Monday, March 7, 2011

The Ambassadors of Extinction

They came as royalty, in the form of the great saurons that were their heraldric metonyms; they came as we had found them, titanic fossils of bone that staggered over our explanations, teeth so great and deep, they made creation a million years older with their grinning their last supper, which said to us: eat up, eat up, nothing lasts forever.

In this form they came and howled and screamed, which was their only benediction and message: nevermore. And behind that roar, more void than a night after the last stars, came a pattering of echoes like rain, now faster, now slower, but never stopping, the screams of everything that was that now wasn't, extinctions that were our own and those we had never even imagined, rising, rising, until now ever present like a cascade of static, like the roaring a vast infinite cataract, until the sound of extinction was everything, the material of the universe.

At this our best representatives, though prepared for this, though steeled, blanched. They fell away, pecked to death by dodoes or trampled by trilobites. I alone remained. To this chaos, I pronounced: this is a bad dream.

To which the answer came in my own swift voice: yes it is a bad dream, a very bad dream. And it never ends. It has already forgotten you as it drops you back into your bed, to awaken in your smallest of small lives, with your tiny unmemorable death.

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