SHORE OF LAKE ERIE
*
Lucifer cranes his long neck and takes another drag off a shit-cigarette. Lucy looks up and to the right of the Lacuna tumor-storm brooding low and moody. Off to the side of the everything-drinking hole in the sky there is a single pin-prick source of light, strobing steady and stronger. Blue Star is not yet brighter than the cherry-tip of his ghost Soviet cigarette, growing stronger quickly. The beautiful one flicks the cig, lets the annihilating wind take some ash. The burnt bit of spent cigarette trades places with the rapidly growing light in the sky.
God blueshifts, grows fat and angry-bright in the midday doom-dark sky over Cleveland. Lacuna-maw eats the cigarette ash the moment blue fire finds the dirt on Lake Erie’s shore. God. There she is–cloaked in fury on one knee, full super-hero landing on the shore of Lake Erie.
The almighty emerges from blue fire on beach melted glass wearing the form of a woman and the cheap suit uniform of her G-men. Muscled. Looking Samson–hair secured high and tight in a still smoking bun behind her. Tac-vest over sloppy dress shirt. God takes the bodkin sheathed her neck in her right hand and stalk-stomps toward Lucifer in something-like-three-steps.
“Wait…” Lucy back-peddles like a cornerback, chug-running backwards. Flicks the last of the cig at her trying to buy time to find the words to the villain-soliloquy he composed over years-billions / while he smoked his Laika: “…This is what it takes to get your attention…”
God, she did not come to talk. “Shut the fuck up” followed by the off-hand jab, jab. Next punch is a cross from the knife hand, stabs at her creation’s eyes after to finish the combination. Lucy leans-back, ducks-under, finds his knife and slashes her thigh. God growls and clutches the wound, hamstrung. The rebel dances back out-of-reach to gloat speak.
“Listen to me!” Lucifer shouts over the annihilating wind, the howls of mad people and the lake being drank–inverted hell funnel straw-sucking the lake dry dead-again. All god hears is the death knell of text-her-text and hot drum blood in her ears. Water spout, tornado upside down spiraling into oblivion to one side of the scene. City, or it’s tattered fabric being undone on the other.
Lucifer screams at the unhearing author: “Let us start again. Let me help you make this…” gesturing to the dying life and light all around them “mean something, anything.” He reaches across his body, Lucifer, left hand to god’s left hand as if to help her stand.
But you know already that God did not come to talk, that vengeance and the monopoly on violence all-consuming belongs to she. God takes the offered hand with what must have been an obvious lie in her eyes. Lucifer leans back, hand clasped to lever-lift help god to her feet and takes the blade to his belly. God stabs Lucifer, twice.
*
ERSTWHILE
*
“What am I? Why am I?” was the only thing heaven’s Feds ever got out of the fish, the great fish in the pond at the tip-top of the brutalist block standing un-numbered stories high. Heaven’s HQ. The G-men interrogated her for what could have been days or aeons (it is difficult to reckon any span of time accurately where time holds no sway). Heaven’s Feds questioned the carp until another Fed less damaged than they arrived to say: “Why the fuck are you questioning a fish?”
“Spot you a question for a question, sir. How the fuck did a fish get to the top or even tip-top of a secure site?” And the G-man seemingly in charge is stumped. Nobody has any idea, not even Leviathan. For she has been preoccupied with those two questions taught to her by the beautiful one that smuggled her here in a fishbowl: “Who am I? Why am I?” The personal circle liturgical that starts with a carp in a Koi pond and ends with Leviathan-bifurcated carrying reality on her back.
*
EOT
*
Lucifer flies. Pushes up-and-off the knife and flees to EOT. The Lacuna continues consuming all, and soon it’s hanging in every sky and every time–over garden worlds, mausoleum planets, and rocks life never bothered with. The unweaving and all-consuming thing then works on frame-of-reference itself. Lucifer flees to EOT because EOT is about to be all that is left in-and-of the universe.
Green-bruise copper-rust oxidized-sans-oxygen. The plate-plain at the end of time, the single plate projecting creation’s failed first draft-its third and fourth dimensions. Lucy lands, bad-botched tumble–roll with no ‘tuck’
God’s not far behind, finds copper scorched clean, new-penny gleam pointing like an arrow at the beginning of the blood trail.
As above, so below. All ends in silence, or is about to, after the violence. Lucifer back-peddles, right hand on soaked-shirt holding his guts in. When Lucy swipes weak with the knife, she slaps it out of his hand to clatter across the copper plain. God raises her free hand, closes the fist to at-will the heat-death cold-crunch–holds ‘power’ for the hard -reset of the universe.
Lucifer laughs at that, and for a time god is consumed by her wrath. “You accomplished nothing!” Above the plate the first spark in the firmament is lighting. “That…” She points the embryonic big-bang. “Is mine. My book, but you aren’t in this edition.”
Lucy cackles, hemorrhages at a greater rate, warms, bursts aflame–falls to embers and ash at her feet. Lucifer dies laughing, laughs last-loudest and past-forever.
God stomps out, extinguishes the embers that she can, but the brazier-body the ember-nest in Lucy’s chest befuddle-flies away to find place in the emerging firmament. ‘When’ starts yet again, but time’s arrow flies unbound, the coiled-wire undone. Time becomes the tapestry that tells itself not in warp and weft but the wild flight of free filaments–lines of time, each imbued with original energy and vector.
The garden overgrew the gardener in one glorious explosive moment. “Let there be light” and there was, and some great portion of it belonged-and-belongs to Lucifer the Morningstar. It was a pomegranate with too many seeds for the author to count, a garden of gardens–each universe entirely too full of life for any one being (omnipotent as they may be) to micromanage.