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Jun. 22nd, 2015 11:00 pmAfter an argument God, drunk, kicked Adam in and partly through the face then dragged him by one arm and a handful of hair down to the streambank, where he dunked his giant head into a small pool beneath a willow's roots, caught a fish in his teeth, spat out most of it, nudged the rest of it about his cheeks for a few minutes and then pulled from his mouth a rubbery looking green and purple glowing bag. He stuffed this into crying Adam's nostril and slammed it home so hard that the pool was red for days and the species lost the smaller and more attractive of its two original noses.
On waking in the hospital Adam found that some of the things he looked at stayed behind, or rather mockeries of them did, simplifications made of and manifesting in a restlessly shifting fluid, nearly transparent, self-lit. The substance couldn't be directly focused on, as it swam apart in panic into blackest corners and unders when one tried, but when one focused on some other scene or concept it would reassemble itself gradually at the center of vision, as though pooling at lowest ground, and accept being looked through. Once gathered it moved with his eyes. It would only color at first, and not dramatically, but the longer attention and enthusiasm were sustained for something outside the self it would begin to form complementary pictures, enhancing or underlining or extending or counterpointing what existed with what had or would or ought to or tellingly failed to do any of those.
God visited him on the third day, as he knew God would, God's benders being what suns wind their watches by, and asked him with a continent-broad smirk if he was seeing things. Adam looked at God a while till God became so uneasy he ate the cheap gas station bouquet he'd brought. Adam didn't say a word. God left.
Forty-four years later Adam said to Eve, twenty-eight, after a fight and reconciliation that he hadn't meant to snub God but kept clammed from fear of admitting that when he looked at God his color pouch had done something new, concentrating itself until it replaced him with how it imagined the bathroom door, wall-mounted phone and cowering nursing staff behind him might look. Its guesses were good - it almost never tried that hard. And certainly never showed that level of mimetic skill. It was almost like the world were nudging it, using it to prove there need be no gap. He was terrified at how easily he was becoming convinced of God's absence and of how furious this might make what God remained. If he spoke he feared the truth might come out with his words and that a race would begin between the well-advanced erasure and whatever swift outlandish violence God would perform to yank out the offending bladder from his brain. His fear, he thought, might have been all that kept God whole in the room, as a pattern of ripples suggesting a face. Like a nightmare. Had God guessed any of this? He'd moved away sans word that week, and had relayed all messages since then, even transmitted instructions for activating the dust-covered Eve unit, via shapes made by the shadows of the angels on the moon. Only one seemed to be alive now, and its shadow always looked like the same sickly comma. It hadn't even stirred in months. Eve didn't turn her head to look out the window. God talk again. Don't encourage.
When they were drunker and their heads were at opposite corners of the mattress she squinted over at him through a notch her fingers made and wondered if she had a subliminal light show of her own. Nineteen, she'd eaten part of his side and sucked one pupil from each of his eyes while he was sleeping, vengeance for an affair. Maybe if she winked in one of her secret sequences he'd disappear too. She tried some. He just snored.
It was hundreds of years later that she decided she'd had what he must have meant all along. He just hadn't described it for shit.
On waking in the hospital Adam found that some of the things he looked at stayed behind, or rather mockeries of them did, simplifications made of and manifesting in a restlessly shifting fluid, nearly transparent, self-lit. The substance couldn't be directly focused on, as it swam apart in panic into blackest corners and unders when one tried, but when one focused on some other scene or concept it would reassemble itself gradually at the center of vision, as though pooling at lowest ground, and accept being looked through. Once gathered it moved with his eyes. It would only color at first, and not dramatically, but the longer attention and enthusiasm were sustained for something outside the self it would begin to form complementary pictures, enhancing or underlining or extending or counterpointing what existed with what had or would or ought to or tellingly failed to do any of those.
God visited him on the third day, as he knew God would, God's benders being what suns wind their watches by, and asked him with a continent-broad smirk if he was seeing things. Adam looked at God a while till God became so uneasy he ate the cheap gas station bouquet he'd brought. Adam didn't say a word. God left.
Forty-four years later Adam said to Eve, twenty-eight, after a fight and reconciliation that he hadn't meant to snub God but kept clammed from fear of admitting that when he looked at God his color pouch had done something new, concentrating itself until it replaced him with how it imagined the bathroom door, wall-mounted phone and cowering nursing staff behind him might look. Its guesses were good - it almost never tried that hard. And certainly never showed that level of mimetic skill. It was almost like the world were nudging it, using it to prove there need be no gap. He was terrified at how easily he was becoming convinced of God's absence and of how furious this might make what God remained. If he spoke he feared the truth might come out with his words and that a race would begin between the well-advanced erasure and whatever swift outlandish violence God would perform to yank out the offending bladder from his brain. His fear, he thought, might have been all that kept God whole in the room, as a pattern of ripples suggesting a face. Like a nightmare. Had God guessed any of this? He'd moved away sans word that week, and had relayed all messages since then, even transmitted instructions for activating the dust-covered Eve unit, via shapes made by the shadows of the angels on the moon. Only one seemed to be alive now, and its shadow always looked like the same sickly comma. It hadn't even stirred in months. Eve didn't turn her head to look out the window. God talk again. Don't encourage.
When they were drunker and their heads were at opposite corners of the mattress she squinted over at him through a notch her fingers made and wondered if she had a subliminal light show of her own. Nineteen, she'd eaten part of his side and sucked one pupil from each of his eyes while he was sleeping, vengeance for an affair. Maybe if she winked in one of her secret sequences he'd disappear too. She tried some. He just snored.
It was hundreds of years later that she decided she'd had what he must have meant all along. He just hadn't described it for shit.
