Three: Bari survived. The Earth, sensing his indecisiveness, rejected him and bounced him back into space, towards the infamous grilled cheese nebula, which is the home of the famed four sided triangles.
…festivities.
Situated halfway between the American and Eurasian landmasses, there is a landmass, muy pequeño, where there to this day reside the last stalwarts who desperately cling to an ancient, barbaric religion that had once nearly conquered the world. It happened like this: the religion demanded of its followers that once a week they imbibe the body and the blood of their God. Now imagine yourself as this God. You’ve spent thousands of years exercising your wrath to instill fear in your subjects and alternately telling everyone that you loved them unconditionally to add a little bit of extra confusion, and suddenly you become relegated to a once a week snack that just happens to be worshipped as well. Add to that that you’ve convinced them that you were infinite, when that is most certainly not the case, and you do possess a massive, though finite amount of resources that constitute your body, and maybe they could be regenerated, but certainly not at the rate they’re being consumed. Add on top of this that those people are going around killing some people so that even more people will engage in this practice, which is a pretty intimidating way to make people believe what you do. I believe that anyone in this particular predicament would be endowed with the right to feel at least a little bit irritated over time. So, this God took out an ad in the New York Times to declare himself dead (though it had been done in literature before, that was regarded by many as fiction), and it had the desired effect. Less people believed in him, and so his flesh began to regenerate faster than it was being consumed. He retired to a distant corner of the galaxy with the hopes of spending the rest of his days in the seclusion of a high class resort.
The problem of the island we were just discussing still remained. They staunchly stood by their faith, no matter how foolish, in this God, and so every weekend while lying on the beach, he would have to endure the minor inconvenience of losing a small amount of flesh and blood. This was especially irritating when he was trying to show off his magic tricks to the other inhabitants of the resort. Eventually, he grew so frustrated that at these given times he would refuse to come out of his room until they were done snacking. This eventually grew more and more frustrating, as he was stuck hiding inside, writhing in the pain of being eaten when the much more appealing games of Frisbee or surfing were going on outside. It should come as no surprise then that one day they were punished by a sequence of body parts washing up on their shore.
Baritone, as an impulse purchase, once bought a temporary trial version of immortality, though he wasn’t informed as to the whereabouts on the calendar of the expiration date. He also wasn’t informed as to whether any sort of extenuating circumstances existed which would lead to a termination before that unspecified date. In fact, the whole thing was really a scam, like those people in the kiosks in the middle of shopping malls that are selling the latest as seen on TV product that’s bound to break in a week, but they grab the helpless people filtering by and harass them into purchasing said useless product. Only in this case he had walked into the church attempting to find some sort of spiritual guidance, and this had been the result. In these days, this was the product being peddled in such situations. In the middle ages, it had been admission into heaven, which was eventually revealed as being a scam. As such, sales dropped greatly, but those, along with other products, are still available in every church gift shop. On occasion, he pondered this purchase, and in a moment of clarity two years after the event realized that he’d been fooled into buying what everyone is given at birth, that being an indefinite amount of time to be spent alive. Only the phrase immortality seemed to cancel out the word temporary in his mind, and he conveniently ignored the oxymoronic nature of the phrase temporary immortality for a while. When he came to, he realized the comedic fallacy of the situation he had put himself in, and wished that there had been a reasonable return policy. But he was stuck with his purchase. “That’s the last time I do business with them”, he thought.
One morning, a severed human head, with his eyes frozen in the final terror they had beheld, which was to him no terror, but with a smile that revealed that he had thought of something extremely funny in that instant before the shark had begun to tear his body asunder washed up on shore. What a relief it had been to be eaten by a shark, that creature which he had so admired for years. Now if only that joke he had thought of could be known, for it is well known that the best jokes originate in the minds of those taking their last breaths, and much money could be made from compiling a joke book which contained these jokes. This island where he washed up was a perfect circle for most of its existence, but a while after the events in this narrative, a peninsula, fed up with its old abode, implored of its godfather, Plate Tectonics, to move it somewhere else. Naturally then, each half of the Island was a perfect semicircle. All water touching one side was heavily shark infested, while the other half was heavily Shaq(uille O’Neil) infested. It should come as no surprise then that human body parts would wash up on shore from time to time, but the truth is that on either side it was much more common for burritos to wash up.
Now, this head was soon followed by other body parts, such as arms, legs, and a torso. Lastly the viscera washed up: a plethora, a cornucopia of organs, vital and not so vital, that washed up on the beach in a random array, as if part of a package deal, an economy pack of dismembered human body parts that had been rendered useless by their separation from the body. And in the appendix, the organ whose proud function had been shattered so long ago by the process of evolution, there was frozen a vague shape. Something that had been contained within him and had been invisible throughout the course of his natural life, but had attempted to show its visage now that the appendix was available for the world to see. Something that had once meant something to him that could only be expressed in the nomenclature of shapes. It manifested itself as the symbol for pi, but who knows what that meant. It was simply there.
At some point in the future, the Earth, burned by the ever-warming scorching rays of the sun, would begin to crack. It would beseech of the sun, to no avail, to de-intensify its burning. And the sun would not listen, because it had never known anything but what it was now doing. Its nature could not be changed, even if it had been moved by the pleas of one of its dearest satellites. Because of the warming of the sun, the surface of our beloved planet would eventually dry up, crack, and shatter, and that planet would unburden itself of its own viscera. Trees, mountains, and oceans. The ground, and all the graves below that. All of these and more would begin the slow pilgrimage through space, with gravitational forces dictating the buddy system. But find a destination they never would, for nothing could replace the Earth as home for its components.
It had come to pass that the islanders possessed, at the very least, a working knowledge of the human digestive system. Perhaps due to this basic knowledge of human anatomy, the following thought process was thus logical in their minds:
1.When we eat, we defecate
2.We’ve been throwing our refuse into the shark/Shaq infested waters for a time long enough to qualify as ages
3.Every weekend, we eat our God
4.Thusly, going back to step one, we defecate our God
5.Going back to step 2, we throw our God into the water
Due to all of this information, the mass opinion was that only one explanation was available for the occurrence of the parts of a body washing up on shore. The washed up remains, which, if you haven’t figured out yet, belonged to our protagonist, Baritone Juicebox, were in their minds the remnants of their God that had assembled themselves in the middle of the ocean. They had avoided being eaten by the sharks and the shaqs and finally washed up on shore before they could fully assemble themselves into a body and return to the faithful followers, most likely with some form of salvation, or at the very least, veggie burgers.
The plane
ts, stars, black holes, and antimatter, plus the respective residents of those cosmic bodies and entities, were not so naïve, foolish, or deficient in any of their intellectual faculties to the point where they could logically entertain an idea so garish to the bastions of logic, but in this place, anything was possible. The whole part of anything being possible is generally wonderful, but oftentimes, and this is such a case, that anything goes astray and becomes a doltish idea which implants itself in the minds of masses of normally sentient beings. Not a bit of all this seemed confounding to them, for they truly had the explanation to everything. What a blessed people! Oh, that such a fate could befall us all! The only event of the day that confused them also came in the form of another object washing up on shore later in the evening, and that was a piece of toast. Alas, for that no explanation was available. Oh well.
One time in Bari’s youth he had become possessed by a newly discovered form of neurosis that stripped his mind of control over the great majority of actions his body would perform. In fact, the only control that was retained was the desire to eat what he wanted to, and subsequently eat that food. Thus, he found himself standing upon the venerated Milkshake Hills above the hemorrhaged waters of Lake Spatula. An alligator with silverware plunged into its scales lay, lifeless, though maybe it never lived, suspended above the ground by poles thrust through its body. If one looked past it, past the gaping jaws, past the body, and for Bari, past his past, what could be seen was a mangled cityscape. It was a cityscape he longed to experience, but only ever did so from afar. It was from this vantage point that Bari would often view the scenes of what had passed in his past within the safe confines of retrospect. From here it was safe to call to mind what ifs, what might have beens, and the opinion pieces known as what should have beens. And what a gallimaufry passed through his mind’s eye each time, but it always came back to the first time he saw that alligator. Yesteryears they were at this point, though with the present as it was, they were what he desired to substitute for reality. For at one point this alligator had been located on the roof of a museum, and he had viewed it, and not because of that, but because of the current circumstance, he had been happy. Now he saw it with a sort of jaded bitterness, the sort that seems to inevitably come with age, though he would try harder than most to shake it off. To look into the gaping jaws of this mutated form of some creature of the family Crocodylidae was to behold something far different from a cityscape of this world. This was something special, though this encapsulates two things, neither of which is edible: one being the truth and the other being the future.
And while there was no specific reason the neurosis had led him to this spot, other than to enjoy the view of the water, and the alligator with the silverware in it, and the thought that the walk up to this spot would be very divertido, he appreciated the coincidence. He appreciated that some disease that temporarily took hold of his body would have a similar taste in the destinations it desired to visit as him, as he probably would have gone to this very spot of his volition in the near future anyway. In fact, he resolved then and there to make a point of going back as soon as time and resources once again allowed. It was such a kind neurosis that Bari was genuinely disappointed when it left all so suddenly. He had been hoping because of the chosen location for the walk that he would have someone finally to voice his concerns to, someone that might understand the history that this location had, though the whereabouts of the alligator were in fact ever-changing. But those who appreciated it always had a way of finding it and that was mysterious in the way that turtles always find their way back to the beach where they were born. This was important, because Bari was the sort that could attach sentimental value to anything, so long as it had the least bit merit, and had occurred in the past and had no chance of ever occurring again. But if we are to focus on the present and not on the past, at least for the present, we will find that Bari was about to say something.
“Oh well, I’m sure he’ll be back.”
This was, of course, a reference to the neurosis. You see, our poor protagonist, in these days, only ever found himself in the company of those creatures that saw fit to possess him, and usually did so to attain their own selfish goals. Because of this, he always looked forward to being possessed because it at least meant he would have someone to talk to, and maybe even entertain his musings. But now, the poor soul, he was left alone, and looking down from the Milkshake hills, which were named because the first settlers thought that the local cows were saying milkshake when they in fact said moo, and errantly believing, just as the settlers had their own errant beliefs, that the best current course of action would be to leap from the cliff upon which he stood into the lake. And whilst he pondered this, he began to pick at a scab that was itching, and had been so for a while. But as they say, to do that is just to reopen old wounds, and open this particular wound did. At first, the scab had been shaped like a grizzly bear, and so blood began to drop in that shape. At first it entertained him, for there was a bear shaped pool of blood on the ground beside him, and due to the quantity of chocolate milk which he had imbibed in his life, the blood looked an awful lot like that beverage. Therefore, he had a bear shaped pool of chocolate syrup lying beside him, but it eventually lost that charm and became formless. The first drops embedded themselves into the ground, with each subsequent drop being fuel for those seeds, which rapidly grew into formidably-sized carnivorous plants, and ate him.
“Poor soul”, said the neurosis from afar, glad that he had diverted his possession from this creature and unto a blade of grass, and upon witnessing this, quickly diverted his attention to a passing…
Las plantas de la sangre de Bari, as they had just engaged in auto-cannibalism, now could be viewed as his authentic persona. Thus, they continuously cut themselves apart, and used themselves as a source for food for growth. Eventually they reached into the atmosphere and spread their branches across the sky so that they might obtain a better view of all that there was to see. As their flowers opened to take in the sight below them, they in turn blotted out the sun.
“How selfish”, you might think.
That would seem like a reasonable thought process. He was taking all the sunlight for himself. A most self-serving form of photosynthesis, possibly the most selfish example that had yet existed. A most photosynthesis form of serving selves, I would dare say, and I dare not say much. Hark! The sun now hadn’t the ability to set its rays to the surface of the Earth. What lived on Earth withered, as its food could no longer be replenished. The sun, because of all these happenings, though due in absolutely no part to its own failings, began to feel like a failure, and gave up sending out light. The entire solar system wilted. The other stars, which had tried to console the sun, used up their last bits of energy trying to dissuade it from suicide, and exhausted, died. Antimatter was all that was left alive.
“Good riddance”, was the collective statement they issued when asked about that matter, and one that was easily agreed upon amongst their sorts. They were rather sick of the travails of all those silly beings, creatures, and other synonyms for living things made of matter. .
“Illogical!!” screamed one part of my brain.
“Balderdash!” was what one other part of that brain cried.
“You cannot insert such selratatious
bits of information into your writing.”
All these concerns were voiced to the part of my brain that told my left hand to move the pencil across the paper. This was their verdict!
Necesitamos decir the verdad to your audience. Cosmic bodies do not naturally possess thought processes. Plants do not grow into the sky. Furthermore, the part of my brain known as conscience told me that I needed to be kinder to my characters, for all which transpires in their lives is up to me, and thus far I have been extremely cruel to them. I imagine that I have. So be it. Perhaps suffering really is a learning experience, and thus they will profit from this and become the billionaires of learning experiences. Parts of me indeed
scream cruelty, for what benevolent creature would put beings whose fates are in his control into these predicaments. Well, I guess I would. But the others continued screaming.
I was overwhelmed
POINT!
I
Had no choice but
To
Heed their words, and take
Back at least what had transpired regarding the end
Of the
World and solar system and universe
And being anew, at least
Regarding those events
Because innocent bystanders could have
Been harmed by the cruelties I have inflicted
Upon my characters, and I don’t want the innocent
To suffer at the hands of my
Sadistic words. Because though they might just be symbols
Upon pieces of
Paper, they
Stand for actions
Which may or may not have an impact
On the lives of those
Who inhabit this world and universe.
I apologize.