Whatever said those words must not have realized that I could see my husband through the back window, dangling lifelessly from a tree.
As my vessel drifted along the gloomy seascape, I spotted something stranger than any leviathan: my name, scrawled in the sediment.
I couldn’t let her third eye see that I’m not actually a priest, or that the real one is rotting in a shallow grave outside the village.
At one point, it turned to me and hissed, “Before I met him, your son looked just like you.”
“I just don’t have the heart to part with my lifelong friends,” he explained, as I noticed my missing pug Frank perched stiffly his nightstand.
“Yet,” he responded, removing a pair of pliers from his toolbox.
As the first few drops struck his pallid skin, the boy bared his fangs in a grin and said, “I knew this guy was a fake.”
Today, I came home to find him standing between me and wife, gun in hand, asking me who I was and what I wanted from them.
Now, watching my father scuttle along our ship’s wing, I know she was telling the truth.
After a moment of bliss, I remembered that I cannot breathe underwater, and our once tender dance became the thrash of a drowning man.
We followed tracks in the snow until we reached his frozen corpse, but none of us could explain why the tracks led past the body and off into the horizon.
Our team retrieved dozens of coffins and a variety of burial garments, but we never found a single body.
He sank down, and down, and down, until the hungry trench swallowed his universe. Therein dwelled a darkness so ancient that the stars were but a passing dream by comparison. For eons, such darkness had remained unillumined by humanity’s curiosity… The diver’s torch flickered and sputtered, casting feeble rays through the murk. Though he did not know it, his flame incensed unnamed things, older than gods, who would never abide such glowing blasphemy in the temple of night. Limbs and tentacles swirled about the ink, dancing to tectonic heartbeats, as the scion of Prometheus learned that his little lights could not hold back the void.
Pen and paper, with digital editing.
Those cosmic dusts cascaded on Earth like glittering nebulae, and great spires sprouted wherever they landed. Their sublime psalms called us forth, to serve a purpose beyond the self. We fed our flesh into towers, and, with the fusion of offal, climbed our way back to God.
Pen and paper with digital editing.