Dust to Dust

I.

Life in a single cell. 

The mothering light of the system’s new sun warms a meteoroid’s dusting of stray particles, these shed from larger bodies left hanging on nothing around the miniscule strike—from a fragment of a fragment of a fragment of a distant comet—that sent this rock spinning through the void with a few hardy cells still writhing in its dust. 

Gray strata of porous chondrite—a scattering of dots yet shivering in the deepest reaches—flashwarm as the rock spins round its axis a million times per life-cycle.   

This rocky womb of humanity screams silently to its blue-green end, an accident set in motion by the wake of a long-gone comet’s shudder, in time out of mind. 

The cells congregate, form colonies.

The rock melts and runs thick over one colony’s deepscored niche, a whimsical bubble popping a perfectly circular void around the fractured crystal where the cells even now split and, inexorably, come together again.   

The terminal shock, when it finally comes, splits the sacrificial rock into a galaxy of far-flung shards. Some land in killer flumes of primordial gasses and a few land in pools of fresh water.

II.

Cue slick evolutionary montage, from our single-celled survivors to larger and more complex aquatic bacterium to a bottom-feeding fish precursor to the salamander that finally emerges from a murky African estuary in the light of a blood-red dawn.

The lush earth warms the reptile into a hot-blooded rodent, a viciously-opposed grasp stretches a few mutated mammals into primates, and a scattering of these leave behind the more social members of their order to grow, finally, into homo sapiens. 

III.

Blink to a sparsely blonde infant bawling in his mother’s arms.  A man’s pointed sigh—“You’d better change him.”

IV.

Cut to the freshly-uniformed blonde boy boarding a yellow bus in a leafy suburb somewhere. The other student’s parents have come to see them off. The boy sits in the back row and looks the other way.

V.

Cut to the boy—now a pimply adolescent—standing naked before a reclining redheaded girl a little older than himself. She props herself up on dainty elbows and watches the boy carefully guide his wrapped cock into her precociously waxed cunt. He leans awkwardly against the foot of her bed and thrusts three or four times before groaning and nearly collapsing on top of her. She props the boy up with both hands and smiles to herself.

“Wow. Okay,” she says. “That was really quick… well, let’s hope the condom didn’t break.”

VI.

The redheaded girl grows into a tired woman mothering her (blonde) son, alone. The male who generously donated his sperm drops in and out of the picture with arms perpetually full of expensive trinkets. Their son grows bitter and reclusive as he reaches his own adolescence. He loses himself in video games, drinking, and, inexorably, into drugs.

VII.

The boy—near enough a man now—scratches at a crimson stain on his orange jumpsuit and yawns at his father through the visiting room’s bulletproof partition. The man pointedly pulls back a monogrammed sleeve and pretends to check the stainless Breitling on his wrist.

“Look,” he says, “ Look, I don’t have to represent you. I just feel it’s the right thing to do.”

The boy bursts into jags of crazy laughter. Utter disgust on his father’s face.

VIII.

A judge throws out the case. The boy shares a passionate embrace with his public defender, who looks shockingly like the girl who was mother to this boy.

IX.

A few years later- The young man and his ex-lawyer scream at each other from either side of their daughter. The fire-kissed girl crawls away as quickly as she can manage. Her tears go unheard in the din.                   

X.

All three stand in black, the little girl clutching the hem of her mother’s skirt. They stand with others better-dressed in black suits and shapeless inky dresses, all watching not the countdown superimposed on the blast window’s bottom edge but the rocket itself as it quivers on its spotlit launch pad.

“Your loved ones will be traveling among the stars forever,” says a uniformed technician who—in this light—looks not only raceless but ageless.

The man squints and picks out the rocket’s designation, painted vertically along one sleek fin:

X 
AE
A-XII

The rocket explodes from the launch pad and vanishes into the evergrowing night.