CLICK HERE to start at the beginning

It’s a clean glow. A soft buzz, growing louder. It’s a funnel with a marble rolling in concentric circles, halving the distance but never quite getting to the hole. It’s life, open and vast, a plane of clouds merging with other clouds, forming pictures in the sky for some barefoot creature on the ground to admire on a lazy day.

It’s a mother and the love for her offspring. It’s a father and the way he defends those who no longer need protection. It’s the child, begging approval from the world. It’s the child and his rebellion against the world. It’s the world scoffing at the child. It’s an interlocked game with mystery as the key component. It’s a conspiracy with an open-ended margin for an unknown author to write comments on the side.

It’s Jordan, lying on his back in the last room he was ever human. There are visions eclipsing and occluding his consciousness. He was a ghost, a barren phantom, barreling through centuries with a lopsided grin. He was a hot dog vendor in a Metropolis, counting out change and shoving nitrates under the noses of his patrons. He was a hunter in the Congo, whipping and killing for ivory tusks. He was an afro-headed slave boy, in chains on a ship bound for the New World. Everything goes white.

It’s an onion peel of whiteness, each layer more translucent than the previous. It’s his father. He’s with him in this room, on his back. He’s telling him about tragedy and the loss of God. He’s giving apologies and instructions. He’s giving him empty air and desperate excuses for the blackness. Jordan protests that without shadow there can be no light. There can be no dream without reality to compare it with. He looks at the past through the eyes of a succubus.

It starts out clear, a bubble with an organism inside. It’s virgin, not stained, not fragmented, and never been rained on. It was bloody, but the blood didn’t stain at first. It was filthy, but the filth was transparent. Then the bubble got bloody and the blood was recognized, it made a stain. It tore the stitches open and the fabric of time began to bleed. Time bled from all orifices, past, present, and future. It bled like it was alive. It became alive because the blood was recognized as belonging to something. Time became aware of its own blood and named it, history.

The blood pool grows cancer. The cancer has nails; needle-sharp claws shaped by time. The cancer becomes aware of itself. It feeds on the blood that bleeds from time. The cancer is an organism feeding on an organism inside a bubble that bleeds from all orifices.

The cancer’s getting too big! It’s gets so big that it can’t see the blood anymore. Blood is the purpose of cancer, but the function has been eclipsed by growth. How much can it hold? How much will it take before the cancer grows orifices and bleeds too?

The cancer must die so the blood can flow again. Flow is what life’s all about after all.

© 1998 by Joshua Minton

Creative Commons License photo credit: şãÐ FέëŁίήg™

CLICK HERE to read Part VI

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