The world died in phases. First, the rains diminished, falling in sparse drizzles, and even when it did fall, it wasn’t really rain, but a perverse mixture of water and pollution. Then plants turned brown and trees ate at themselves, nothing was left but wilt and dust. Then the animals became like the tress, eating each other out of existence. Then the people followed, some ate each other, some let their blood run out, some jumped from high places, broke their necks. In the end, the buildings, rivers, and savannas all faded, and all that was left was this unending wasteland. There was no sadness etched in the seamless desolation, because there was no one left to feel guilty for surviving.

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The sun is red and beating, casting depressing colors across the sky. My feet ground the stones of what used to be an alive world. Red skies, dead earth. The picture is a familiar one, not so long ago the giant lizards were the rulers of this world, till the heavens fell on them. All that was left of their world was bones and dust, all that is left of this world now is bone and debris.

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Before the world died there was a man. On the edge of the gun-shaped continent. He met me on a trip. We both were farmers. He was a tiller of the soil and I was a seeker of knowledge. He stood five feet below me and I had to drop to my knees to look him in the eyes. He opened his mouth and words came out. Words strange to me as I was to him. His voice was calm nonetheless and the tint in his voice wasn’t fear, or distrust, but reverence. He dropped his implements and said more words I couldn’t understand and he bowed and his head touched my foot. Then dipping his hand into a rucksack, he brought out a bloodied bush animal and handful of seedlings and laid them before me.

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“Orisa-Oko” He said, again, and again and again. Then he turned and ran back into the bushes.

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Back then, before everything. Before the death, before the hunter, I floated across light years, swimming, searching… For what? I wasn’t sure. I just knew I needed to cover the space between those two points. Between two points there is always an in-between, there is always a period of nothing before something emerges, that is the synergy of existence, without life there would be no death, without nothing there wouldn’t be something.

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One day rainfalls. Falls again the next day and the day after that, nonstop, as if trying to wash the gloom away from the Earth’s canvass. Then they come forth, from the belly of the planet, little critters, eyeless, boneless, soulless, breaking through the dirt. The earth spits them out, and the dead seem alive again, or waking at least. Death is only an opportunity to be reborn again.

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One day rainfalls. Falls again the next day and the day after that, nonstop, as if trying to wash the gloom away from the Earth’s canvass. Then they come forth, from the belly of the planet, little critters, eyeless, boneless, soulless, breaking through the dirt. The earth spits them out, and the dead seem alive again, or waking at least. Death is only an opportunity to be reborn again.

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