Apology for Creation

As it turned out, we were no more than the idea of ourselves, God’s spittle bubbled on His big baby lips, bacterium of a deity swollen to the size and shape of a forest afloat on a bed of peat. It was the sort of news that brought everyone out into the streets. We thought we owed everything to The Flood: alluvial fans, dendritic drainage patterns, newts, coaxial cable, permafrost, chakras, geometry, every variation on desire: leather, frozen yogurt, frozen embryos, speed, hip hop, mescal — only to discover we were coded in a single protein —our own negative feedback loop. Even on Neptune and Mars, entire civilizations of us had come and gone. Suns born. Earths lost. A trillion times over. Without punishment or reward. We were a repeating pattern, that, when viewed from a great distance, appeared as an elegant, limbless twist, a strand of coiled matter wherein everything that would happen had already happened. Even with Heaven gone, some dropped to their knees. None of us knew where to look. Suddenly, all of our thoughts embarrassed us; the idea of I. The smell of a neighbor’s dinner —meat and carrots stewing — wafted into the street, and embarrassed us.

“Apology for Creation” first appeared in The Alembic, Spring 2009.