Exile Pt. 8

Arc 2: Locust and the Pomegranate

“Lamentations”

*

FRAGMENT: The Book of Lamentations (Abridged)

FRAME: EOT (End of Time)

SUB-FRAME: Lonely liminal 0x27 (gas-station)

SUB-SUB-FRAME: Gas Station Bathroom Wall (left of mirror)

SUB-SUB-SUB-FRAME: Re-written (37 times elsewhere at same location)

ALSO FOUND: Remains of 1 iron collar.

*

THIS: I RECALL MY MIND, THEREFORE I HAVE HOPE

*

Fragment: -0x63 “Let’s go Fuck Up Rambo!”
Date: EOT (End of Time) ; 1/1/2020
Subject(s): Convergence Condition (A(99); A(84); A(79)); (A(79)^2; A(84)^2; (0x1)) ETC…
CFC Breach? CONFIRMED
Curve-Status? UNKNOWN

*

EARLIER/NOW

*

Backseat of a 1990-something Ford sedan contour flying, the speed impossible, inches over the scorched plain at the End of Time. A(79) reaches across her other iteration, the fuckup A(84). She leans face to face, high-as-fuck-searching for anything familiar other than the schnoz. She is too-long, too close, he starts to stammer. She kisses him on the forehead. “For luck.”

Flannel Man flicks the end of a blunt out the opening in the roof. A(79), maintaining eye-contact, reaches over the other passenger, opens the car door.

“Tuck and roll, fuckup.” She shoves him out of the moving vehicle: the Ford Sedan, hugging the packed ash, flying fast. They are on their way to a pale pool of light that leads to Pittsburgh, to New Years 2020 on a planet that should never know the pandemic. They are on their way to stop a fascist.

The blunt end strikes the plain, lightning strikes the scorched ground, a prismatic pool opens-instantly beneath A(84), swallows him. It spits him out into a custodial closet in the bus station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

*

“Punch it, Chewie.” A(79) to Flannel Man at the wheel.

“Yes, Ma’am” He floors it. The car leaves the scorched plain, contour-flying inches over, smoother than smooth. A(79) climbs out the open door of the moving, flying, car and onto the roof. She creeps forward onto the hood, crouches low, clutching the lip of the hood by her finger tips, a runner in the starting blocks.

A second Ford on the scorched plain, 2000 something appears alongside, feet away and flying perfect formation. Flannel man looks in disbelief through his weed cloud at the other-driver of the other-hotbox, illuminated A(79)^2.

From the hood of the 1990 something Ford sedan, A(79) sees an A-iteration. She sees her mirror-image standing hood-ornament on the other car. A(84)-but-wrong: schnoz, wild-man beard, hair half-burnt off. Ragged scorched dude-robe blowing in the wind. Broomstick catching lightning from nowhere. Eyes even sadder than the fuckup’s, he looks feral.

Eyes wild, he leaps too-high toward her, swinging a broomstick.

Instinct, reflex, practice: hand-in-coat-to-pistol. It’s instant-out, she shoots twice.

*

ERROR

*

FRAGMENT: NULL

FRAME: NULL

DATE: NULL

SUBJECT: COMMENTARY

*

The garden has a more accurate physical analogue than a “pomegranate.” It’s a fine fruit and all, lotta vitamin C. But a gas-giant’s “spot” might give mortals a better foothold for understanding.

Oh, the Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a storm. As such, it is part-and-product of a planet, Jupiter, that is made of storms. It’s swirling gas. It’s a planet that aspired to star, fell flat. Now its gravity catches planet killing rocks that were meant for the inner planets. You’re welcome.

Oh yeah, the spot. See, it’s a part that appears apart, always has. Will still be there when you’re dirt (if you’re reading this early 20th or 21st century).

It’s my fault. Forgive me. I’m explaining it poorly. I’ve never been able to articulate or author what it is I mean to say. Every time I speak, I make it worse. That’s why I usually do not speak.

*

FRAGMENT: 0xFD.007

FRAME: EOT(End of Time)

LOCATION: Chapel Beneath the Ghost Grove

SUBJECTS: MULTITUDINOUS

*

The great brazier that lights the main chamber of the chapel beneath the Ghost Grove falls, clatters on the stone slab alter, cracks the stone. Flaming logs and embers fly everywhere. Blinding, swirling, choking smoke twists through the air of the chamber. The two Custodians in iron collars that cut it loose, cling to the root-riddled roof like spiders, watching the havoc with eyeless, featureless faces. They let go, dropping into the melee below.

There is chaos in the temple. Gaunt G-men and Custodians in iron collars. All are armed with cop-sticks. They pour down the tunnel at the base of the desiccated Coast redwood. They flood the tunnel and the temple under a tree in the ghost grove at the End of Time.

As they pour into the main chamber, they swing, they club, they batter. They do not care who. They club, they batter, they swing. And when they find a custodian, they apply the iron collar. After the struggle and the docility. They order their new ally to assist in their efforts.

*

EARLIER

*

A(84) writes and interrupts the Parson’s sermon-composing; A(523) composes a sermon and interrupts A(84’s) writing. The Parson’s wife, REDACTED, cannot handle “you in stereo, especially one of them being a bearded lady.”

Two A-iterations in unison: “we love you!”

“You think it’s funny, but it’s creepy.” Maddy: 6-arms (two crossed in front of her), ethereal baby-snakes swaying between tufts of perpetually-frizzy hair. Pissed-off resting face and kind-angry eyes.

She leaves to find the dojo to spar with Flannel Man. REDACTED joins to watch the fools beat each other with sticks or read or both.

*

The Parson and the broomstick Fool trade stories, edibles and herb and the finest tinctures in the coffee.

When she can focus she spits out a sermon-verse; when he can focus he composes a fragment of their histories (post fall-through).

Both writing on napkins, scrap paper, receipts and old tax forms. As they fill a page, they press it to the screen of a dead laptop, rub and press. They hum and sing to themselves as they work. This happens twice: the screen bends distorts and accepts-and-absorbs the paper, drowning it, accepting it in sacred-black ink. Elsewhere, the words are etched in silver plates by acid. Amen.

When calamity comes to the chapel, when the brazier falls, the room shakes. Dust falls from the ceiling. The Parson, A(523) and A(84) hurry to the main chamber.

*

Fragment: -0x63 “Let’s go Fuck Up Rambo!”
Date: EOT (End of Time) ; 1/1/2020
Subject(s): Convergence Condition (A(99); A(84); A(79)); (A(79)^2; A(84)^2; (0x1)) ETC…
CFC Breach? CONFIRMED
Curve-Status? IRRECOVERABLE

*

NOW/NOW

*

A(84) leaps too-high from one Ford to the old ford, hood-to-hood-but-too-far. Two cars contour-flying in formation over the scorched plain. He sees what the occupants of the 1990-something Ford sedan cannot. The third vehicle: the blacked out fed-truck SUV, headlights off, intercept course, diving at an angle from the driver’s blind-spot, a figure with a sword perched on the footrail beneath the car’s door.

His eyes are wild, he’s swinging a broomstick across his body, left to right.

Instinct, reflex, practice: hand-to-holster-to-pistol. It’s instant-out. A(79) shoots twice.

The broomstick catches the first bullet like a lazy-high fastball, chucks it back over A(79)’s shoulder.

A(84) glides over her, slow-mo, big-bird flying bringing the broom stick high over-head.

*

The first bullet, deflected least-likely-perfect, seems to catch Woland in the hand. Somehow he keeps his grip on the rapier held in his right.

A(84) still-mid-leap, brings the broomstick down on Woland’s head. The consultant tumbles off the sideboard. The broomstick Ronin dives, half-in the open window. Wrestles for the wheel. The fed truck swerves.

Woland clinging to the truck’s bumper by one hand. He brings his watch, precise and austere, to his ear. He hears nothing. There’s a bullet embedded in his wicked watch, his profane time piece. Sacred sand trickles from it out onto the scorched plain, mixing with the ash.

*

FRAGMENT: 0x3E7

FRAME: EOT (End of Time); ‘Earth 999’

DATE: NULL; 100,000 BCE

*

EARLIER. WOLAND’S FRAME

*

“Keep her steady.” Woland to his driver.

The muscled man with the flat nose, “Aye.”

Woland opens the door of the moving-flying car, creeps out onto the sideboard beneath the door. The consultant reaches back into the vehicle, into his bag open on the back-seat bench. Out he pulls his progeny: the Locust (or what’s left of it).

Fed-truck flying low over the scorched plain. The consultant, the professor, the doctor of Black magic and macroeconomics, Woland, examines his progeny. He smiles. mutters something to the fist sized blob of ichor hovering above his right hand, and casts it out onto the scorched plain at the End of Time. .

*

The Locust tumbles over ash, up dunes and back down like a dung ball without a beetle. It’s not aimless. It’s following a path prescribed, determined, and inscribed by Woland and in line with its essence.

After a journey-indeterminate, the beast reaches that destination: the skeleton of a bus station.

One of the lonely liminal spaces that fall to the scorched plain. It’s the husk of a brutalist bus station. It’s all bulk and sad-bastard blank concrete. Mid-20th century. Could’ve come from one of a thousand cities on either side of the first Cold War.

The blob, the Locust, fart-gloop-forces itself through the crack beneath a door and flop-flow-flops down and down stairs in the station to a basement. There it finds a boiler room. There on the floor: a pool of light linking to a very special Earth.

The beast flattens itself across the pool of light. The Locust falls through.

*

SPRING 100,000 BCE ‘EARTH 999’

COLLOQUIAL AND-OR IMPRECISE COORDINATES ARE INVALID (2ND WARNING)

*

Faint at first in the night sky, it appeared. From between the horns of the bull, it glowed-as-it-grew. The saffron morning star turns red, stronger-red for three days. Blood red. The fourth day, it hanged in the sky–a daylight sun, a blood spot ember in the firmament growing brighter.

On the fifth day the red star fell.

It hit hard in North America. A forested depression that will become Lake Winnipeg (in part because of this impact). Trees lay down, broken and burnt like the Tunguska air-burst (the blast was the beast slowing its descent). From above, if one could see through the great plume of ash and dust and ichor particulate, the trees lay down scorched in the shape of a butterfly.

The thing burrowed deep-not-too-deep. It touched dead roots and learned to spread spines into the earth around it. Over time, time inconceivable to a short-lived tree, it learned more, consumed more.

It learned chitin and circulation. It learned sinew, then the fine art of decomposition from some slime mold, and so on and so forth. Amen.

From the minds of sentient things, for the Locust could reach out in ways spooky and distanced and ethereal-not-physical, it learned intention. In turn, it learned to warp and bend intention toward it’s own ends.

‘Earth 999’ got colder, literal-figuratively. The ash and ichor darkened the sky and brought about a 75,000 year ice age.

The mythology and culture of the peoples of North America? And quickly that whole world? Any and all stories (colonizer and colonized) involving cryptids, cannibalism, and monstrosity achieve a “higher pitch and broader scale” of cold-cruelty and austere viciousness, care of the Locust’s influence.

All of this culminates on the date: *REDACTED*, known locally-colloquially as the “Day of *REDACTED*” A direct reference to the creature’s most commonly used name across the fabric of human mythos.

*

COLLOQUIAL IMPRECISION AND UNAUTHORIZED AMATEUR

COMPARATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY. NARRATOR REVOKED.

REMOVE HANDS FROM KEYBOARD. AWAIT BEHAVIORAL INTERVENTION.

*

FRAGMENT: 0xFD.007

FRAME: EOT(End of Time)

LOCATION: Chapel Beneath the Ghost Grove

SUBJECTS: MULTITUDINOUS

*

The broomstick Ronin and the Parson arrive in the central chamber, they see Maddy and Flannel Man emerge from a tunnel opposite.

The melee: G-men and ever-more collared Custodians club and swing-wild at the congregation. Every color, culture, and creed in that tapestry resisting in any way they are capable.

Fire and choking smoke and crackling clubs landing blows.

A Custodian charges the Parson, club held high. She turns calmly, looks down her nose at it, “No.” The creature halts. She effortlessly removes the cold iron collar, drops it. The Custodian flees.

A(84) and Flannel Man leap into the fray from opposite ends of the chamber, broomsticks flicking. Maddy flings lightning into the fight, turns two G-men foolish enough to look her way to stone.

*

LATER

*

Bartleby, the gaunt G-man, struggles. A Custodian and congregant stand on his feet and grip him by the shoulders as rubber-limbs strain. “Torture me! I’ll tell you nothing!” He seems to beg to his captors: the Parson, Maddy, Flannel Man and A(84).

The goons are gone. The remnants of a fire, ash and injured, and the sound of lamentations from the beaten and bloodied. A(79) is out in the crowd tending to wounded.

The G-men and collared Custodians captured hundreds of their comrades and did their best to beat any congregants that got in their way.

“Do your worst!” No. “Do your worst to my tenderest bits!” Bartleby, chill.

“I’ll tell you nothing, no matter what you do to my..” A(84) steps forward, snatches the fed’s face in his hand.

“Shut up.” A(84)’s right eye goes strange, all black for a moment.

“How?”

“I said shut up.” He stares into the G-man’s soul, the right eye twitching-void. “Bartleby, what’s Woland up to?” The fed gasps. “B” feels what the broomstick Ronin wants to know being ripped out of the organ where-a-brain-should-be. “We gotta boogie.”

*

Fragment: -0x63 “Let’s go Fuck Up Rambo!”
Date: EOT (End of Time) ; 1/1/2020
Subject(s): Convergence Condition (A(99); A(84); A(79)); (A(79)^2; A(84)^2; (0x1)) ETC…
CFC Breach? CONFIRMED
Curve-Status? IRRECOVERABLE

*

Three vehicles flying inches over the scorched plain at the End of Time, left to right: a fed-truck SUV piloted by Woland’s goon, a 1990-something Ford sedan on its way to the Pitt to stop a fascist, a stolen 2000-something Ford sedan there to stop Woland from stopping the other Ford.

*

Mark Schmidt wrestles for the wheel of the fed-truck SUV with big-bird, elbows A(84) sharply to the schnoz. Palm-on-face pushes his broken nose back, tosses the scarecrow of a man half out the window. Mark Shmidt looks in the rearview, sees Woland out the back, standing on the bumper and clinging to the car.

A(84) hangs from the passenger window between the SUV and its target: a 1990 something Ford sedan.

“Crush him!” Woland shouts, somehow his goon hears, flicks the wheel right to pin A(84) between the vehicles, but the Ronin skitters to the roof of the SUV. The cars clash. Paint is traded. The 1990-something Ford sedan lunges back, bodies the truck back left as if they’re trying to run each other off a road that doesn’t exist.

The third car, the stolen 2000-something Ford sedan noses up, accelerate-wings-over does a baby-barrel roll over the other two, ends bracketing the fed-truck SUV. The two Fords pin the truck between them.

Woland clambers to the roof of the SUV, raises his sword and gestures to his wounded watch on the wrist. “Cute, clever, animal cunning.” He stares at A(84), right eye going strange, twitching, pupil black covering the whole thing as it opens impossibly wide. A(84) mimics. “How?!”

“Mimicry and standardized tests.” Left foot forward, knees bent, A(84) raises the broomstick high. “My gifts.”

Woland lunges, stabbing. The broomstick blocks the blade. Sidestep, body-checks Woland back, swings up with the broomstick blade, misses. Reset. A(84) dances with the devil atop the fed-truck SUV.

A(79) on the hood of the 1990-something Ford sedan watching the blurred-fast fight: “What the fuck?”

Three cars fly inches above the scorched plain at the End of Time, their speed impossible. The destination: a pool of light that is a portal to ‘Earth 14.’

*

The fascist, A(99), thinks he hears a crow. The predator’s eyes catch 3 sets of headlights on the gently-rolling plain’s horizon. He thinks he hears the hum of engines, faint rolling thunder, and wicked laughter. The fascist shuffles in his pocket, pulls the tiny binoculars out, finds the cars in formation, the fight on the roof of the fed-truck.

“What the fuck?” He flicks his cigar on the ground.

*

Fragment: -0x64
Date: 1/1/2020: 00:00:01 GMT
Frame: Pittsburgh, PA; bus station.

Subject(s): Convergence Condition (A(99); A(84); A(79)); (A(79)^2; A(84)^2; (0x1)) ETC…
*

“You ok, man?” Concern in the stranger’s voice. He looks at the man with the big schnoz coughing phlegm into the sink.

“Coming off a cold, that’s all.” A(99) washes his hands, walks from the bathroom into the busy bus station in Pittsburgh.

*

Heading toward the entrance, a few football fields away. The sound, the woosh-wind of a freight-train. The building shakes like a beat drum before the crash. The fed-truck SUV plows through the bus-station’s ceiling, hammers the floor of the station, miraculously missing any of the workers and travelers inside.

People scream and scatter in the station, because cars are apparently falling out of the sky. The hair on A(99)’s neck stands up, he hears the woosh, he leaps to one side. A 2000-something Ford sedan (empty) streaks through the ceiling, beer-can-crunches on the stained carpet where he just stood. More screams. More scattering and scurrying to safety. He pulls his pistol.

He turns. He sees high-beam-headlights through the glass wall that runs the length of the concourse. Hears a laugh. “Drop the weapon!” Pivots, sees the stoner who ran out of a custodial closet wielding a broomstick.

These things happen sequentially: A(99) the fascist quickly shoots the stoner with the broomstick, A(84), in the face. In less time than it takes for him to fall-dead-to-the-floor, a thrown 1990-something Ford sedan careens through the glass, skips off the floor and impale-pins the fascist to the wall.

*

Mark Shmidt groans, wipes blood from the car’s seat on his clothes, climbs out of the SUV standing on its nose–buried a foot deep in the concrete floor; A(79) and Flannel Man crunch glass shards beneath their boots as they walk through a messy hole in the glass wall; A(84), broke-nose-burnt-beard, mullet-scorched off, bloody and wounded, steps out of the broom closet and over his own corpse; The consultant Woland, PhDs in Black Magic and Macroeconomics, floats down gently through the hole in the roof holding a rapier one hand, dagger sinister.

All of this happens in the bus station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just after 8PM EST, December 31, 2020.

*

FRAME: EOT

LOCATION: Chapel Under the Ghost Grove

SUBJECTS: MULTITUDINOUS

*

I’m saying you don’t schedule sermons, or really anything else. You just sort of gather when you catch a vibe. It happens when it needs to happen (or maybe it’s always about-to-happen). What’s “it”? An occurrence, singular or mundane, sublime or sinful (or the combination). Things happen here when they need to. Making a sandwich; having sex; giving a sermon. All on a vibe. Never by schedule or alarm or time clock.

“Baby.” REDACTED calls from the front row. “You’re thinking aloud. You said all of that out loud.” Eye contact. The preacher’s wife mouths “Focus. Sermon. Job.”

A(523), the Parson, levitates over the broken altar. The brazier is not lit. A multitude of candles and cell phone flashlights light the chamber. They flicker and dance with her intoxication. She takes a deep breath, begins with the history-of-the-present-conflict:

“Before we get our people back, every single one of them. We’re going to take a moment to understand why they were taken.”

*

God broke up with their boyfriend. The angle-faced Lucifer. “Angel-faced?” That word is from way before our time, but I guess he’s cute, if you’re into that.

Why did God and Lucy-fer break up? They fought over Job. The whole episode started so small and petty. Stuck in traffic, god driving, they turn on the radio. God “just happens” to find the station where somebody’s singing their praises. In that full-throated-because-my-belly-is-full way: all sweet, no bitter.

Lucifer hates praise and worship and affiliated genres, for reasons beyond the obvious (the “get behind me, Satan” vibe). He despises the most saccharine, the songs of those who have never known sorrow.

“I cannot listen to one more note of this garbage.” God is so very offended in the silence after their boyfriend kills the radio. “I don’t want to hear your rich mud-twink sing your praises. I simply do not wish to hear it today.”

“You dare blaspheme against me?” Play that card. “It’s true.” The only card you ever play.” Lucifer’s arms are crossed. “In my car, you’re going to blaspheme against me?” Smoldering silence.

“Let’s make a bet.”

Ladies and gentleman, what comes next we can get from the official “Book of Job.”

*

MEANWHILE IN PITTSBURGH

*

Mark Schmidt has Flannel Man in a sleeper hold. The biggest-man has his victim in a vice-grip from behind. He whispers: “I’m going to make you watch.”

A(79) and A(84) bracket Woland. Both charge, the devil parries once and twice. Rapier up, dagger down, spins. Smug smirk on his face. Two new wounds on his opponents.

Flannel Man does not feel the broken, blank-screened phone in his pocket vibrate-to-life.

*

EARLIER

*

Flannel Man, standing on a bus station bench, delivers a DDT to Mark Schmidt in the background. Somehow the pile-of-shitty-dude rises to his feet.

“You’re looking at your future.” Woland to A(84) standing by his own corpse.

The broomstick Ronin gets a shoe beneath the fallen broomstick, flips it to A(79) who catches it.

“Not the first time he’s died here” A(79) charges, lunges with the broomstick. Woland deflects with the dagger, spins, rapier over head. A(84)’s swing bounces off the blade. The three end mirror-image of the charge: As (79 and 84) bracketing Woland

Red-and-blue. Red-and-blue. Repeat. Nasal-tinny bullhorn: “to the terrorists in the station. You’re surrounded. No more with throwin’ cars. What are your demands? Can you hear me? Mr. Terrorists?”

Woland, “I have all day. Tomorrow as well. You’re friend doesn’t.” A few drops of blood at A(84)’s feet. He’s weaker, favoring the bullet wound in his abdomen. “Your work.” To A(79) as he turns his back on her. She takes the bait, charges. Woland sidesteps, trips and sends her sprawling. She is hamstrung by a gaping dagger wound in her thigh.

Woland advances on A(84) who staggers back against the wall by the custodial closet.

*

“Go to sleep, little dude.” Mark Shmidt gloats in Flannel Man’s ear, choking the life out of him.

Right hand raised, shaking. Flannel man’s right hand a fist, quaking. He starts to stand, impossible strength pushing Schmidt back. Elbow’s his battered ribs, again and again again. Head-butt to flat nose. Flannel turns. Knocks the man out with a single punch to the jaw.

*

A(99), the fascist, in and out of consciousness. Finds it funny that he should go down with the Pequod. He recalls the last book he read. Looks at the gun in his hand. “From hell” Gasped whisper. He lifts the gun with enormous effort. “For hate’s sake… my last” He aims the pistol at the woman with the schnoz in the aviators rising to one knee.

He shoots.

*

Flannel Man charges, tackles A(79) they tumble through the wall with quiet lightning and a prismatic spray lost in the cop-lights.

The fascist’s dying-breath-bullet misses, flies the length of the station, out the the glass door. Lodges in a cop’s tire. Shot’s fired.

Woland grabs A(84) by the throat, chokes. The devil presses him so hard he falls through the wall, steps in after.

It’s a custodial closet. “Pocket dimensions are my specialty.” A(84) slumped in cardboard boxes of cleaning agents. He gathers a clump of paper towel, holds it to the bullet wound in his gut.

“Here’s the deal, and I don’t care if you accept it or not.” Woland continues: you’ll bleed out here slowly, years slowly, while you watch what your failure wrought. Woland sets a transistor radio and a smartphone (both set to blare ‘Earth 14’ news 24/7) on a low shelf. Enjoy the pandemic.

He places a tasteful, austere, off-white business card next to the devices. The only number the phone will dial. “Or you come and work for me.” I’ll bleed out, thanks.

“Thought you might. English teacher, no? I’ve brought you a jaunty little hat, you clown.” Producing a hat from nowhere.

“You have removed any doubts from my mind that you are the devil.” Woland tugs the hat, complete with little bells down over the wounded man’s head. From behind his back he pulls a single can of beer. “For you, it will never run out, but it’s warm and tastes of piss.”

“Who hurt you? Why are you like this?”

The Consultant opens the door, steps through onto the scorched plain. He begins wiggling his fingers, calling brick and mortar from nowhere. “Why are you doing any of this, Woland?” At the last row of bricks, A(84) thinks he hears the devil speak.

“The test applies to all or it applies to none.”

As the last brick finds it’s place, sealing A(84), Woland thinks he hears a bell jingle. He closes the door, it shrinks at his gesture. He places it in the pocket of his austere suit jacket. Woland adjusts his human molar cufflinks and begins walking. The consultant, and doctor of both Black Magic and Macroeconomics, is headed toward Headquarters. He walks on the scorched plain at the End of Time.

*

END EXILE PT. 8

ARC 1, COMPLETE

PT. 9 COMING

ARC 2: “PROMETHEUS AND SISYPHUS”

*

POST-SCRIPT/COMMENTARY

*

He wants the bet, the bet I should have never taken part in, applied to all of you. He wants to hold you, all of you mortals, to the standard I couldn’t hold a single man to.

I wept, the second song, the sad song. I wept at what couldn’t be replaced. I gave Job more, poured the blessings juice on him. He wept harder. He sang sadder, as if punishing himself for what I had done to him. I couldn’t handle it.

Re-wind. We played the tape again, and I took nothing. I let him live and die in peace because his family lived and died in peace. I lost the bet. The book says otherwise. That’s why he’s so pissed.

It was the same fight, spread out over a year or more. Every mortal we encountered or zoomed in on became an opportunity to call-back to Job. We’d argue. He’d pack his things dramatically, swear oaths, make me beg him to stay.

Until, I didn’t come home. I made a machine. I set it to do what I do, remotely and dispassionately. I left to figure out “why” any of it. To see my own universe in (or as) a grain of sand.