Albatross
In the beginning, before we knew how to move our bodies to the beat of sultry music, before we knew how to intertwine our tired tongues, God decided, on a lonely Sunday afternoon, that they were bored.
They decided to make people and places and things. Light and darkness. War and peace. In an instant, in less than a fraction of a second, the world as you know it became whole, one hundred billion galaxies colliding into one another. An infinite cosmos.
Human history wrote itself. God played no part.
Primates paved their way through jungles of green, throwing feces at each other, discovering the miracle of touching each other’s bodies. They fucked in the middle of wide-open fields. They fucked in the wild shrubbery.
They learned about desire and survival and destruction, how to kill another living thing with their bare hands.
Wars were fought for no reason, or for every reason at the same time. Men stabbed each other, blade through flesh, watching their brothers bleed, for oil or money or whichever God they worshipped. When they returned home, unable to discard memories of chaos and carnage,
they were asked to never forget it, and to never themselves be forgotten.
God watched all this from afar, ashamed of what they had created. They spent long nights, alone, thinking of what they had done, unable to ask anyone or anything for forgiveness. God wanted, more than anything, to make amends. They created one more thing, a feeling, something invisible and without shape.
This creation is nameless, but you are aware of its existence. You bring it with you everywhere you go. You wear it like a necklace, or a wool sweater in the dead of winter. You walk it through the streets of your dreams like a puppy, and it whimpers, quietly, until it falls asleep.
It is the silence on the subway, the music made by trees.
It is every word left unsaid.
When you leave this place, never to return, you will live on in the hearts of those who loved you most, in their mouths and in their words. They will talk about you over dinner and drinks, laughing and crying, often at the same time, weeping over their glasses of whiskey and wine.
They will say your name like a prayer.
They will whisper it until they fall asleep.
Men will still watch other men bleed. Monkeys will still find solace in bodies warmer than their own. God will always feel lonely on Sunday afternoons.
Ghosts will still wave to each other, nervously, thinking of the bodies they used to inhabit, talking about how good it felt to touch another living thing, how sad it is to know they cannot go on, how strange it is to know that everything, everywhere, expires.
Sean Dolan is a writer and editor. He holds an MFA from Western Washington Universityand his fiction appears in Hobart, 805 Lit + Art, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. He was worked previously as a bartender, a college instructor, and as the managing editor for The Bellingham Review. Born and raised in Missouri, he now resides in Denver, where he works as the digital editor for Milling & Baking News, a food industry trade magazine.
