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Rachel Rodman (rachelrodman.com) writes fairy tales, food poetry, and popular science. Her work has appeared in New Reader Magazine, Mad Scientist Journal, and in the Third Flatiron anthology Galileo's Theme Park.
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.
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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