by Shaun Lawton
You are a cipher in an alphabet, one letter itself comprised of an entire alphabet. It takes an alphabet outright to compose one singular figure, you who are only one character in a word. The ideograms streaming through you also produce an idiom with you, just as they eventually generate a phrase of you, and render you into a sentence.
The syllabary running through your genetic code some day makes you into a complete paragraph. This takes at least a decade or so as your fable is being woven around the loom of the Sun. After two decades you may grow into your own saga, a very short tale perhaps, only a couple of paragraphs long, but not without its own punch line. By the time we each reach adulthood we are breathing examples of a sort of flash fiction, after a good and long life, say double that, we'll transform into animated novels.
If we double that and live into our eighties, we'll metamorphose at long last into legends of flesh and blood. When we die, the book that became ourselves will dissolve in the earth, having been reduced back into the ash of a particular character, shed like so many individual scales of snakeskin from this ongoing articulation that came before it. The Omega transubstantiates back into the Alpha.
And so it goes, an ever cycling process channeled through the subatomic forces at the heart of the universe, expressed along the second law of thermodynamics, to bring about everything from an endless series of big bangs right on down to this very moment, where I, already having lived long enough to have developed into a novella of living information, have been led to transcribe these thoughts here to you like shadows onto the screens of your mind.
You, like me, each one of us a solitary letter, symbol, word, idiom, phrase, sentence, paragraph, whose lives have now become many stanzas of a developing collection of stories, interacting with each other in the most complex anthology that has yet been written in blood upon all of the pages of flesh and bone. Each one of us a chapter, describing every permutation of the one story, that's been told since before the title of The Tale of Time was established as the heading for this account, having captured in monograms of the alphabet this single letter, composed outright as a page, for you who are only one character in a world being spelled out by each one of us, about to step off a cliff, one exclusive mark at a time.
on the Freezine
streaming
in real time
'til Halloween
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