Sacculina

by Philip Fracassi

There was no blanket of stars, no stunning cosmos in the heavens to pray to. The bowl of space hung blank and desolate and uncaring as the water.

They would all die soon, and his only hope was that his soul, or his energy, or whatever it was that lived on, if anything at all, would find something better than all this. Find something to love about life’s miracle, which more and more seemed like the ultimate joke. They were but animate flesh on a planet as inconsequential as they were. They all tried so hard to live and to feel, desperate to understand the why of it all, time and time again, but they simply lived and died by the billions, and never, not once, did they feel truly alive, were no closer to answering the biggest questions, the ones that mattered. The imagination organ let humanity see God in their minds but still, somehow, the point was missed, leaving a planet full of idiots. For that failure the species was being punished. Wrathfully. The earth was taking the flesh back from beneath, retribution rising, released and hungry, wiggling and mighty and dark, to suck humanity down into the formless primordial stink of pre-existence.