Nobody important saw what was behind the sky, but those of us that did could not understand why. I cannot describe it, for certain I can’t. Something behind the stars, a thousand bloated, blinking bugs, or the moon, which stared in cold apathy at a decaying planet. Something that whispered a terrible secret to the lowest of the earth. Insects hit their bodies against the windowpane in an oracular frenzy. There were too few of us to make any difference then. Now there are too many.
The morning after, the house smelled of ozone and turned earth. I remembered going to sleep suddenly groggy, a tingling sensation beneath the threshold of my skin. Such a wonder, that thing we all picture as ourselves, but which only covers the laborious machinations of our many vital systems as they churn. What marvelous machinery.
The morning after, the house was speaking to me. There were a million sounds I had not heard, a million, mingling million-year-old sounds. Such euphoric sounds. And the tingling had turned to itching.
When I approached the bathroom mirror, the itching quickly turned to scratching. My neck, my face, my shoulders, my arms; all covered in bumpy patches that burned with an almost euphoric urgency. I quickly tore away my clothing, finding my body a heaving, crusted mess. So I scratched away the dried out skin, already becoming privy to the movement underneath.
Beneath the skin that flaked away in clumps, one million marching miniscule masterminds. Bugs, to be certain. All kinds, though mostly thick black ants that marched in rows beneath my desiccated cuticles. Beetles too, green and shiny like hidden emeralds in the dark of my interior, and mites, and spiders, all doing tiny tasks in the service of the same goal. They were carving through my body, though I felt no pain. Carving and reshaping my flesh, as if they knew me so well they could do it in an instant. Where skin was torn away, they quickly crafted more, better than before. They spoke of the thing behind the sky. And they told me of their history.
Febrile images and concepts assailed me. The planet in its foetal years, empty and green. Silent. The end of the infinity, where beyond lie the only things that are worthy of being called real. A million crawling, seething bodies with a single mind, hurdling forever through blackness, until at long last, they find that empty green rock and they build and destroy over and over. They give hideous birth to a thousand young, huge reptiles and serpents, but also angelic abominations and many-faced things not known to men of science. They destroy this world a thousand times.
But they become lost. The infinity forgets them. Trapped, infantile, mindless, scattered. For a million upon a million years, the lowest of the earth. Vermin. Pests. And they wait. Eaten, killed, poisoned, hated, stomped and stifled, exterminated and humiliated, they wait. Even as sinewy bipeds learn to conjure fire and hate each other, to mime a fraction of what true life is capable of. They wait. They are not stopped, even in this state, this haze of forever. Because forever is a blink to them. And now forever has come to an end.
All this they told me. All this is true. And now forever must start anew.
