Together, they gazed into the galaxy of colorful orbs behind the glass. “Every gumball dreams of growing up to become a planet,” the goddess told him. “They are child worlds, waiting to be adopted by a sun; but, as you might imagine, almost none among them will survive long enough to see their dreams come true.”
He slid a single quarter into their universe of metal and plastic. One of the little planets fell from its resting place, spiraling into a downward orbit before arriving in his hand. “A whole world, huh?” He held it up to the light in wonder. “Are there people living there?”
“Of course there are,” she nodded. “Though time does not progress for them as it does for us. From their perspective, everything that we do is happening in a time beyond memory. That is the nature of mythology; all divine events take place in the same impossible moment.”
“We?” He strained his eyes. “You speak of me as though I’m a god like you.”
“You’re holding their entire world in the palm of your hand. No matter what you consider yourself to be, they will remember you as one.”
He stopped to think for a moment. Then: “What does it mean when someone eats a gumball?”
“It usually means that the world never comes into being, which, all things considered, is actually quite normal. The failures of the gods are rarely witnessed by mortals, but they greatly outnumber our successes.”
“Why do you only say ‘usually?’”
“Because the end of the world takes place in the same mythological moment as its beginning. Sometimes- and its hard to say exactly when, but it happens- there are worlds whose entire histories amount to one long, slow apocalypse. When this is the case, biting into a gumball initiates both the beginning and the end.”
“So, if I bite into this planet, it’s possible that I’ll become its one and only god?”
“Well, you’re certainly welcome to try.”
His attempt to do so was punctuated by a sudden snap, followed by a loud gasp of pain. He spat the orb into his hand, and it emerged alongside two new moons which were once the tips of his teeth.
“As it turns out, gobstoppers dream of becoming planets, too.”
He responded with something between a growl and a moan, all the while clutching his wounded jaw. “You knew what it was this whole time, didn’t you? Why didn’t you say something?”
The goddess smiled widely; her teeth were still perfect. “Another basic lesson in godhood: there's a trickster in every pantheon.”
Gods and mortals are not always so far apart in power.
Mythological time and statue chronology are closely related.
Some gods are more trustworthy than others.
A marble statue of an angel hovered over the lagoon, with no physical connection to the Earth below. Water poured forth from an amphora in her motionless hands, spilling endlessly down. “From this point, the potentiality of all creation spills forth. New species of microscopic life come into being and disappear in moments. Only a fraction of a fraction can survive, but every few centuries, one endures, and begins to spread through the waters of the world.”
The Fountain of Youth. And in fucking Florida, no less.
“This limousine is endlessly long. Were you to reach the front, you would be at the end of space and beginning of time.”
“But there is a driver?”
The antlion is unique among modern animalia in that its evolution resulted not from a mutation within its genetic code, but rather, within the spelling of its name. Sometime during the legendary translation of the Septuagint from Hebrew into Greek for Ptolemy II, an old Hebrew variant of 'lion' used in the Book of Job was warped into the bizarre word 'myrmecoleon,' a portmanteau of the terms for 'ant' and 'lion.'
"Before paper was easy to come by, scrolls and books would be rinsed of their ink so that their pages could be reused when the original copies no longer had an audience.” A dash of lampblack bitters left a squid trail through his whiskey and vermouth. "Even after their removal, however, the molecules of ink would continue to cluster in a similar geometric manner. Because of this, most of the information was retained in the ink itself long after it had been wrung from the text.
Geogaddi, Boards of Canada’s sophomore album, was engineered so as to last for exactly sixty-six minutes and six seconds. Their fixation on the repetition sixes is clear throughout its content, right down to the title of track sixteen: “The Devil is in the Details.” Even the cover art is composed entirely of six-sided figures, a seemingly endless kaleidonoid procession of hexagons within hexagons. When the LP suddenly emerged in 2002, it debuted at a collection of six churches worldwide, in a ritual of unknown intent.
The average seashell found along a shoreline is fixed at the same frequency as the body of water that birthed it. When held to the ear, the same, steady undulation of waves can be heard, sliding in and out of time. For this reason, they make excellent souvenirs for tourists, providing instant access to memories of better climes.
Meanwhile, the spiraling apex of a black conch’s shell can be twisted in several places like a radio’s dial. The larger the mussel, the more precision that can be attained while tuning its abandoned hermitage.
Among alligators and crocodiles alike, there exist elders who remember the flavor of mammoth's blood, and even some whose gnarled backs bear scars from the fire of an asteroid's impact. Their kind have persisted for untold millions of years, long enough for evolution to nest their brains within our own like matryoshka dolls.
The human body is not a mere brain-driven machine of nerve and bone. Every subsection of its anatomy is an independent ecosystem of organisms (or organism-like structures), each with their own motivations and metabolisms. Though much of this zoology occurs beneath a veil of skin, it is still a phenomenon that can be seen with the naked eye. When one looks upward into cloudless daylight, they just might see the spectral outlines of lifeforms known as lucigens.
In the lands east of the Ural Mountains, there is said to have once grown a plant whose fruit was a fully-grown lamb fastened to the soil by its umbilical stem. To some, this beast was known as the borometz, and to others, as the Yeduah. It survived by grazing on the grasses surrounding its roots, though it could never wander beyond its own tether to the earth below. Any separation from this stem would result in its immediate death.
"From what you've described to me, it sounds like your brain is undergoing rapid shifts in chirality." The doctor's eyes were focused on his tablet. “Like you’re suddenly trading places with the other side of the mirror, yes?“
“Yeah, that’s one way to put it. But what could cause something like that?"
Kissing was invented in the city of Thusk, a seaport with thousands of citizens, yet only one dentist. Her services were scarcely needed, for the civic biologists had rendered most of her profession obsolete.
I wanted to believe the tales of Polybius, the arcade game that drove its own players to madness. It was the perfect urban legend, for the details of its telling reinforced its own state of unverifiable limbo. Any and all cabinets which may or may not have once existed were seized by the powers that be, leaving an empty-handed public to speculate about whether or not they’d ever actually been there to begin with.
There are two separate sources of gravity competing for control of the city of Hyperboleon. These operate perpendicularly to one another, drawing objects towards two separate grounds whose horizons meet at a right angle.
The glyphs of the Folorsine alphabet are neither read horizontally, nor vertically; they march towards the eye as a procession of phosphenes, parading one after the other through the iris’s gates. This is not a language that is interpreted from a page, so much as swallowed by the brain. It is still actively used, though its spoken form has not been heard for centuries.
“Hey, you! Your eyes are untied.”
Decades have passed since she first uttered those words to me. We were in Kindergarten then, yet she spoke them with such certainty that, even as an adult, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had meant something by them. Whenever I’d ask her to explain what she meant, however, she’d just smile and laugh at me, as though it were obvious. What was it, I wondered, that she could see, yet I could not?
Together, they gazed into the galaxy of colorful orbs behind the glass. “Every gumball dreams of growing up to become a planet,” the goddess told him. “They are child worlds, waiting to be adopted by a sun; but, as you might imagine, almost none among them will survive long enough to see their dreams come true.”
An irregular grid of clouds formed in the evening sky, simultaneously violet and orange.
“They’re killing us,” she told me. “The jets are spewing cancer out of their tails.”
The Hoover Dam is said to be filled with human bones. So the story goes, during its construction, workers who fell into the structure’s wet concrete were left inside, as those in charge believed that the cost and risk of retrieving their bodies would be too great. For those who believe this tale, the dam doubles as a colossal tombstone for those buried within.
Imagine, for a moment, a broadcast of the original Twilight Zone where Rod Serling never appears. In such an episode, the characters within are forced to contend with a reality that, without warning, is subjected to the influence of a “fifth dimension,” where the laws of humanity lose all meaning. After being assailed by this anomaly for roughly half an hour, its influence fades away, and the world continues rotating onward.
The captain’s wrist bore a living tattoo of a compass rose; as the icy waves tossed her vessel about, its ink contorted so that its longest petal would always point north. Its pigment conspired with the iron in her blood to reveal the world’s magnetic winds. It hadn’t yet proven useful on this journey, as the tramontana had been making itself obvious for weeks, yet she knew that it would soon become a necessity.
The coyote awoke one morning to find that his roadrunner was gone.
He’d disappeared, beyond the asymptotic horizon which outlined their desert, that unreachable boundary between two nowheres. Together, as predator and prey, they’d followed the same highway westward for thousands of miles, always encroaching on that same horizon, yet finding no end to the repetition of sagebrush and sand.
“The ASCII standard begins with a set of control characters,” she explained. “If you type the last of these on a modern computer, an invisible character is added, one that usually doesn’t do anything. It’s a relic from another time called the ‘delete’ character, number 127. These days, programmers sometimes use it as a placeholder, but for the most part, it’s obsolete.”
The human mind does not actually move forward through time; it is far more accurate to say that it sinks through it. The passage of time is a constant, ambient force like gravity, rather than a willful motion. When one closes their eyes and attempts to resist it, there is no traction or grip to be found that might stall the inevitable descent.
Objects wrought from wood occasionally remember being alive. The circuits of their quiet minds can be seen in the contours of the grain, sleepily churning through memories. No matter how deeply carved, sawn, milled, or polished, there is always an aspect of the original arbor that endures. What remains is no longer alive, of course, but it is more than capable of haunting.
Gremlins are known to live in the engines of airplanes, the spindles of hard drives, and the pipes of boiler rooms. No space within human industry has ever proven hostile enough to prevent their occupation, making them some of the hardiest lifeforms on this planet. Furthermore, they are notoriously difficult to capture, or even to spot; their presence is only ever known in hindsight, evidenced by chewed-through wires, rust-addled screws, and corrupted data.
Some mathematicians go so far as to call their work the language of God. In their hubris, they refuse to admit that they write in a language that is very human: one with its own idioms, clichés, and platitudes. In order to prove supposed mathematical truth, they routinely employ the same handful of phrases and arguments, yet are startled when these phrases and arguments are echoed back to them in the same language that they began with.
“At first, we thought that our fortunes had changed,” his journal begins. “We saw what we thought was a whale breaching when a jet of vapor erupted from the waters along our ship’s port side. As we readied our harpoons, however, we found that the geyser seemed to have no source but the surface of the ocean itself. One of the other sailors exclaimed that it must have been a ‘mirror whale,’ meaning that both sides of its blowhole were on the outside of its body. As such, there was nothing for us to see or kill.”
There exists an incantation which, if uttered properly, can duplicate the mind and body of whosoever dares to utter it. There exists another, similar in nature, which allows one’s own reflection to be drawn out of any mirror. Lastly, there is one which causes a perfect opposite of the self to appear in juxtaposition with the original, causing both to immediately cease to exist.
As it turns out, all three of these incantations can be learned by parrots.
The end of the world is neither exactly a time or a place; rather, it is a four-dimensional surface, curved and chaotic, which courts the path of the planet on its journey through space-time. Were one to visualize it using only three dimensions, it would seem almost ribbon-like, a black helix of fluttering death. Asteroids entangled by this dark fabric are certain to be drawn into the Earth’s gravitational pull.
During the first phase of manufacturing, jellybeans are perfectly transparent. In this preliminary state, they look like misplaced contact lenses, or raindrops that failed to burst on impact. These beans have no flavor of their own, yet contain the potential for all flavors; when bitten, there is only that familiar texture of a tender shell giving way, followed by that of semi-molten starch oozing apart.