Literary Zinc

Here are two excerpts from an original, complete short story, titled “Alistair Cook’s Bones.” Feel free to comment, critique.

1 

Natural selection had gone wrong with the human brain in Bill’s opinion. In its unending quest to equip living creatures to survive any and all environments, natural selection had nurtured brain tissue into its own worst enemy: a thing that contemplated itself, grasped its mortality…a lump of biology that longed for things the universe did not contain.

Things like morality, purpose, love, connection to divinity, and eternal life. Offering such absurd impossibilities to people was like a brightly-colored balloon given to a child with terminal cancer, like a three-quarter-inch bandage for a wound made with a cannon ball.

Useless. Absolutely fucking useless.

The universe was vast and people were motes of dust blowing about on a remote, inconsequential, spinning pebble.

People built nests, filled them with bits of string, feathers and hay. They created the illusion that the world belonged to them by imposing human geometry upon it, covering the earth with nests, signs of humankind’s importance.

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2

The Earth trembled just a little, he could feel it shift, the atoms that made up all things vibrating in a silent dirge to add their peculiar disharmony to the sound of Bill’s thoughts.

Matter, they sang, is all we are, life and death the briefest dance, a vapor that appears for a moment then vanishes into sweet oblivion. All alone, they sang, is all we are.

The atoms held his death, they knew his name.

Copyright Ó March 31, 2007 by Jim Wormington