and in your mother you find the way of loving and for your whole brief span of forming, you will battle in between these two always, everything a struggle between standing and loving. And on you go. And soon enough you speak your first word, mama or papa or, if you are of mind wholly independent, something wholly unrelated, and thus you find a third path, apart from loving and standing, the path of constant reformation. And thus you climb and strive.

            And suddenly they cast you off, your god and your protector, alone and unprotected, surrounded by two dozen other bundles of carbon, learning the earliest ways of loving and standing, the earliest charades of that which the carbon once fought, blood caked in its hair, with sticks and stones. Soon you lean of life without a god and protector constant at your side, and maybe that independent side develops out a little more. You form alliances, based on cause imagined rather than common, born out of shared fear, fear of the other, of the one that you call the teacher, that you call the bully, that you call the yucky ones, of hair of strange length, face of bizarre lines.

            These lines of war and strife make you, even as your comrades fall off. Suddenly, the yucky ones become the lovely ones, and you find your basic self changing, growing longer and bigger and hairier, and the lovely ones haunt you, eating of your soul as the ancient ones tore with teeth at smaller beasts. Their haunting becomes a disease of your own soul, and as your body grows, your heart withers, beaten and cut and scarred, and you make yourself in the image of that which surrounds you, or, if you said a third word back in that time outside your memory’s deepest shroud, you make your own image, designed as the yin to their yang.

            All at once, you cease to change, and all the combatants stop, and look around as if Helen magically were restored to her place on the Spartan throne, and you find your feet again, and you find your god and you find your protector once more, and the yucky ones that became the lovely ones are now the beloved ones. And yet your learning continues, and the teacher becomes a guide, and the path, as it grows infinitely, at once narrows, as you see it shoot off straight towards a far off horizon, that the bundle of carbon still lying at your base recognizes well. Now, though, the great struggle is against that horizon, a struggle fought with loud, harmodius noises and strange substances engineered to guide you off the path, to show you another way, a way that you cannot seem to know. A way of forming, and reforming.

            But you skate on forwards, towards the line, towards the zenith you imagine you see on a road altogether flat, a dreamed of great house, a pretty beloved, happy kids. Or maybe you don’t, maybe you choose the path of the wanderer, searching the earth in its great expanse for the origin or the ending, without the self knowledge to just look within, to see the carbon that makes you.

            The zenith you build up around you, great walls in front of your eyes to keep from seeing that the horizon line now draws ever closer, and as you forget your beginning, you begin to lose sleep, lusting after a true notion of that which comes at the end. The two are one and the same. This the carbon knows but will not tell you, because it has seen this happen a million billion times before and will a million billion times again.

            Your greatest comrade in arms, from the struggle you’d almost forgotten, one day finds his path of reformation begun again, and in this you finally catch your first glance of the genesis and you witness a terminus, failing to recognize in the end a new beginning. But that, that will come later, in some long early morning, on a beach in South Florida, or pitched out by the side of your pool under the Arizona sun.

            Even as you know you are your childrens’ god/protector, they yet push away from you, finding their own bodies as changed, and you see them in the struggle that just a short age ago you survived, and you want to reach out to them and touch them and make them see that, in the beginning, is an end, but in the now is just more change. And maybe, probably, you reach them, and they see, and, as you, they grow up and out and again learn the name of their god/protector, but maybe, once in an impossible eon, or, at least, an eon you thought impossible to reach you, they decide to pry open the doors of the train, and make an early exit, and maybe this destroys you. But in this tragedy there is no true end, just unforming for the sake of reforming.

            As the way of love, or the way of standing, your children move on and up and out, and into their own phase of playing out life’s heart strings with chemicals and music. And you turn to your beloved and you ask where it all goes and she has no more answer than you.

            Soon enough, that which you whiled your days away with for purposes of survival, your hunting mammoths, well it pushes you out, says your time is done, now it’s time to relax, time, finally, to live, but live you cannot because all you ever lived for is gone now, and you find yourself that little place in the sun, and you look about in despair, wondering where to which it has all gone. And then, one day, your children they knock at your door, and in their arms you see it begin again and your eyes fill with tears and your kids ask you if you’re okay and you says of course you are, and finally you see it, the forming and the reforming, and you take the child in your arms and finally you see the carbon.

            And then you live a little longer, really live now, warm and content, your beloved by your side, her hand in yours, and for the first time you are happy, though never more so than when your kids knock at the door. Eventually, you feel your beloved’s grip weaken, slacken, slip from your hand, and you cry, even as you see it all form and reform.

            Time passes, your own body weakens, your kids put you in what they call assisted living, but living can never be assisted, for this is a place of ending, and you know, so it goes, and you see it all reform around you, and you feel your mind slip, until all you can remember is the face of your beloved the first time you saw her.

            Then it all comes back, birth, the god and protector, the battlefield, the experiment, the love and the work and most of all your children knocking at your door, and then, like that, you are unformed.

            But this is not the end, this is just the start of another age of forming and reforming, another time of motion and change, and the carbon watches a billion billion lives begin and end, all pulled into one continuous timeline, all one, the single celled to you to whatever comes after.

            Then all at once, the great ball of fire that once lit the sky begins to cool, and the beasts get smaller, and short and stumpy comes back, and the one celled, and the carbon doesn’t care because its seen it all before, so it just moves on, ever forward, forming and reforming, forming and reforming, forming and reforming, and then it all suddenly stops as the light in the sky gets suddenly brighter and brighter, and soon it all stops and it’s all engulfed in a great ball of fantastic light.

            And the carbon fears for a second that here, then, is that which we long now dead once called death.

            But out of the light comes just more forming and reforming, and here now the carbon sees that which was before earth, the great, awesome expanse of everything, laid out in every direction, towards an infinity line that those that once lived could never have begun to understand, and yet here the carbon sees only possibility, expansion, more and more, forever and ever, all the balls of fire slowly, ever so slowly, ripping themselves away from each other in that which we call entropy, and soon it’s all spinning off and the few threads that once held us all together are torn asunder, the universe itself now finding an ending.

            Here yet though, is still the carbon, against it all. For in nothing there is still something. But in this nothing we find a barrier that I cannot see past. Even that, though, is a qualified statement, for, in the great minds of our time, there is a place beyond maximum entropy, beyond the zero, a new beginning and a new ending, a new great age of forming and reforming, as all that once moved forward now moves back, death then life then love then birth, the one celleds, the short and stumpys, the two-legs, the mammals, the great lizards, the short and stumpys, the one celleds, the time before the earth, all the way back till once more on the other end is another end, that again rubber bands back towards birth life death, death life birth, on and on forever, against it all.

            And in this we find our death, an illusion, just another unforming in a great constant cycle of forming and reforming. So, then, to fear death is to fear birth and, even, life itself. Death, in this way, is as breakfast, a beginning and an end on only a most limited time scale, because, even after the next great age of maximum entropy, there is the promise of yet another breakfast.

A Long Day | Theland E. Thomas

Falling! Darren jolted awake with a shallow gasp. He sat up straight at his desk and looked around him. No one noticed. Alright. He fixed the pencil in his hand. All I have to do is take some notes… He opened his eyes briefly and stared at the last written notes that trailed from incomprehensible scribble to a line that traced all the way down the page. He strained to sit forward, cradling a nearly empty cup of coffee in his left hand. The clock on the wall read 10:22.

“So, as you can see,” the professor droned on, “if you take the derivative of 2y2, you get 4y. And if you take… let’s see here… the second derivative, you get just 3. Isn’t that right, Darren?”

Darren’s eyes flashed open. “Um, yes.”

“No, it isn’t,” the professor said, erasing the answer she’d written on the board, “because you would get 4. Maybe if you’d stay awake in class for more than five minutes, you could actually learn something.”

Heat simmered in Darren’s cheeks as he opened his eyes. He sat up and squinted at the board. Did he miss something? He was in the front row, for God’s sake. He couldn’t keep drifting off like that. Leaning his heavy head against the wall, he gazed at the other students. Their expressions betrayed them. Some were clearly bored, head in hand, eyes glazed over. Many held chronically quizzical faces no matter what. There was always that one brown-nosing nerd. The rest of the students who already knew the material just ditched, but she had to show up every day to generously flaunt her understanding upon the plebeians. Then there was the group of Asians behind him. Darren didn’t know what language they were speaking, but, God, if they would just shut up while the professor was talking… So disrespectful.

He blinked. All the students were gone. WHAT? Darren jumped up, sending his coffee careening into the wall. The classroom was vacant, the lights were off, and the boards had been erased. The white gleam of the moon shone on the desks. His gut churned with sickening weight. What a bunch of douchebags! They’d all just left him there? He walked toward the door and tried it, peering through the pane of glass to see that the building lights were already off. Turning around to face the windows, he realized they were his only chance of escape. Darren took off running toward them, and, as he jumped, he vaguely remembered that the classroom was on the fourth story. He turned his face as his forearms smashed through the glass. As he descended, his body twisted to view the shower of sparkling shards ready to impale him. His stomach dropped out from under him. He was falling!

“Ah!” Darren jolted awake. The classroom was silent. He looked around. Everyone was staring at him. Including the professor.

“I’m sorry, Darren,” she said. “Was my lecture interrupting your dream?”

Darren rolled his eyes. “As a matter of fact, it was. Bug out.”

A soft chuckle rumbled from the class, and the professor stood in shock, her mouth agape. The girl next to him turned to him. “God, Darren, you’re so edgy,” she said, looking him up and down. “I love a man that can stand up to authority.”

“Yeah,” Darren said, first matching her sultry stare, then watching her turn the pencil in her mouth, then glancing at her low-cut top, “Well, you know me.”

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. Like I need an invitation. He straddled the back of her motorcycle and wrapped his arms around her slender waist, pressing his body in close. Together, they sped off, the cloud of dirt in their wake blocking out the sun.

The light of it brought the classroom back. You gotta be kidding me! What time is it? Of course, there were no clocks in this room. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. 10:22. Only an hour and half left. Dammit. He sat up straight in his seat, rubbing his eyes and yawning. The hum of the professor buzzed lightly in his ears. Okay. It was time to pay attention. Passing this class is hard enough when you’re awake. He reached for his coffee, but it was gone. He leaned forward to see it on the floor beside him, spilled into the carpet. Whatever. Quickly, he caught up in his notes and raised his hand.

“Yes,” the professor called on him.

“Okay,” Darren pointed with his pencil. “So, we know about the polynomial, but what about the pterodactyl?”

“Oh,” the professor smiled, pointing to the green outline of the pterodactyl that took up the whiteboard on the other end of the classroom, “I put that guy right over there.”

“Oh, okay, good.” Darren copied down the image of the pterodactyl exactly as it appeared on the board. He leaned back in his chair. He needed to stay vigilant. Something’s happening. Just as he’d completed that thought, men in suits and sunglasses burst into the room, waving pistols.

“FBI,” they shouted, hoisting Darren out of his seat and spilling his coffee everywhere. “You’re under arrest!”

“What?” Darren protested as they slammed his face into the desk and pinned his arms behind his back, “For what?”

“You have the right to remain silent!”

“You didn’t hear?” The professor said as they dragged him to his feet, “Sleeping in class is illegal under the No Slacker Left Alive Act. I reported you last week.”

“ARGH!” Darren exclaimed, “Thanks, Obama!”

Darren bubbled to consciousness again. It’s going to be a long day. He took a sip of his cold coffee and gazed around the classroom in time to see seats full of his clones raising their coffee cups as well. Discreetly, he pulled his phone from his pocket. 10:22.