Gurta drew one of his fingernails along the sand dune. It wasn’t a proper fingernail, but an iron nail jutting from the tip of the demon’s finger. The Character couldn’t tell if it was infected or not, but all the flesh around the nail had turned a shade of purple that didn’t look native to the otherwise tomato-red demon.
It spoke in a voice that, if the Character was pressed, he would describe as similarly infected by purple.
“The Author enjoys cuteness and doesn’t see it detracting from His attempts at seriousness.”
The desert erupted in hundreds of geysers. The water fell and splashed into unnatural shapes, forming the outlines of trees, rocks, a road, and a general landscape. All conveniently froze in place. The water and beige pastoral remained for a few seconds before colored washed over it, and suddenly the Character and Gurta stood on a lonely stretch of highway, next to a bleach-blonde in a yellow sundress, standing beside an apparently malfunctioning cherry red convertible.
“After all, cuteness is often merely seriousness with broader perspective,” elucidated Gurta. “A child is very serious at opening a lock. It’s only with the adult’s withdrawn perspective, knowing that the child is using an oversized plastic novelty key on a 200-year-old Slavic liquor cabinet, that the serious situation is recognized as cute. It is similar to how chaos is merely order observed too closely, or something utterly negligible given attention. Observe.”
The bleach-blonde pursed her lips at her cell phone. She cursed, then complained. It all came out like the wa-wa’s of Charlie Brown’s school teacher, yet the Character got the gist. She didn’t understand how her cell could possibly not work.
The earth pulled back and spectrums shifted. Suddenly Redge wasn’t seeing in colors anymore, instead seeing signals pinging out of her cell, bouncing off of forests and mountains, and those that made it through dissipating into nothingness with several more miles to go before reaching the nearest cell tower.
Probably for effect, the earth pulled forward until the Character could read her cell phone bill, somewhere in her glove compartment. The figure was only three digits, which convinced the Characters that this zoom was for humorous effect.
Then everything fell apart into sand again, starting out all colored, but beige by the time it splashed into dunes. Even the bleach-blonde melted to dust.
“I don’t think I get it,” lied the Character.
“Or do you not want to get it?” clarified Gurta. “I can’t really blame you.”
The earth pulled forward again, flying in on just one grain of sand. Infinitely deep within it sat twelve grave men in grey suits, muttering about how to end the war.
The world pulled back and thousands of men in various tattered uniforms charged at each other, exploding in sprays of heroism and gore.
Things pulled so far back that the Character wondered if he still had eyes. There was the universe, so many splotches of color like crayon marks on a child’s placemat. Otherwise, black. The Character had no notion of where his home was in all of it. The Character pointed at the center.
“Is that where earth is?”
“No,” said Gurta. “It’s actually three trillion kilometers to the left of the earth, in the middle of the void of space. But the Author will move earth there now. A good change of pace. Break away from a norm, you know?”
The Character frowned and wondered what would happen to the tides.
“Cute.”
No comments:
Post a Comment