Unseaming

by Mike Allen

  Those who clutch this emptied vessel—who see what flows from my gutted corpse—will know then that I was never human. Even as they let my body fall, they will know.

  All will feel my passing from the flesh.

  My sorrows, an affectation from my time among humans, left behind with the shell I once wore. Liberated, I shall grieve no more. I—a tiny mote of nothingness, a vast discorporeal consciousness enveloping the world—will dance through the torrents of wind and weather; swim in the gulfs between atoms…and wait.

  The energies that bound me to my body, loosed in a massive burst, detected by the instruments of my destroyers, defying analysis. Their learned ones will flounder for explanations—a reverse in polarity? A warning from God, a message from the Spirit Mother? A formation of a white hole; the opening of a wormhole?

  A beacon call.

  Their radiologists will marvel, their astronomers will speculate at a grand disturbance in the cosmos, a surge in background cosmic rays. They’ll mutter in alarm at a tremendous dark mass discovered by their forests of radio telescopes, appearing spontaneously at the galaxy’s edge, generated from nothing, emerging from nowhere. A drifting mass of dark matter—a dark nebula, perhaps—spilled through a rift in the fabric of space?

  Only my Father—aroused by my dying call; awakening for the first time after a billion human lifetimes of sleep.

  Their scientists shall whisper among themselves about the missing piece of the night sky—a widening blotch along the path of the Milky Way, invisible at first to the naked eye. A strip of stars the same age—formed from a nebula parsecs wide—all dying, all winking out at once? A dense cluster of gases, propelled toward Earth by the force of the titanic black hole in the galaxy’s center?

  Only my Father, swimming between the stars, drawn to the planet where His daughter died.

  Their priests and priestesses will offer shrill prayers—beseeching their Lords to impart the meaning of the horrendous dark shadow that swallows the night sky, blotting the stars until nothing remains but pitch black. An omen of Armageddon, a dimming of Light before the Celestial Spheres rend? The Second Coming arrived at last, the vast darkness but the underside of New Jerusalem’s greater glories?

  Only my Father—closer to His destination than any Earth-bound dreamer in the most twisted of nightmares could ever conceive.

  Constellations, occasionally glimpsed in the black night, wavering, fading—the stars that define them dancing around each other; shifting, merging—their shine distorted as their light passes through my Father’s translucent flesh. Auroras cavort in twilight hours—horizon-spanning fans of blazing iridescence, triggered in the ionosphere by the winds of radiation that compose my Father’s breath. In midnight hours rolling waves of mad color burst across the heavens; widening, spreading, vanishing—stars flickering within them like glowing fish seen in the abyss. Moon-sized spheres like raw red suns appear suddenly, cast aside the darkness, paint the world like an open wound—then are gone.

  The Children of Earth will babble, scream and shriek at what they see in the night. Some will panic, hide, resort to murder, or suicide. More tragic yet, some will welcome the sights, thinking them signs of some wondrous new contact—the start of some long-awaited dream of rapture.

  But the greatest tragedy of all will be the shroud of ignorance that smothers every one of them. The Power that could have given them new life, here to end the cycle of their evolution. Those who will suffer for the murder of His daughter, doomed never to understand the cause.

  When dawn ends a new moon’s night, my Father’s single six-lobed hand shall appear opposite the sun, a monstrous billowing deformity dwarfing that stained yellow eye. As the world spins, my Father’s hand will rise in the western sky, ascending to meet the sun in the east.

  Pouring from their towers, crazed masses of humanity will reach undreamed-of peaks of barbarism: Men of the urban blight will parade their dismembered children and women through the streets; military engines will sweep their killing lasers through the crowds, bringing rains of blood and severed limbs; the skyscrapers that pierce the stratosphere will spill human flesh from every window, bodies piling hundreds of feet deep, those trapped beneath crushed by the sheer weight of their fellows.

  But despite all supplications, despite all attempts to escape, my Father’s hand will eclipse the sun.

  As my Father’s fingers close, that star’s golden corona will shine out between the narrowing gaps, struggling still to give light to its daughter world. Then, absorbed in His nebulous substance, the sun’s light will die; the Earth, cast in darkness; and the whole of humanity will see my Father’s true face.

  The face of their Creator, blotting out the Cosmos.

  Then the fires will come. Shockwaves from the dying sun—stellar matter loosed from my Father’s fist.

  The Earth’s surface, purged of life, its crust cracking open, vomiting its innards into the void, turning itself inside out.

  But mankind will not die.

  Mv Father, governor of energies and forms, will bind them to their bodies. Cast out into the cold of space—blood boiling—still they will live. Buried in the molten floods, trapped inside the cooling rock, still they will live. Burned and hollowed-out shells wandering the lifeless, airless hulk of their planet, still they will live.

  The energies fueling the minds and spirits of the human race bond stronger, break brighter than those of any other species blessed by His intervention in their evolution.

  My Father will not let His creations go to waste.

  The shimmering, ragged pucker of my Father’s maw will rise above the ruined Earth—so enormous no human still possessed of eyes will ever glimpse the whole of it. Then His mouth will open, and yet another behind it, and one behind that—infinite tunnel of billion-fanged mouths, receding into His star-swallowing gullet.

  Yet the Earth will not be consumed.

  Instead, He will draw one great breath… Stripped from the planet surface, pried from the rock, snatched from space, all His creations will be drawn into Him. All the men and women and children, their bodies boiled, broken and burned, hurled through the endless procession of stellar mouths. Even the energies of the discorporated dead—from the apes whose minds first awakened to those who perished during the sun’s death—drawn into the labyrinth of tunnels through Time and Space that compose my Father’s pulsing veins.

  And where will I be?

  When He comes, I will rejoice; and when He begins His journey to a new universe, I will join Him—the humans, their writhing shapes howling, endlessly digested, reformed, digested, reformed, to fuel my Father for his travels. Their screams, to me, only music…Celestial Child, I will cavort through the time-streams that carry my Father’s blood, delighting in the perpetual-motion machine that is my Sire.

  * * *

  The past eludes me—yet I know the future with the clarity of vivid memory. A grand contradiction in my Father’s design, that remains to me a mystery…

  Each night I lie awake, pondering why He would bind me here, to play Savior to man, to offer them all the chance to evolve beyond the limits the universe has given them—yet leave me with the certain knowledge that His plan will fail.

  A lesson, perhaps, that I once understood, its significance denied to me now, that will prepare me for my eons as a world maker?

  How I long for our reunion, that at long last He may enlighten me.

  THE QUILTMAKER

  prologue: the pattern

  You never imagined you’d be in a place like this again.

  Mothers. Fathers. Schoolteachers. Children. All about you, children.

  To a tiny part of you, this setting is familiar. These hard chairs built a little too small, with their desk flaps scarred by years upon years of pocketknife graffiti, rows on rows slanting down between aisles of threadbare carpet to the stage with its smooth-worn planks and its decades-old curtain and its faded elementary school logo marring the cinder block at the front of the stage platform.
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  You’re packed in tight among these people that the bulk of you finds so alien. To your left, a plump mom in a fancy black coat shushes her sullen son. To your right, a thick-bellied dad with a ridiculously long mustache makes no effort to hide his boredom. In front of you, a younger woman, slender, wearing a tacky spotted top, reveals a hollow, haunted look as as she leans in to listen to whatever her towheaded daughter is trying to tell her.

  The lights dim. The curtain parts.

  The play is something scripted from a children’s picture book, and the set matches the source, all garish pinks and greens. Adults in the cast are dressed as children, with ponytails and long white socks and overalls. They speak in exaggerated childspeak, with loud slurred words, and jump and skip with over-the-top excitement. There are children on stage with them, playing at being playmates. They’re singing that old tune about the woman who swallows everything, the fly, the spider, the bird, all manner of beasts. Around you, the parents laugh and laugh, especially the moms, even the haunted mom in front of you.

  You pay the story no mind, it’s all just screechy noise.

  Except it isn’t.

  If the school auditorium affects you like an alien moonscape, then this sensation is even more alien, this burning moistness behind the eyes you’ve chosen to use, this pressure in your throat like a tightening fist, this weight pushing down inside your chest, the pain there that billows and unfolds and billows.

  You don’t understand. Thoughts echo confused inside the marble hall of your mind, whisper amidst infinite layers of tapestry.

  Your vision blurs. You bring a hand to your face, unable to believe until your fingers touch your lower eyelids that you’re shedding tears. That you’re sniffling.

  It makes no sense. You’re not moved by this squealing travesty on the stage. Not at all.

  How many parts of you remember being read to at night? The drone of a father’s singsong voice, the sprightly coo of a mother reading Alice or the Grimms? Sharing in your wide-eyed delight with shining eyes of her own.

  This agony in your belly uncurls layer after layer. You are a mask of mourning in a garden of mindless giggles, listening to voices from stolen memories, watching a tableau of unabashed, unselfconscious innocence that you will never belong to, can never be part of again.

  It’s a miracle you don’t sob aloud. You have to get away, get out of this crowd, before someone notices.

  You excuse yourself. Once upon a time, these people would have had to stand up and press themselves as far back against their seats as they could to let you pass. No such problem now, you’re so compact they hardly notice you.

  It’s no matter that you left early; your plans are still on track.

  You know what you’re looking for and where you want to go. But it’s this tide of emotion sloshing inside you, disrupting your concentration, that’s unexpected and unwelcome and potentially dangerous.

  It takes an uncomfortably long time to find the car, and the slice of you that remains in control frets about how you must look, wandering aimless among the rows of spoiled suburbanite SUVs with tears smearing your face. In another life, you might have called the cops on such a freak, or at least run like a goody two-shoes to tell a teacher.

  When you spot that little red hatchback with all its charming dents and rust spots, it’s like the day your father arrived at the park just as the sixth-grade bullies had you cornered, a signal of safety, an end to fear.

  But not an end to sorrow.

  You produce the hand that holds the right key, you open the hatch and swing it up, climb in with a creak of old shocks and seal yourself inside. There’s a thick tattered quilt of yellow and green crumpled behind the back seat, where you knew it would be; you pull it over yourself and squirm into the darkness underneath, as small as you can make yourself.

  But you want to shrink further, crawl into the purest darkness that’s found only in the spaces between atoms and the void outside time and never come out again. The empty places inside you rustle at this longing, trickle echoes down into the sickest pits of your soul, and you allow a sob to escape. But only one.

  You can’t still the trembling, not completely. Though you smother this ghost chorus of despair in layer after layer, you can’t quite force yourself to still, no matter how silent you become, enveloped in warm black misery that doesn’t abate even as the young mother with the hollow stare opens the passenger door. You can’t see her, but you know she’s there.

  Her towheaded daughter chirps Shotgun! as she climbs onto her seat to be buckled in.

  Maddy, don’t be silly, scolds her mom, and hold still, damn it. Hold still.

  Madeleine, you say, too soft for either of them to hear.

  Somewhere inside you, someone’s heartstring stretches past the breaking point.

  The little engine that could starts up after after several cough-and-hack tries, and as the asphalt rumbles beneath you, Maddy starts to talk. She tells her mother over and over again about the play’s funny parts, the parts that make her laugh again to think about them, prompted along by her mom’s disengaged Mmm-hmms and Yeahs muttered at the right places. And that little girl’s laughter, that indecipherable Rosetta stone from a land with all its gates barred to you forevermore, makes you want to plug your ears and howl.

  Even in your state, tactile memories tell you when the final turn arrives, when the tires bounce and trundle over the gutter and onto the gravel drive. That’s when you do move, when you sit up, when you stretch out.

  As you draw your magic pouch from your neck, your bulging button sack, and dig fingers into your writhing faerie beads, far more addictive than any crystal Maddy’s mother was ever tempted to try, you glimpse your face in the rear view mirror, so distressed from your pathetic weeping that it’s peeled in strips like wet wallpaper, and the stuff beneath has sagged like softened wax, a paper-mâché horror show.

  You could scream at the sight, as you slide forward. And so could Madeleine and her haunted mother, but soon they have no mouths to open.

  In your hands, it shudders, this thing plucked from a little girl’s limp shell, this eye-searing, beautiful thing.

  You wail as it flutters against your fingers.

  first square

  In the cobweb-garnished shadows of his living room, Benjamin does what he does every morning at this hour, creeps to the bay window where he keeps the gauzelike curtains pulled almost shut but for a gap of an inch or two.

  And he watches through his remaining eye.

  His living room is dim and cavernous, and yet he never turns on the lights here. There’s no need, because he never has visitors.

  Binoculars rest on on a doily atop the lamp table beside the window, next to a telescope on a tripod that bows its heavy magnifying lens in a show of mock shame.

  For now, with the sky cloud-free, he has no need for such tools—perched on the hill at the end of the circle, his house commands an ideal view down the short length of the street, with split-level domiciles lined up to either side, four to the right, three to the left, triplets and quadruplets clad in beige and white vinyl siding. He has a surveyor’s command of the neighborhood, and the people in it, what they do in their yards, what they do in their cars.

  He only needs assistance when he wants his gaze to reach through a few choice windows.

  Already there’s sights to behold. Second house on the left, Maria the single mother is outside washing her car in cut-off jean shorts and a bikini top, a good use of an idle May morning. Her son is probably in school, true, but even if school was out she’d still be idle—her ex has custody on weekdays. A loudmouth talk radio DJ, that pinheaded tub of lard was no prize in any box, but she was the one who got caught cheating. Let her boss’s nephew nail her on top of the manager’s desk in the very restaurant where she worked as a hostess, or so Benjamin heard. Just one unseemly bead on a string of terrible decisions that stretches across her entire life.

  Maria is not a young lass anymore but the wear has all be
en on the inside. It’s no wonder that even though she’s almost twice his age, Lance the redneck brute has emerged from the first house on the right to make a show of trimming the hedges. He stares at his neighbor whenever her back is turned, sometimes even when she’s facing him.

  Surely she knows he’s there, what he’s doing, but whenever Maria looks up, it’s to steal furtive glances at the house directly across from hers, third house right, where Clive and Francene’s troubled prodigal son has just been returned to the nest.

  Benjamin had been witness a couple afternoons ago to the sad procession, as the unhappy couple brought wayward Shaun home from rehab, rushed him inside like handlers hiding their charge from paparazzi.

  What a delectable mess that household is. Once upon a time they were four, with stiff and proper Francene, demure wife number two, agreeing to help Clive raise a granddaughter produced through his first marriage. So little boy Shaun acquired a niece, Denise, who started as a sweet tomboy in a softball uniform, graduated from there to full-blown teen crackhouse queen, then vanished without a trace.