The box was composed of flesh: living, human, maternal.
And, inside the box, a scattering of molecular confetti, sourced from two parents, swirled and shimmered, collided and collaborated, in an innumerable array of unprecedented arrangements: every way, and no way.
To create... a birl.
And it was a president and a CEO, with more power than a god, and a beggar, starving in a dumpster, and a soldier, bleeding in a ditch, and a professor of mathematics and a philanthropist and an impressionist painter and a sociopath and a hospice nurse and a bureaucrat, chained to an anonymous desk. And an Olympian and a sexual criminal and a celebrity, famous for fame, and a murderer and a scientist, weighted with Nobel Prizes, and a voice--The Voice--the voice of a generation, and a social pariah, eternally lonely. (And a thing and a thing and another and another, for which--yet--there existed no words.)
But then, on the screen, the box was opened, and these simultaneities condensed and narrowed and became unalterably discrete--the map of something singular.
"It's dead, actually," observed the sonographer gently.
The End
This story was first published on Thursday, January 3rd, 2019
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The Quantum Womb by
Rachel Rodman.
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