Excerpt from Outside Athens

The Man had moved away from center stage, towards a chalked x off to the left of the tree, and now The Younger Woman saw The Woman wrapped in her star-spangled cocoon, stood before it, staring out from an opening in the fabric’s folds into the massive trunk as if it were an oracle. What did she see? What could possibly be so engrossing? The woman seemed to be crying, and she felt the need to run to her, to embrace her, but her feet wouldn’t move from their position over the x chalked onto the dusty black stage. She thought, for a moment, that there was something strange about the moon. It seemed close and tangible. She was used to the moon being distant, a symbol or a metaphor, an abstraction, but no… There it was, solid. Real. Its light poured onto her face, and she felt its warmth. It seemed to be moving closer like the bulb of a lighting rig as a director encroached for a closeup. The intensity of the light grew until there was nothing other than the light in her eyes. All perception, all matter, all sense of coherence melted. She felt it all, her world, herself, float away as if time, space, and consciousness were a massive reservoir into which her body and mind had dissolved. 

And then it came back, an aperture opening like a pin prick, concentric expansion until there was a full view of the screen before her. A forest in the middle of the night. A king dead in the ground. The soundtrack is an inhalation: four-hundred years pass in an instant, a film being rewound. the corpse regaining patches of flesh and hair, the parking lot of the friary becomes a field, then a forest, the ozone slowly repairs itself, the temperature drops, minerals pour back into the gaping wounds of the Earth, oil slips through shafts back into the ground, Manhattan Island growing shorter and wilder until its nothing but varied shades of green, ships moving in reverse across the Atlantic, bringing bodies home, empires diminish stone by stone, chiefdoms, villages… There is a man on screen now. He sits in London, eighty-eight miles from what will be a parking lot and excavation site, writing the dead king’s story at his desk. The ink leaps up from the fibers of the folio onto the tip of the quill and back into the inkwell on his desk. The ink defies gravity, pours up, leaves the well for its vessel, crosses London in Shakespeare’s bag, sits on the shelf of a store, rides backwards on a cart to a workshop, then returns to an Oaktree, a knot where a wasp is reincorporating the eggs she lay returning the wood from a sappy black to its fragrant, grainy, trunk. The tree itself shrinks to a sapling, then a seed who could never have known that it would one day lend the ink to a masterpiece. Things are unmade, the mounds of material around our populations centers shift back to the places they were. Watching London over centuries in reverse looks like erosion. The clothes on her body become cotton at the tips of plants, wool on the backs of sheep, chemicals returned to their component parts. Nature becomes visible as nothing more than a motion, like breath, taking matter in, rearranging it, and trying again. And then she’s in a garden. Her skin is dark. She chews in reverse, expels a fragment of apple from her mouth back into the fruit, talks to a snake in unintelligible backwards syllables, makes love to a man from orgasm to foreplay, and then her body melts into his… There is no his, no hers… No body at all… The eukaryotes retreat from the face of the planet. No genesis, no gender, no sex. Bacteria swarm. The planet grows warmer and warmer, wetter and wetter until it is nothing but rumbling sounds and violent clashes. Even the single cells collapse into one another, merge. From billions to one to none. The matter that makes sound and color doesn’t change, but there are no sounds, no visions, because there are no senses to filter them towards meaning. The planet itself breaks into a trillion stones, which break into a trillion fragments each, which in turn become dust, which breaks apart into gas, which is sucked across the universe in an instant into the tightest space that has ever existed. Exhale.