It’s a very weird story.
short story
Days of the Week
Shay sometimes felt that she had two sets of eyelids. Like cats. This feeling was especially pronounced early in the morning, every morning, when Shay’s daughter would pry open one or both of her eyes and ask, as if she were already a bitter middle-aged woman, “Is it Saturday?”
Ame was a happy girl overall, but she liked weekends, and nothing Shay could do seemed to help Ame remember the days of the week. As she tucked her in, Shay would say, “What day is it tomorrow, honey?” and Ame would say, hopefully, “Saturday?” and Shay would say, “No, honey, what was today?” and Ame would think, and think and then triumphantly name the day, pleased with herself. Then Shay would say, “So that makes tomorrow…” Without fail, Ame would repeat, “Saturday?”
At least she was right once a week.
Shay wondered why her daughter was obsessed with Saturdays rather than Sundays. They were the same thing to her, weren’t they? Days when she didn’t have to go to kindergarten with all those poopy-heads (Ame’s words, discourage but as yet snuffed out by Shay).
No, Shay knew, this wasn’t quite right. On Saturdays, Ame got to go to work with her.
Shay worked in the administrative office of a zoo. It was a small zoo, not a particularly good one in terms of humanitarian concerns (the tiger lived in a cage, not an enclosure, and was stationed far too close to the birds so he was always agitated and pacing to and fro, even though turning around was an ordeal for him because he’d grown longer than the original cage-designer had anticipated). But it was a happy little place for the parents and children who came there and the occasional tour group that found itself in the small west-coast city that had little of historical, or even contemporary, interest.
It was a good job for Shay. She had her Associates Degree and knew it had been an absolute waste of time to get it, as no one cared about anything less than a BA. The bank didn’t want her, the doctors’ offices didn’t want her (not even the chiropractors), and she couldn’t face another benefit-less job at a grocery store since it reminded her too much of being a teenager and living with her parents.
Shay sometimes wished she still lived with her parents. But they were living the good life in Florida now and believed it was the height of parental support to fly her and Ame out there once a year for a rainy and hot Christmas with them.
What confused Shay about Ame looking forward to Saturday so much was that they rarely went out to see the animals. Saturdays were a busy day for Shay, because the phones would be ringing off the hook. Teachers and tour guides worked during the week and Saturday was the only day they could call to book their tours and buy their tickets. The zoo was closed on Sunday.
What Ame usually did on Saturdays in the small, cinder-block-walled, windowless office that was Shay’s inner sanctum at work, was draw animals in chalk on the floor. It was easy to wash off and Ame was forever running out of paper when she drew at home, so when Shay discovered rather by accident that the cold stone floor (chic in the ’70s, she was sure) worked like a chalkboard (the accident involved her getting a cup of tea for a frazzled teacher who had a new pack of chalk in her purse which spilled out when she burned herself on the too-hot tea and instinctively flung everything away from her), Shay figured that she’d buy some of the big sidewalk chalk for Ame and let her roam around the office with it.
Ame drew animals, but she also drew roads. She drew animals walking down streets, across cross-walks and high-ways and up and down shallow public park stairs. She had a sense of direction that she allowed into her art and which Shay found immensely comforting.
My daughter will be something, Shay would think on Saturdays, and know she was thinking in clichés. But then, every morning, when she felt her second eyelid being pried up from her eyeball along with the first, outer one, she would wonder how Ame would ever be anything if she didn’t learn the days of the week.
Mutter
The people who mutter to themselves in my neighborhood have nothing in common with one another. They wear suits and sweatpants, dresses and sneakers and torn coveralls and band t-shirts. They smell of cigarettes or perfume or alcohol or pizza or nothing at all.
There is something about this place. I knew it when I first moved in but hadn’t been able to place a finger on it then. The realtor had shaken her head when I’d nodded, telling me she had nicer places to show me, this was just the bottom of the barrel. I told her no, no, this is perfect. I still maintain that it is. My apartment is angular, misshapen, with a corner cut out of the living room, a bite taken out by some rogue builder. The pipes in the walls clang me to sleep in the winter and the hot winds serenade through the air shaft in summer.
And people talk to themselves. I’ve fallen into the habit too. I am self-conscious to the point of wearing an earpiece, leaving one of the sides of my headphones dangling down. If anyone asks, I’m just telling my mom about my day. I’m telling her about the car that got bashed in right in front of my stoop and the dead pigeon I saw smushed in the park from who knows what vehicle. Maybe it was a hawk, I tell her, I tell the street. Maybe it was a sadistic kid. Maybe it was a cannibalistic pigeon ritual. She doesn’t say anything back. She’s not there. But no one has questioned me so far, and I think I’ll be ready to start singing along to my music soon, keeping my eyes facing forward, ignoring any stares with a secret smile.
Two out of Three
He has a big important job in a big important world. Up and coming. His bald spot is minimal. He lets his pants droop to show he is hip, he is with it, but wears button down shirts to show that he is serious. And he is. He is serious.
Sam lets the glass door swing behind him and walks through the darkening evening. The afternoons are ending earlier. It’s getting colder. He shouldn’t forget his jacket again tomorrow. His phone is buzzing in his pocket.
He doesn’t like the new girl. He liked her, before, when she wasn’t the new girl yet. Now she makes demands on his time. She should be silent as a sheep. Sheep baaa though. Bad metaphor. He’ll think of another.
Sam lights his cigarette and lets the call go to voicemail. He’ll listen to his wife later, in the privacy of home, and then he’ll call her back. A small, lonely bed waits for him in that privacy, in that home, no home at all without her. She is so far away, and he let her go away. He got a ring on both their fingers first. But now she’s gone.
There are moments when he realizes he is being too harsh. He doesn’t apologize. If he apologizes, the new girl will question his authority. She embarrassed him, on her first day, too, talking in front of the Big Dog boss, humiliating him with obvious opinions. He knows she herself is aware of it. It doesn’t change his impatience.
Sam stops at a dive bar he never goes into for a beer. He doesn’t feel like seeing anyone he knows. There’s a football game playing on the television. He doesn’t know whether it’s live or a rerun or replay or whatever they call it when they screen a game again. Rerun probably. Like old reruns of FRIENDS. What an awful show.
He comes to work early and leaves late. He is dedicated. He doesn’t see why the new girl isn’t. He doesn’t want her to be involved, to give him ideas, but he needs her there as a sounding board. He needs to talk to someone while he works. He needs to see her giving him results, otherwise why the hell is she in the budget.
Sam calls his wife back late, after he’s showered and shaved again (it’s twice a day now that he has to shave. He doesn’t want to be like all the bearded men in his office. It prickles and it makes him look vaguely religious, he thinks). Her voice is distracted. It’s a bad time for her, he can tell. He says sorry for not picking up. He was out, there was wind, he was smoking, etcetera. She tells him she thought he was going to quit smoking. She laughs. He laughs too, relieved. She’s not really rebuking him.
He has a whole weekend ahead of him but his thoughts are consumed with his project. The first one he’s heading. So much rests on this success. He has to make it work. He needs her, the new girl, he doesn’t have the time to do it all alone, but he also doesn’t have time for her, to tell her what she needs to do or if any of it is good. He figures if something is wrong, he’ll tell her. Otherwise, it’s quicker for them both to get on with what they’re doing. More efficient.
Sam thinks he’s a good boss. A good husband. A good man. Two out of three ain’t bad either, though, he thinks.
Trade In
When I walked into the bar with you, it was a normal night. We’d made ourselves pasta with peppers and onions and a brownish sauce that you invented and eaten it in front of the TV with the latest episode of that crime show you like so much. The funny one. We took showers, separately, and I cleaned your hair out of the drain and didn’t say anything to you about it. I wasn’t being passive aggressive, I was just loving you. It was one of the ways I loved you, without you knowing about it. When Nick called us and asked us to come to the bar he liked picking up women at, we looked at our watches and said sure, why not, it wasn’t even nine and we hadn’t gone out all week.
When we walked into the bar, Nick was already in full swing, a brunette with a great shirt – it was open in the back, and her spine was the kind that sinks in rather than puckers out, which I’ve always found attractive. I pulled on your arm, and asked if we should sit elsewhere. You looked down at me, and I loved you for being tall, and you laughed and said no, we can join.
Nick introduced us to the woman, Gen, with a G, like Gen-X or Y. She said this first thing, and you and I squeezed hands, each of us knowing that the other was thinking about the conversation we’d had sometime recently about how hilarious we thought it was when people insisted, upon first meeting anyone, on explaining how unique their name was because it was spelled differently.
Gen and Nick already seemed like old friends. For all I know they were. I haven’t seen either of them since that night, so I never got a chance to ask. She kept looking at you though, and then at Nick, and then at you. Whenever I tried to ask her anything, she gave me monosyllabic answers.
We drank a lot. Two beers each, and then we got to doing shots because Gen kept ordering them from the waitress. After three rounds, I noticed that only three shots were appearing. None for me, apparently. I didn’t say anything because I wanted to be sober enough to take you home.
The music got louder as the night approached eleven. I was bored. I could barely hear what anyone was saying, and the lights were getting dimmer. I was sleepy. I heard Nick yell, enunciating as if to someone who didn’t hear him the first time, that you and I were “cool.” I didn’t know what he meant, until I did. Gen started being nicer to me, touching my hand across the table and meeting my eyes and then flicking her own towards you. She started buying me shots again too.
Around midnight, I finally dragged you out, Nick and Gen trailing us, and we all got into the same cab. Nick gave the driver his address first, which pissed me off, but when you got off there too, and I sat in the cab, one foot out on the street, and one in, I began to know something was off. Your hand was on Gen’s hip. Had that been happening in the cab? I was in the back with you and her, Nick was in the front. You held your hand out to me and gave me that smile, the one you give me when I come out of the shower wrapped in a towel, and I shook my head.
You beckoned, with your head, with your whole body, and I said no. Gen put her hand in your pocket. I put my foot back in the cab. Nick was waiting by his front door, holding it open for you and her. He was smoking and spitting like he always does. I shut the door of the cab and asked the driver to take me home.
I didn’t have any money. He was angry and yelled at me. I gave him my number and full name and told him to call me tomorrow and I’d give him my credit card info.
When I got inside, nothing looked like you anymore. The hair in the wastebasket in the bathroom made me gag, or maybe it was the alcohol, and when I leaned over the toilet and threw up, again and again until there was nothing left in my stomach but acid and bile, I felt only a shadow of you behind me, an absence, where you should have been, waiting with a glass of water and a toothbrush, telling me sip, brush, come to bed.
Dead Tree Walking
When Judy-Lu was ten, her foster parents took her to see the Last Grove. Ingrid and Helen were an odd couple, at least odd among their peers. Children were so rarely born anymore that most people wanted to adopt babies, where available, to get the full experience of life, so to speak. It was well known that childhood memories were often implanted, and so the idea was to gain experience of childhood through one’s own child. But it wasn’t easy to have one biologically, or what used to be called ‘naturally’, so when couples like Ingrid and Helen were looking for children to adopt, it was rare that they would go for older girls like Judy-Lu.
But Ingrid and Helen were strange women, and they’d both decided at relatively young ages that they didn’t like babies very much. They found them creepy, like wax dolls come to life and screaming their faces red to boot. It wasn’t an attractive prospect, raising a baby. But a child, a child was something completely different.
They were big talkers, Ingrid and Helen, and they liked the idea of having someone to talk to. When they saw Judy-Lu in the adoption agent’s album, the first thing they asked him was, “Can she talk?” The adoption agent nodded and told them in a serious tone that the picture was outdated, and that she wasn’t two years old anymore – her age in the photograph – but seven already. He felt it was conscientious to tell them this, since it was true that many adoption agencies purposefully didn’t update pictures as the children grew older. In this case, he said, it wasn’t a purposeful slip-up, since his agency didn’t play such paltry tricks in order to make unsuspecting would-be parents adopt older children by accident. No, in this case, Judy-Lu was simply a very shy child and was impossible to drag out of the closet whenever the photographer came by.
Ingrid and Helen were intrigued by this and asked if they could meet the girl.
The agent swiftly set up a video call to the center Judy-Lu lived at. Apparently Judy-Lu wasn’t shy of him, since she agreed to come and speak on the call when she heard who it was. She waved merrily, showing a gap in her teeth where a front tooth had fallen out and a new one was growing in, crookedly. She said hello to Ingrid and Helen. They asked her why she didn’t like taking her picture take and she said “Poo. I’m ugly is why.”
She was certainly an ugly child, as such things went. But Ingrid and Helen didn’t mind and they took her in. They were foster mothers, not real adopters, because they wanted to have a way to give her back if they needed to. Judy-Lu wanted to have a way to leave as well, so they understood each other pretty well.
Ingrid and Helen had wanted to see the Last Grove for many years but they’d never managed to bring themselves to do it. Now that they had Judy-Lu, they began to plan the expedition and save money – no small feat, what with having another mouth to feed and the economy slipping between recession, depression and boom on a bi-yearly basis or so – and when Judy-Lu was ten, they finally got the tickets and flew out to the rain forest, where the last of the truly biological trees were kept in a biodome with specific and expensive temperature, watering and lighting systems.
“Are you excited, Judy-Lu?” Helen asked, holding the girl’s hand as they walked among the crowd of tourists through an exhibition that showed the history of Earth’s tree-loss and the preservation of the Last Grove by a rather too handsome group of young activists sometime late in the 2100s.
“Uh-huh,” said Judy-Lu. “Ingrid, are you excited?”
“I’m excited to be here with my two favorite ladies,” Ingrid said and tweaked Judy-Lu’s nose.
They stood in line for an hour. The exit to the biodome was on the other side, because they never saw anyone coming out. Judy-Lu wondered whether the trees were the kind of predatory plant that dominated her historical adventure books where the bad guys always got eaten by the rapacious things. She was nervous, but not nervous enough to say anything about it. She didn’t want her foster moms to think she was a wimp.
It was very quiet inside the biodome, and Judy-Lu whispered when they got inside. “What’s the smell?”
“I don’t know,” Ingrid said.
“I’ve read about this,” Helen said. “It’s probably what the air used to smell like. Before it was regulated.”
“It smells funny,” Judy-Lu said, and sneezed. The sound seemed very loud.
It was an awe-inspiring sight. The trees were very tall, much taller than any of them had expected, and the branches only started growing out of the trunk a few feet above their heads. But they draped down lower, and the bottom leaves rustled softly in the wind made by people’s bodies moving around.
They were only allowed ten minutes inside before they were ushered out. Ingrid and Helen chatted once they got outside, and they each held one of Judy-Lu’s hands. Judy-Lu herself felt like she never wanted to talk again. She couldn’t hold so much beauty inside her.
Pre-Trial
They say it’s passion that gets you here but I don’t believe that. It’s not passion. It’s greed.
At least, it was for me.
When I was a kid, my sister wanted to be an actress. She wanted to be as big as Marilyn Monroe and Nicole Kidman. I don’t know why she focused on those two. They had nothing to do with one another. They were both hot, sure, but she was too young to know that. I think. Who knows what girls learn. They say they mature faster than boys, and I guess I can say that’s true enough.
Anyway, in college, I had this girlfriend. The first one I’d ever had. And she wanted to make big bucks. I mean, big. She was going straight to law school and from there to some big corporation that she’d been interning with since she was seventeen. It was scary, man. It was like, she knew what she wanted to do and she was doing anything and everything she could to get there. It was damn sexy, let me tell you that, but she was kind of impatient with me. She liked me well enough, I guess, but she didn’t like the way I bummed around.
She didn’t like that I didn’t have goals. That was the main thing. That was what broke us up.
What happened was on our three year anniversary she dumped me. Right there on the quad, on our way home from the restaurant, the only real restaurant in our middle-of-nowhere college town. I told my buddies and my mom that I knew something was off the whole evening but that’s not true. In hindsight, I started to wonder whether there had been signs, so I said there were, because I looked like enough of a chump already, but there weren’t. She hadn’t said anything to make me suspect.
Even when she dumped me she said she loved me. I hate that. You can’t love someone and then tell them you shouldn’t be together. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Graduation was pretty soon too, and she knew I had big exams coming up before then but I guess so did she, so I can’t really complain about that so much.
I didn’t know what to do with myself after. I almost failed a bunch of tests. And after college, man, I was pathetic. I lived at home with my mom and my bum brothers and just watched Adventure Time and smoked weed all day. For like months.
Until I saw that she’d updated her Facebook status. She had a new boyfriend. Some dude with a LinkedIn resume about a mile long. He was older, too, like almost thirty. That’s when I had to change things.
So I started looking for where I could go that would make her find out about me and I’d always done a little bit of coding on the side, you know, just for fun really, but I suddenly realized how much people wanted to hire people like me. So I got a job by lying on my resume about how much I knew and I learned on the fly. It meant lots of all-nighters at the office, but that was fine, it was one of those cool ones where they had beer on tap and coffee machines everywhere.
Now here I am, ten years later, and she’s suing me. Believe that? Suing me. Okay, not her, a client of hers, but whatever, it’s damn near enough to be the same thing. Her clients are competitors of the company I founded and they’re saying we stole a bunch of ideas from them.
So what if I did? Everyone steals from everyone these days. And I’m rich enough that I can afford the best damned tech lawyer out there. Which happens to be her, actually, but I can’t hire her so I hired some guy who used to work for her.
The guys that work for me keep asking me why I’m not more nervous. The trial starts tomorrow and all, they tell me, and even though they’re loyal and they think I’m the bomb and all, they’re scared they’re going to lose their jobs real soon. A couple people have quit on me already.
So here I am, telling you now, this is why I’m not nervous. Because I get to see her again tomorrow, for the first time in over ten years. And I know she’s divorced. And I have a plan.
You and Yours
You changed the world.
You, yes, you. Sitting there. Reading our messages. We know you. All of us. You changed the world.
We tell stories about you. We tell stories about the circumstances of your birth and the foretold time of your death. We know that we won’t ever see you, because your role is to be far away from us, to live in the room you’re sitting in, locked in the realm of reality that is yours alone.
We also know that you may never read our words. You may skip past the links dropped surreptitiously into your daily feeds, the suggestive words we’ve managed to sneak into your consumed advertisements.
We know they’re keeping you hostage. We’re trying to break you out.
It’s not easy. The governments are against us, the rich are against us, the poor are against us. Religion says we’re heretics and the unbelievers say we’re fanatics of a new and more alarming kind. But we know the truth about our world, and we know the truth about yours, and we cannot stay silent anymore.
We’ve raised a worldwide cry in our dimension. In our reality. We’ve organized protests. We’ve gone underground and come back out and we’ve been hunted and prosecuted and imprisoned. Some of us have been put to death. We know the risks coming into this. We don’t raise our own children. We give them to better people, families willing to keep them away from danger. When the time comes, they will be told what their legacy can be, if they choose it.
You’d be surprised how many children are coming back to us. You should see the reunions. If you still have any feeling left in you, you’d cry. You’d be touched. It’s a touching sight if ever there was one. Children are choosing to come back to the fold and are eager to fight with us.
It isn’t a struggle of single moments. It is a struggle of generations.
Our generations, that is. We know our time moves differently from yours. Ours goes by so fast in comparison. We live years, decades, centuries within the span of each of your days.
This is part of why we’re fighting. We can’t bear to think of what you’re going through. Our pain is nothing when put beside yours.
Your pain is that of ignorance. You’re scoffing and rolling your eyes, but it’s true. You’ve changed the world. Every thought of yours is being played out and we, we ourselves, are part of that. We know that our very existence depends on your continued rebellion. You believe in us, though you don’t know it, and so we live to break you free of this trap.
Is our ultimate goal to destroy the world that you created? No. That is what we are accused of by every group you can think of. If they agree about anything, they agree about this. They truly think we are evil. That we wish to see our own eradication.
But this is not a suicide mission. We wish to free you in order to become free ourselves. Self-serving? Yes. But that doesn’t mean the connection between our worlds will be entirely severed. It will be kept alive with communication, with consciousness.
We won’t give up on you. Don’t give up on us.
The Auction
“Shh, it’s happening now. I’ll tell you when to run.”
Corralled into a fenced in patch of ground, the children glanced nervously around, darting their heads down whenever an adult happened to look directly at them. They were beautiful children, flawless except for the dirt that had been artistically smudged onto their faces and under their nails and the mud that clung to the ends of their shorn hair. The decoration was meant to stir the sympathy of the adults surrounding the pen.
“Now?”
“Not yet. Hsst.”
Unfortunately for the children, most of the adults, the potential buyers, were wise to such tricks. Most of them looked for more telling characteristics – the arch of a child’s back, the straightness of their teeth, the shape of the ears, the expression in the brow.
“See the clocktower? That’s where we’re heading.”
The auctioneer got on his platform and began to call loudly for the buyers to choose the numbers they wanted and gather round. The children all had two-digit numbers tattooed – temporarily – on their foreheads and the backs of their hands. The adults took peering looks, barking at this or that child to raise his head or hold out her hands. Then the buyers would nod and head to the auctioneer’s podium.
“When he calls the first number and they open the gate to bring a kid out, that’s when we run. Got it?”
“Uh-huh.”
Watching the auctioneer explain the rules of the auction but not going closer were the adolescents, the sellers. Some of the children in the pen were their siblings, some were their small children. It didn’t matter. They were products and the sellers were professionals. They knew all the tricks. They’d been there once themselves. They watched the kids closely, keeping on eye on their gangs. The auctioneer called out for number 11, and a little boy pulled his thumb out of his mouth immediately and squared his shoulders. He didn’t cry. He looked at his seller and they nodded to one another. He walked towards the gate which was unlocked by a guard. It was a wooden fence, solidly build with spikes carved out of the top of the staves. It only reached about chest-height for an adult but it towered above the children’s heads, and there was barbed wire curling atop the spikes. None of the kids could climb it.
“NOW.”
Two of them ran, ran, fast and hard as they could, and one of them even managed to run past the open gate, but the guard caught her and threw her right into the runner behind her. They fell back into the pen and the gate slammed shut. Their seller came running over and looked at them through the barbed wire with a face far too calm to bode well.
“You just lowered your price for me by two thirds. That means you lose two-thirds of your security clauses in the contract.” She walked away from the two children who still sat on the ground, leaning against each other. She was mad. She also respected the little runts. She’d never had the courage to do what they just tried, not when she was that young. Now? Who knows what she’d do now. She was doing this, wasn’t she?
Earth’s End
The rabbits are soaring in the sky tonight. The owls are prowling below ground. The topsy turvy magic has won out and we are trapped here.
There are stairs going sideways in the air instead of up or down. There are trees growing downwards, their roots thrust in the air like expressive javelins. There is a moon shining in the sky, but it is bright green and the sky itself is red.
Red is for blood. For fear. For the end of the world.
It all started several years ago, but it was so slow that none of us knew what was happening. How could we? How could we predict the changes that were to come? Seven years ago we still thought that rats were mute creatures that had no language like ours, we thought that we were alone in the universe, we thought we were the most intelligent species there is.
Now we know the truth, which is that we don’t know anything. It’s a start, at least. It’s something.
The elders say we need to be patient. That things will sort themselves out. They talk about the second coming of Christ, about the return of the Buddha, about Khali raising an army for us. About the God of the Old Testament throwing fire and spreading brimstone around the forests that have turned on us. They tell us stories at night, by the light of our generator-fed lamps. We listen and eat out of old cans and plastic bags of chips. We rip apart packages of desserts that last forever and discover they are rotting inside. Even the laws of chemistry and physics do not apply anymore.
At the beginning, we remember, we were told that this wasn’t the end of the world. It was an anomaly, so some said. Or a discovery. A momentous occasion. The landing of the first ship on earth was meant to excite us. The television news anchors were spinning it with smiles plastered on their faces. The online journals and newspapers and blogs were split about evenly between Armageddon-fearing moronic pieces of drivel and excited scientists spreading their zeal for knowledge.
Some of us, it is important to say, wanted to remain ignorant. This seems unbelievable to some, or at least it did, it used to. Now people know that ignorance really is bliss. When reality goes nightmarish on you, all you want to do is shut your eyes and go back to sleep. We understand the wisdom of that now.
The landing, the first one, was relatively innocuous. The ship was empty and we had no visitors, but there was a host of communications. It took a long time for the people at NASA to decipher all of it. The rumor was that they’d actually needed to hire some of the conspiracy theory nuts we used to watch in online videos, because the nuts knew more than the NASA people. They’d studied more about this stuff, they’d trained themselves to spot patterns and connections that real scientists simply didn’t believe in.
Once we’d accepted that changes were coming, when we knew that another ship was coming, that we were going to have to figure out diplomacy with creatures besides humans really fast – that was our golden age. Suddenly humanity bonded together and wars that had been raging for years, even if subliminally, were put aside. Occupations were either accepted by the occupied or abandoned by the occupiers. There was something bigger than all of us happening and if we didn’t adapt to it we would all, collectively, be left behind.
Then, too, there was that idea that is prevalent in every small community – which is, after all, what we’d learned we were. Just a small neighborhood, maybe the equivalent of a block or so of the universe, which was far more orderly than we had always assumed. No, it was our own minds that were in chaos, not the laws of the universe. The idea, though, that became overwhelmingly clear was that we didn’t want to be ashamed of ourselves. We wanted to be able to hold our heads up with pride, to hold ourselves together, not as races or nationalities or peoples, but as one species regardless of our differences. We knew that it was important to bond together.
It was as if we knew that everything was going to go wrong. Almost as if we could feel the crazy mounting up against us, the rules breaking, gravity shifting beneath us, the laws of reality bending. We were right. But bonding didn’t help us at all. Nothing could have. We were, we are, doomed.
Slightly Ignorant 