Temporal Warfare
Gradually bombs grew subtler, more selective. Bombs to cause blackouts, or destroy life not property, bombs to destroy hearing and brain cells but not life or property. And last, bombs to destroy time and perspective. Temporal bombs. Detonation prolonged to the dim horizons of measurable process. Materials expelled from the charge expanded and thinned to the the dimensions of dust on dust. Lethal nonetheless. It began with a distant flash that lingered in the horizon of the east coast and the west, the north and the south, a speck of light so distant and unvarying it couldn’t matter to anyone. Shock waves spread from the initial node like memory loss. Before anyone knew it Mozambique was gone, Cape Verde misplaced like the car keys. Water spouts danced in the Mojave Desert, icebergs huddled in the Long Island Yacht Club. Tornadoes swept in packs through through Sydney and Beijing. Sinkholes the size of neighborhoods gaped in the streets of Miami. Connections frayed at the molecular level. Cause and effect. Premise and inference. Compensatory measures were palliative. No think communes, unthink collectives. Posti-intuitive therapy and paralingual meditation. The solace of the inconclusive and averbal. If the towers took a year to fall, and all the light bulbs on the coast snuffed like cells dosed in alcohol. What of it? There was sex, after all. Pheromones so thick in the air one could taste them. But desire? Just how many nostrils is normal? Is hair really necessary? In what parts of the body? Who was looking anyway, with the skin turned scaly and rubbery on some and as frail and translucent as a sigh on others? Vertigo on a mass scale. World war. Whorl war. Or or. I caused the whole damned thing. Something I did. Something I should have done. Not that it matters. There’s still time. Years yet. Lots of it. Something like that.
~~~
Chris Moylan is an Associate Professor of English at NYIT where he publishes short fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. His book, Border Taxi, was published by Abaton in 2010. An activist, he is a founding member of Novads, an online arts and culture resistance group.
Parhelion 