Pale Fragments

fish

"If you want to catch a fish," Grace said, walking out from behind my still-open door. I jumped, the jar of peanut butter I'd had cradled in my elbow cascading through the two bursting grocery bags I held in each fist. (I lived on the fourth floor. I was sweating.) "Don't thrash your way through the pond."

"What?" I said, bending to pick up the peanut butter but forgetting about the four grocery bags, which swung with surprising momentum that sent me falling on my face.

"You started without me I see."

"What do you mean 'start'?" My eyes were closed and I lay at peace on my side. "There is no beginning nor end to the weed I smoke."

"Amen." She helped me gather up the mess of groceries, not bothering to hide her satisfaction at scaring me.

When we got situated, bowl packed and lit a dozen times already, the Goddess watched me play video games. I was baked. She always grew the absolute best weed I've ever smoked. She left me some seeds, and I'm afraid to plant them. I've just got to get this done, then, maybe...

This was right around the time that I started loving myself. She watched me and I knew I only felt that way because I was seeing myself more clearly than ever; I wasn't afraid. We sat in silence as I played the same Mario Kart cup a thousand times (on 200cc; I eventually beat the whole motherfucking game with three stars on every map, and I am far too unashamedly proud of that fact); she kept hitting the bong without me, and I was only aware afterwards that she used this time to stew on how to tell me what she came to tell.

When I beat the cup (Special cup, the one with rainbow road), I sat back, drenched in sweat. I clapped and whooped somewhat embarrassed as the Goddess patted me on the back.

"Anders loved that game," she said.

"Did he?" I said, clearing my throat. "This same one, or..?"

"No, it gets way better two-thousand years in the future."

"There aren't retro-enthusiasts anymore, again?"

"If you saw the games they played in the future, you wouldn't be asking that question."

"Two thousands is a lot of years."

"I mean, not really, if you think about it for a second."

I started to protest, but rethought my argument a few times in the court of my mind before giving way and saying, "Yeah. Yep."

"He played a lot of it once he woke up." I didn't know what she meant by that, then. I trusted I'd learn.

"He brought his gaming system--"

"Ooh, what was, will it, uh, be like, like a VR headset, fuckin', implanted in micro-technologies in the side of glasses or contacts or some shit--"

"--with him to the Temple, though he'd been commanded to forsake all of his belongings. Ida, I'm not telling you. Listen. Ahem. Fuck, you have no idea how much comfort that old system, surprisingly still intact, brought him. And at that point in time, Anders' version of Mario Kart will be an ancient relic..."

-

He...it was complicated.

He was twenty-three, but since his birth the Earth had traveled 'round the sun two-thousand-twenty-three rotations.

He was floating in a bed next to his wife and first true love. Their bed was in a room filled with a self-cleaning water-mixture that kept their bodies healthy as they floated, asleep. There were ninety-nine other young (at the time they went to sleep) newly-wed couples asleep in the room. It was pure white, though it had faded gracefully to a bland tan over time. The architects and scientists hired by Robert Smith assured him the white would last forever. They'd lied, the prophet was desperate, it turned out to get tan. Anyways. He wouldn't live to see it. None but me, Anders, and archaeologists ever did.

I'd visited Andreas many times over that time he slept. I didn't know why until he woke. Now, I know I continued to hope, though despair ate slowly through me. I still lived, I still searched, I still loved. I came to, what would eventually become called, the Temple of the Dead Immortals every fifty years or so, but to me it felt like I was checking my phone every five minutes, worried for a friend and desperate for news. And also desperate for validation...the last time I'd spoken to him before he went to sleep, he told me he never wanted to see me again.

Then one day I came to him. It was luck that he hadn't died yet, that it just so happened that I came to him exactly a year after he woke from immortal sleep, from a drug coma, the eternal pathway to Heaven. It was luck...it was something. It was something. No other one of those "Transfigured Saints" ever woke again, and their transition from awareness to nothingness was as smooth and safe and comfortable and pleasurable as anyone could possibly hope for.