At the Seams

Chapter 24: Poppop

Chapter 24: Poppop

Mary trudges along quietly, lost in blankness and a formless sense of determination. Miraculously, Karn is also quiet. Besides trees, each single one its own weird breed, Mary sees nothing interesting—no life, no signs of death since the pile of bones in the narrow tunnel, nothing. After a bit, despite her sense of caution and her fascination with the alien forest, Mary feels antsy, if not quite bored. She decides she wants to talk to Karn after all. "This is the pantry, isn't it?"

"Yes," it answers, uncharacteristically brief.

"And the trees are all my individually preserved nummies?"

"Yes," Karn says again, humor in its voice this time. "What are you, a spider?"

"Who knows? Considering the pile of bones I fell in back there it would hardly be surprising."

Karn is silent, but when Mary looks, it is smiling.

"Tell me about books," Mary says.

"What?"

"You've talked about them once. You even asked me about a book I read, though I ignored your question at the time. You don't seem the type to make idle conversation, so, you must contribute some relevance to books, right? And I love books. If I'd had more balls, I might have tried to write one."

"You've never had a shortage of balls, sweet Mary; you just can't write."

Karn sneers a little when it says this, but Mary isn't hurt. It's right, after all. She is a rare unfortunate, deeply creative and utterly untalented. Her curse never bothered her; the foundation occupied her and allowed her to express a different kind of creativity. "Don’t dodge," she says.

"Just having a little fun. Also, credit where credit is due and all that jazz. It's not books, or the reading of them, or even their creation that is of particular interest. Imagination is the point, and can be birthed, fed, or fostered by any kind of idea. Intellectuals are gravely mistaken when lumping imagination and art together—just ask Albert Einstein, Toorq the Great, or Snnf (you wouldn't know those last two, of course).

"I find imagination interesting because it is the most powerful tool at the disposal of any thinking critter. Within thinkers, imagination blossoms, makes even the horror of life beautiful again, creates happiness and murder, heals and destroys its wielders. Imagination is neutral, like wonder, but beyond an ideal. Imagination links the thoughtful of not only your planet, Mary; imagination also links the thoughtful between different realities. When you imagine a monster, Mary, or a fairy or a child with lavender skin, you may be sure they are imagining you back.

"Imagination is like invisible thread that flings across time and space and randomly attaches multiple things, uniting them into something unexpected. Imagination is the residue of Something magical and powerful that once inhabited the endlessness now possessed of life. Perhaps you would prefer to think of imagination as the Holy Spirit, the divine connection between God and all life on Earth.”

"I no longer wish to think of things as anything other than they are," Mary says.

Karn smiles. "How excellent. It's not like you God folks have it all wrong, by the way. You’re just entirely hung up on names and nomenclature, and are easily impressed by power.

"Imagination is the castle at the bottom of the mind, in the sense that it is one terminal in countless potential connections. Have you ever had an idea come out of nowhere? Surely, you complimented yourself on your cleverness and ingenuity, for thinking such a genuinely original thought—you likely never considered the idea didn't actually belong to you, but was lent or given. Have you ever had an idea so brilliant you couldn't hang onto it? Just as the thought began to solidify into something amazing, life changing, it collapsed into itself? That was but a faulty connection. Something about the terminals or the tenuous umbilicus between them was insufficient to complete the exchange.