SciFi Interlude No.1

feature image illustration by Moebius

My thirst leads me to a stream. I lie in it for days, letting it wash me clean of the Anthropocene.  Did anyone else escape the exodus? The stream shoulders the burden of these thoughts. Their weight carried downstream. 

I follow them.  

I follow them until they congeal as the water becomes fetid, festering in a concrete reservoir. 

I search for another stream and am led to a golf course water trap, complacent and impotent.

I experience their imprisonments, their landscaped deaths and concrete graves, as my own.  Like an explorer looking to undo what all previous explorations have led to, I am desperate to find a way back, below, behind, beside, before…

The promise of something puppeteers my limbs onward.  Pulling me through dense brush before cutting the strings without warning. I clatter to the ground and crawl through soil that becomes clay that becomes sand.

The riverbed welcomes me with breath both sweetened and soured by the lifecycles within it.  The face of a lover whose reed, grass and wildflower eyelashes butterfly kiss my skin as I am pulled in. 

I am carried like a tired child.

The river surges and tosses me along its undulating rapids. Time and memory clash and I feel as though I am back at the station, swimming against a current of bodies rushing toward the terraformed promise land.  I stiffen and sink. The river tells the truth; I am the only one that stayed behind. The only one that chose Earth over a brand new, fresh slate Mars. I surrender to the knowing and slide along algae covered stones that would otherwise crack my bones.  

I drown and resuscitate over and over, reincarnate infinite times.  The blood from my nose gives iron to the riverbed and in return the river teaches my blood to probe toward the ocean.

The ocean. 

She will know what to do.  

The river delivers me as though I am an orphan born into a world that doesn’t want me, the ocean spits me back out onto shore.

I try again and She does the same, pinning me back onto the beach so the shells and pebbles can grip my tendons, hold me still. 

I scream at Her, roar at Her. After all I’ve given up in order to be with Her? To stay with Her?  But she roars loudest and my sounds are swallowed. My rage has nowhere to go but down. Down to my pregnant belly that rolls and quakes in protest.  

Now I understand. She knows it’s time, She is the keeper of this kind of time. 

I am humbled, embarrassed.

As the realization dawns so does the pain. The child is crawling toward the world. Every inch forward is a battle I fight against myself.  I whimper for rescue but there is no relief coming, the only way through is to push toward the pain and hope to explode out the other side.

My muscles tear and still I push. My pelvis cracks and still I push. I push out my organs and I push out my eyes. 

As they dangle, held by threadbare optic nerves, the world sways and spins. Through this drunken kaleidoscope I see it emerge. Pincers first.

It scrapes itself into the world, beckoned by a siren song heaving and pulsing beneath the waves.  Cloaked in the shell it sucked from the mineral sediment of my veins, it’s passage is eased by the flow of my blood toward Her. 

She has called forward this glorious monstrosity, evolved to commune with Her rising waters in a way that I can’t understand. I am the vessel of life on Earth’s next chapter and will feed the gulls with my insides before my use is up.

I thank Her,  for everything, and dissolve into dream as the sun flickers out on the human race.