All tagged the afterchildren
“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?
“So, what’s the weirdest thing that you believe in?” Her hands were busy sawing through a thick cut of swordfish. After a few rough dates, she figured that she would lead with the question this time. “I’ve got a doozy, but I want to hear your story first.”
“Well.” He put down a forkload of farfalle. “Sometimes, you know… I guess I remember things from my childhood that couldn’t possibly have happened. It's made me wonder if this is actually the universe that I was born into.”
She sighs. This is how her last date ended, too. “Do you really want to make this more awkward than it is?”
“Well, as an atheist-“ he had to get that part in. “I really feel that we should get this out of the way. Make sure that there’s nothing too weird for me.”
“Alright.” She takes a deep breath, then:
Humanity left the universe, and the gods followed. They left behind their cities, their treasures, their rockets; but most importantly, they left behind their children.
Divine and ageless, they filled the void with their laughter. Their intellect was perfect, yet their nature remained naive. They chose to hold an endless birthday party for all things, accepting space and time as a continuous fluid independent of all clocks and calendars. The fiery cores of earth-like planets were converted into massive ovens to satisfy their perpetual desire for cake.
Every league out in darkspace had given their war comet a nom de guerre; for instance, the Bubblegum Battalion had their tried and true Fuchsia Machsine,whose engines were hidden beneath a thick shell of rose quartz and adhesive snow (30% marshmallow by volume). Despite their name, they were, in fact, all out of bubblegum, and had been for upwards of three months now. Their comet was drifting through the abyss after a humiliating defeat, having been outfoxed and outgunned by Licorice Laboratories’ Malted Marauder.
