by George Salis
You assume this atom, with its 92 protons and electrons and 146 neutrons, to be as barren as all other atoms: nothing more than a building block of existence. Alas, a Planck-length scan reveals something more, existence on this building block, formless lifeforms smaller than gluons and quarks. Yes, upon this unit, this former piece of a star hurled from an adjacent galaxy after a supernova upset, the formed lifeformlessnesses flickeringly gaze at the semi-omnicircling electrons, those cherished if capricious satellites. The formless lifeforms vaguely remember starting with one electron pop-floating in a void of voids, something that mimicked the flowing merging diverging thoughts and feelings on the atom’s surfaceless surface, then things heated up, part and parcel of a crucible universe, and more electrons elected to join the atomic planet as apparitional moons, and now the uninhabitable inhabitants on the surfaced surfacelessness below dream of the next stage of their evolution, the coming of Neptunium, the harbinger of Uranium. The inhabitable uninhabitants find it difficult to imagine the end, the final design. Surely not the prime mover again, who was Hydrogen, peace be upon hym, but the prime stiller, the completer of the chain. Will the great Fermium manifest itself through their irreducible world? No one knows what ritual or mantra will summon that heaviest of presences, but it seems an enraptured inevitability.
At present, the formless lifeforms remain tucked within the piscine shell of a nuclear weapon dubbed Little Boy, where their atomic planet will suffer sudden sunderance, the non-being beings reaching out to each other via fraying thought patterns, awash with chemical memories—the last of an abstract lattice—of their time flinging from star to catastrophic star as easily as a stone skipped across a pond; of their consumption and eternally simultaneous ejection by a supermassive black hole; of their lightning revolutions in the carnival ride known as CERN; and that string-tethered flash of an interval as part of a person’s palm, the atom complicit in all that the hand felt and held.
Soon the being non-beings’ fissioned planet will be forced to vaporize tens of thousands of creatures called Homo sapiens, each a former home for around seven billion billion billion atomic planets—Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, etc.—now holocausted into nonexistence, whirl-waiting to form something else somewhere else somewhen else.
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Bio:
George Salis is the author of the novel Sea Above, Sun Below. After a decade, he has finished his second novel, Morpholocal Echoes. He’s the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing. He’s also the editor of The Collidescope, an online publication that celebrates innovative and neglected literature. His website is www.GeorgeSalis.com.
