Runner-up of the 2023 Contest in Prose. Read judge Thalia Field’s blurb here.
Revelations
The figure falls down onto his knee, as if in praise, and raises out of a velvet box a ring with a plastic bottlecap centerpiece. The other figure clamps her mouth in shock. Vis-à-vis the diamond, the bottlecap will last pragmatically the same amount of time: much longer than any mortal love. All the starry sand falls from the sky and the night becomes a black carpet again. The downpour of sand suffocates the couple to death. End Scene 1. Rolling.
Start Scene 2. Circle moves inwards towards other circle. Phagocytosis: circle absorbs other circle—becomes circumscribed. Lines move outward, flagella. More circles. Genesis of life on Earth. End Scene 2.
Start Scene 3. Immense whirring. End Scene 3.
Start Scene 4. A luminous hand comes down to Earth. Mr. Ramos wipes moisture from his eye. He knows the story by heart, the one preached by the Western powers, fossilized in a book, the one he reads to his daughter. He will not wait to alert her while she is still at school. He bounds into the house to get his Bible. The luminous hand, undeterred, crushes the building while he is inside. End Scene 4. Rolling.
Resume Scene 1. Figure’s arm reaches out of endless sand and plucks a rose. Rose shrivels. Rose grows legs like a bacteriophage and crawls away. End Scene 1. Again.
Fade in Scene 5. The field is swaying. There are fireflies and a stream running along the side of a log. I know it’s ending soon, you tell him. You have meaning to me, you tell him. He nods and puts his hand on yours. I’m tired, he says. I know, you say, and you sit in silence with him while the water laps by. Fade out.
Play Scene 1 again. Backwards this time. Rose blooms, hand withdraws, bottlecap ring. Love Me. Love Me. It’s you again, and you scream when you see my face. Your crooked lips are like the breast of a canyon, like the curved hand of a toy gun.
Scene 6. Two kids shoot each other with toy guns. It is us three, together.
Rewind Scene 1. I retreat. Your smile returns. I make you suffocate, again.
Resume Scene 3. With a firm grasp, the Great Playwright pulls the rest of His body down to the world. He sees the perfection of all He has created, and, in a bellow so mighty it shakes the air, He laughs.