Skydekkerix

Kiddo you know I aint had writing time this week. I got three jobs and two years on my kid and by god he’s climbing now. Two thirds of my babysitters are in various foreign places and damn if I’m not surprised my wife and I haven’t had more than one argument in this time. I just wanna sleep and play warhammer forty thousand and watch the lord of the rings but baby I gotta write cos it’s my damn purpose. So I fished through my bloated Previous Stories file and rustled up the first dang story I done ever got published and whaddya know I’m pretty happy with the ting. Even had the indents and errything. I don’t know if it’s illegal for me to put on my here website but its been over a decade and it was published in a Canberra uni journal and I know damn well they didn’t know I didn’t go to that uni so what I’m really trying to say is sorry for the clip show.

Ain’t judge me too harsh I was a teenager when I wrote this:

Pillars of Creation

“Nebulae,” said Ms Gordon, enunciating like she was performing a Shakespearean monologue, “Are areas of gas and plasma suspended in space. They are often formed by exploding stars, called sup-er-no-va’s. Scientists theorize that it is in these gigantic objects, thousands of light years away, that new stars are slowly created.”

Ms Gordon knew she was only really talking to one student here. In a small country school of only sixty-two children, there were six year five students. Two were girls, and only one was pretending to pay attention out of a sickeningly sweet politeness. The other three boys were either drawing fan fiction about their favourite violent video games and movies or throwing paper and lint at Billy.

Billy sat at least a desk or two away from everyone else in his grade, a measure Ms Gordon had to enforce for the poor kid’s own good. She had to keep him from sitting next to one of the boys to save him from constant arm burns and dead legs, and if she sat him next to one of the girls her hand would rise up and she would wittingly remark: “Miss, Billy smells.” The class would laugh and Billy would turn a deep shade of red and then refuse to speak for the rest of the day.

Billy was not a good student, much to the dismay of his teacher. “If you couldn’t make him popular couldn’t you have least given him brains?” she often asked the God that she saved for rhetorical questions. Billy listened, often intently, but when it came to exercises she would pick up his book and there would be no words on his page, just a guilty look on his face.

Billy was now staring at the projected slides with his usual look of intent fascination. The slide was a picture from the Hubble telescope of the Eagle Nebula. It was labelled “The Pillars of Creation”. They were immense plumes of dust and smoke encapsulated in a corona of blue light. They seemed to be stationary and brooding, like monoliths in the desert, but with the promise of violence and infused with a kind of dark energy, a storm rolling in from over the ocean.

Billy’s mind was reeling at the sight of them. His eyes flicked around the image, trying to drink it all in. These pillars were light-years across, and thousands of light-years away, and were made of particles that would be invisible to the naked eye and so sparsely placed that you could walk for a lifetime between them and not reach anything at all. It would be impossible to view from close up. “This is what Gods hang on the walls of their living rooms.” Billy found himself thinking. A silly thought, but not far from the truth.

The image started to make Billy uncomfortable. There was intense energy and movement in the image, even though it appeared to be stationary. He started to sweat and his forehead started to itch. The voices of his teacher and fellow students seemed to slow down and grow louder until they became a rushing sound, like the time he went to a theme park and stood near a roller-coaster as it went past. The Pillars of Creation started to roll and retract and the corona of light grew until it became a clear blue sky.

Jagged and triangular shards of white-hot metal flew inwards towards the imploding pillars. Billy felt a tugging sensation in his head, and a piece of shrapnel the size of his palm wrenched itself out of his skull. The piece joined with the rest and slowly pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle to form the shape of an old and rusted car. The Pillars of Creation, which were now plumes of black smoke and dust, slowly retracted inwards. The air rippled as a shockwave was sucked back towards the vehicle and the spread-out limbs and innards of a human being lying nearby picked themselves up and gathered together to make a young boy wearing a huge singlet and a pair of blue soccer shorts.

The boy dropped the soccer ball he was carrying and ran awkwardly backwards towards the dustbowl which was the soccer field he was playing on. The ball flew back after him. Billy didn’t know which game the group of kids were playing. He thought it might be an Iraqi invention. Billy watched from his position on the bonnet of the armoured jeep he was patrolling in. The game had similarities to soccer, but instead of kicking goals, the children seemed to be retrieving the ball from inside the goalposts, then dribbling it backwards to the centre of the field. Then they would slowly carry it back to the goal posts and place it down again.

Billy sucked the cool water off of his head with his water bottle and then placed his helmet back on to protect his skull from incoming shrapnel and bullets. He got back into the cab of his jeep and put it into reverse. The situation here seemed to be safe now that the dangerous explosion had been safely contained in a white plastic substance, and he was sure someone would be along soon to pick it up and dismantle it or pay for someone to bring it back to China or Russia or maybe the USA.

He reversed the jeep back to base; by now he knew the way off by heart. All the while the jeep sucked carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide out of the air and stored it in a liquid from inside of a petrol tank. Back at base this liquid would be sent back to be placed deep under the earth for safekeeping, where it would eventually grow to be prehistoric plants and animals.

Eventually the soldiers would be pulled out of Iraq in one big go, and the government of Saddam Hussein would be restored to power. Then soldiers would be pulled out of Afghanistan, and stealth aeroplanes would fly over to pick up all of the explosions that had been encased in cigar shaped capsules and fly them home for dismantling. Billy knew all of this; he seemed to know what was going to happen. In a way it seemed it had always happened. Billy thought about how none of this would make much sense in reverse.

What if, instead of picking up guns and using them to bring people to life by sucking bullets out of their bodies, they did the opposite? Why would anyone want to make something that put bullets in someone else, instead pulling bullets out to be dismantled to their base elements and put back into the Earth?

Time seemed to speed up for Billy now. His mind detached itself from his body and he watched events fold out like a movie. People dismantled houses used by the previous generations before they crawled back inside their mothers. They packed up all the cars and computers and power plants and put them back into the Earth. Playtime was over and it was time to pack up and move on. People stopped living in houses all together, they were unrestrained now with no walls and no secrets. They were finally able to shed the choking clothes from their skin and so grew a healthy coat of hair over their bodies.

The now free people climbed back into the trees to live a simple life free of war and poverty and hate and stock market crashes. Slowly, and then more quickly, each generation crawled back into their mothers and species came together to become one. Animals walked backwards into the ocean, unafraid of what they would find there.  The world became more peaceful as animals un-ate each other.

Billy saw the world now, spinning backwards at an incredible rate. The surface of it became ocean, and then volcanic rock. Chunks of the planet started to spin off into space. Earth slowly formed into a beautiful disk of gas and dust, which spread outwards to reach the disks of other planets which were doing the same. Each infinitesimal particle spread out from the others, until they were millions of kilometres apart. Billy could see it all now, the apex of time from which all lives spread out like fingers or roots. The Pillars of Creation. In front of him was the most beautiful nebula he had ever seen. It was filled with so much promise and energy, as if any emotion that had ever been felt had been used to create this piece of art. Everything became beautiful, and pain and death and love and life all became colours in the palette of the Gods.

 

My mother said that father was never the same after he came back from the war. The doctors said that he would probably become a vegetable for life as the piece of shrapnel that lodged in his skull had severely damaged his brain. He didn’t though, at least not physically. He came back emotionally dead. He also took up astronomy as a hobby.

My mother approached him in the kitchen one day and said, “You never smile anymore.” To which my father replied, “Yes I do, see?” and raised the corners of his mouth. He smiled often after that day, a dreamy smile that held no warmth, only depth. He bought a huge telescope and set it up in his room, fully obscuring the window and blocking all sunlight that usually flooded into it of a morning. I used to sneak into that huge room on winter mornings because of the warmth from the sun, but now that was no longer there, only depth.

From that day forward my mother slept in a different room. My father started staying up all night and sleeping through days. As a child I didn’t understand what was going on, I didn’t think it out of the ordinary. Eventually my mother and I moved out of the house, and after that out of the state. I moved out of home when I was fifteen, leaving my mother by herself. Our family spread apart until it was impossible to see the bonds between us. I rarely spoke to my mother and only ever once again to my father. I turned up at his house with his old military duffel bag stuffed with dirty clothes. I had been kicked out of the house I had been squatting in and his place was nearby.

I knocked on the door just once before he opened it. He was nothing like I remembered, though this wasn’t surprising as we left him in his twenties and now he was breaking fifty. He recognised me straight away, shook my hand and brought me inside. We talked for a long time, mainly about me. He asked how I was and what I was doing these days; I lied and said I was okay and just stopping by because I was in the neighbourhood.

When we were both sufficiently plastered on cheap beer I asked him what he looked for in his telescope. He lifted the corners of his mouth and eyes in the first real smile I had ever seen him try on. He told me about the war and the bomb. He told me he had seen God. He told me about Nebulae and God’s art on his living room wall. His eyes glazed over as he spoke and his grin widened. He was releasing it all, years of bottled-up thoughts and emotions. He told me how everything makes sense in reverse and that someday I would understand. We were both quiet for a long time after that. I was because I was deep in thought and my father because he had silently passed out on the couch. I left early in the morning without saying goodbye.