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This Day in Heaven
Rufus Penderton’s brains were bashed in by the sharp end of a rogue cloud, attempting to free itself from the many rules and regulations of the celestial superstructure. This happens all the time in heaven. Shitty things. Senseless violence. The odd poetry burning. It’s hard to notice, though, due to size and the eternal now of history. Heaven is tough as nails and it has to be to deal with all the leeches who got in good with the big man in their final dying breaths. Running in as the door was slamming shut. Heaven weathers the storm with poise and dignity, god’s benevolence forcing this dimension to observe mystery physics and tense math. It might be completely by accident that it holds up so well. It’s tagline of sorts – ‘Nothing greater that can be conceived’ – all depends on who is doing the conceiving. Sirens warn its denizens of the warping of space time which opens a gate to the anti-dimension of hell, which looks exactly the same due to the inverse-inverse paradox found outside of typical regenerating universes. Power is limitless here, but it is still an impressive feat to watch it all shrink to the size of the head of the pin, peer inside and see a perfect double. Penderton was here when everything went wrong. He was amazed that he had been able to hold onto his identity through death, and that eternity had not yet bored him. Time had disappeared, the answers to the mysteries of his life in a wholly different universe were presented to him in simple geometry. Penderton moved to the front of the crowd and stared into a hole that led to the-much-more-pleasant-than-ever-imagined hell where the anti-Penderton was staring right back at him. He thought of clones and copies of the real and the duplication of the real. He wondered for a moment if it was possible that he was actually the anti-Penderton, and that it was the true heaven through this hole, where the supposed authentic Penderton lay. Real. It was a hard thing to understand. Especially in a place where everything is real, where imagination creates physical forms instantaneously because quite simply it must in a dimension that does not care a whit for the laws of familiar human physics. Laws. There are laws here, Penderton thought, but they bend like soft spoons in the sun and- Penderton did not finish the thought. An innocent mist nearby suddenly became too, too real and a jagged edge of water vapour drifted uncontrollably into the side of his head, splitting skin, spilling blood, and cracking bone. He felt a distant pain, as if it was memory of an echo of something horrible. Even as his brain was being cut to shreds by proto-ice, he felt nothing more than a touch of dizziness, as he was still intent of finishing his thought about spoons and sun. But it all started to unravel the moment some grabbed his shoulder and yanked him back. He realized something was wrong, and that fuzziness of his vision wasn’t due to the collapsing hole but his own difficulties. His shirt felt wet, but went from what seemed like a small stain to completely soaked in blood. ‘This can’t be real’, he said without thinking, committing a heresy on several counts. Other hands had him lay back as they tried to pick out the shards of cloud that stuck out of a massive hole in the side of Penderton’s head. ‘Am I dying… again?’ he asked, with very little emotion. The notion confused him. In fact, everything was confusing him. The simple answers that sustained him with every footstep here were slipping away from their memory banks, corrupted by foreign instruments. He could sees mouths moving above him, but sound was not being produced. He was shutting down. Like a computer program. He tried in vain to reassure himself, that everything had a plan and that this part of it, but it didn’t stop his racing pulse and deep breaths. Then he was being lifted up. Carried. His legs dangled, but he could vaguely feel at least six hands carefully cradle his head. He wanted a frame or reference. He wanted to remember seeing this happen to someone else here, something that went horribly wrong, but was fixed, and was happily forgotten. Nothing came. He couldn’t remember a past before this morning, the single morning, the only morning, the eternal morning. Perhaps he had always been injured. Perhaps he hadn’t died a first time. Doubt had crept under Rufus Penderton’s skin and was changing him into a shadow of himself. He wondered how anti-Penderton was fairing on the other side of the hole, and it dawned on him that perhaps he truly was the mirror image of the good, that this was a cycle of haunting pain and confusion followed by hopeless realization, and that it was his punishment for his words and deeds in another time and place. And in the midst of this mental cacophony came a siren full of words that stood above and over Penderton and all those carrying him to some sort of safety. A bubble of the mind. A bathing of the quintessence. Everything became frozen as the secret letters formed out of the thinnest air. The words did not boom out from above or below, they simply appeared, as if suddenly imprinted on every particle heaven had within it, all for the sake of reassuring Rufus Penderton and his fragile mind that was still spilling out onto the ground. Thusly, it was said that: The trick to navigation is found in the collapse of all wonderment in the face of the absolute. Conquering time is done in a similar fashion, willing a lack of change upon and between moment A and moment B. Everything is everything and that means there is nothing more. Hold these impossibilities in either hand and make them understand one another. Bring the paradox to a higher and necessary plane. A place where you aren’t expected to breathe, and think, and define yourself as a living changing collection of matter. Then tear yourself apart and begin again. It ceased. On then off like a glorious switch. Everything went back to a kind of normal the living would beg for endlessly. Penderton found himself in a warm and quiet forest, shirt dry, head together. Heaven had reoriented itself. All was well. END
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postmodernism can never die because it includes its own eternally recurring death. | |||