By: Craig Forshaw
Title by Keith Robinson
Bleached-bones banging against the peeling cherry-red paintwork.
Up above, a brilliant tomato grows in the jaundiced sky, getting larger all the time.
PastPresentFuture are all one now. Everything becomes relative, and even gravity appears treacherous.
The roaming, charcoal Sésquac snarl and dance at the American Firebird.
Its colour is an ominous sign.
Meanwhile, in a cave nearby, other primitives paint the tomato as a bird of flame swooping through the yellowing sky.
They can sense the heat it brings, but the lessons scientia taught vanished when the Universal Heathens fled into the great, black chora / the imprint-bearer.
Creation myths paint them as the Scientia Pantheon, now. Or, if they had words, they would.
The prime mover is named the Hawk King. He is not confined; He towers above the land.
Meanwhile, in a cave, they paint, and in the scalding plain, they beat the fruits of scientia, but don’t name it as such.
The tomato is growing. The red is alert. The phoenix is death.
Sésquac became ērĭgĕre when he braved the harsh light, and now the same light is forcing ērĭgĕre to become Sésquac, and return, ever fearful, back into the shadows of the cave. In its way it is the same as the imprint-bearer, but it is far, far smaller.
Without exercise, their minds have atrophied. Tiny grey cabbages suspended in the spaghetti of neural webbing, hanging limp and lifeless. It is like some rotten creature caught by mind-spiders.
But still, those bleached-bones bang.
And nothing is.