Chapter 1: Shell & Chapter 2: 10,000 AD
Chapter 1: Shell
Pearl sat dressed in black still wearing sun glasses, her body perched rigid on the edge of her bed as if shielding from a cold wind, she listened to him breathe down the phone. As powerful as a seashell held to a child’s ear, an entire world contained within it. She had called to tell him about the funeral, but it was the sound of her voice, not the news of their fathers passing, that moved him.
“Remember how he wanted a lead lined coffin, so the worms wouldn’t get in.”
“Yeah, he got one. The pallbearers weren’t happy.”
“Well, they aren’t meant to be.”
She laughed. He smiled. He imagined her translucent skin, whether it had thickened to opacity. She imagined his soft puppy fat, whether it had grown folds, lumps, and hairs. They breathed together, neither wanting to hang up. A click disconnected them. Out of time. Flatlining their breath to infinite dial tone.
She replaced the receiver. Its hard plastic shell had warmed to meet her skin, her palms had grown hot with the call and her sweat formed a slippery balm. The phone radiated unspoken tension and she kept her hand still to calm it, to feel the last tremors of his voice, until the oceanic pulse turned into the footsteps of his incarceration, echoing more distantly with each locked prison door while she fell backwards, guilt-laden, cushioned by the soft static touch of cotton and feathers, sheltered by the childhood bedroom where they once lay belly-up gazing at the ceiling. Where dreams of him had soaked the sheets.
She reached beneath the mattress to see if it was still buried there, catching the dead-eyed stare of an ancient stuffed toy. Her hand found the fluffy hello kitty notebook, a thing that contained the precious and self-conscious whisperings of her girlhood. She stroked its matted fur. A strange squat anxious little animal bound by a heart shaped lock.
Chapter 2: 10,000 AD
[2’52”] A crystalline, undulating mass. A hot and vile jelly. Decaying or breathing or animated by the sway of the ocean, kin to those who live in carcasses, those that bloom in rot. Creatures feed and hatch from it to form one crawling skin.
The glistening mound erupts; a crack cleaving through its voluptuous form, a scolding lava-like substance bursts forth and grows like ruptured organs, at once vitrifying into new gelatinous curves.
Air foams at the fault-line of the eruption, floating upwards in a bubbling choir through a limitless maze of dark tunnels, snaking and tessellating toward a large cave, a howling, toothless mouth strung with weeds.
Moving up toward the surface, the colours change, becoming calmer, sun-bleached. The slow incline of the cave gives way to an expansive plateau. Its’ flatness is studded with stone obelisks encrusted with the dull jewels of time and inscribed with runes long forgotten. Some have fallen, broken, others are upright, tapering to a blunt point.