The Divine Farce (LeapLit)

by Michael S.A. Graziano

It was, of all bizarre things, pear nectar, and had the slightly grainy texture of pureed pear.

In my mind the universe was filled up infinitely with concrete,

and at its center was one tiny bubble in which our randomly assorted souls had been entombed.

Terrifying

Our voices were so resonant in our sarcophagus, whispering and vibrating around and through my head, that all our sentences felt to me as though they came from my own mouth.

Realy cool imagery

Did I just mutter something out loud, something unpremeditated that came out in a falsetto? Why would I do that? Am I insane already? No no, it’s just Rose. She spoke, not me.

Why are we here? What can we do? It is what it is.

Et ez wat et ez

But the world is what it is. You get used to it, as you get used to anything.

At the root of jealousy is a fear of abandonment, and we had no possibility of abandonment in that place.

For a long time, I wondered if we were in heaven. An institutional heaven, with limited resources, that had slotted us into the only available accommodation.

Any finite amount of time implied an eventual release,

But eternity—that was on a different level of conception. It forced the mind to acquiesce entirely and accept the here, the now, and the comfort, such as it was.

I kept my back to them and my tongue to the wall, until Rose beat on me with her open palms, laughing, and said, Sage, turn around, we love you.

The sealant that coated the wall had worn through, and the underlying concrete was now exposed.

His fears seemed to be an expression of conservatism. He was afraid of losing the familiar.

The world is not what it is: the world is what you make it.

The woman smiled nervously, exposing small separated teeth, and whispered, “Is it

for real?” I closed my eyes and her voice turned rose again. Is this what we are?

So cool

I saw a woman twisting biscuits into her rectum, presumably as a capacious storage for later. Her mouth was already stretched so full that her face looked cancerous.

They were no better than anyone else, no more lovely than the thousand other people I saw every moment, no less filthy, but all the same they were themselves, they were special because I knew them, because I had spent enough time pressed up against them to absorb a little part of their odor and skin and blood and emotion,

The rules of the divine game resulted in a certain isolation of the soul.

“I haven’t had a friend in a long time,” he admitted. After a while we got up and went separate ways.

I’d take a break from the perpetual fight, sit down, lean back against a wall, and wonder what else, what else is in the world? What else is worth doing?

Suddenly my perception clicked and I realized that the lights were holes riddling the black rock.