Skip to main content

The Archbishop

 “It never gets old. Like watching living mountains dance. Look, now.” Harper says it in a whisper so close to me I can smell the whiskey on his breath. Christ, man, I think to myself. Ease on the— and then I see them. 


It’s dim morning, everything wreathed in grayness and silence, far off hills undulating charcoal colored waves. Ink-black trickles snake their way across a plain of muck, dirt. Westerly forests are all cloaked in fog. Gloomy shadows.


There are giants in the clearing. Behemoths. Massive, near-vertical necks seem to effortless rise up into the sky, carrying delicate looking heads to survey our earthly realm beneath. “Watch.” Huge muscular slats down flanks and rippling tendons layered upon pillar legs, clawed toes that could crumble concrete. The whip tail is almost comedic, swishing with elegant undulations. 


The dinosaurs are leviathans. Almost— fuzzy. Hard to see, hard for primate minds to grasp and reason with, the way they move as if buoyant, ballet dancers nearly two hundred feet from nose to tail tip. They seem to coalesce out of so much rippling steel-colored sky. Clouds given flesh, muscle, form. Their colors are subtle but dazzling from all manners of layered, striped dark and light, like a vision of battleships given confusing camouflage. Black on ivory, splashed with ocher and azure. 


I’m in awe. Slack-jawed. My heart throbs like I’m witnessing an Angel. Slow, deep beats leaving me breathless. No picture, no holo vid— nothing has prepared me for this. 


One of the dinosaurs steps out to lead his people with all of the regality and majestic pride that every monarch in human history has tried, and failed, to attain. 


“There. See him? The Archbishop. The largest I’ve ever seen, so big that when I first laid eyes on him I truly thought he was a goddamn mountain, hoisted up on legs by God as some kind of joke..”


My bones vibrate. I feel like suddenly the world is singing to me, deep-voiced and ancient, a sermon that would crumble cathedrals to their foundations. Fear, wonder. I half-stand, ready to run or to pray, looking wildly until I look to Harper. He’s standing there, arms open and wide, head back to the sky. Eyes closed like a monk in contemplation. Then I realize. 


The dinosaurs are singing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Find Your Own Way Out

 Find Your Own Way Out What if things could be undone before you’d done them? Or after? What if you could be rewritten, and never know it? What’s beyond time, what’s beyond death? What lies out in the places between places, above and outside of places? What’s in the basement and the attic of God, the places he won’t look, won’t open up to us? That’s what the note said in the empty, cold house.  It’s handwriting was rushed, the letters looping and stretched, trying to run away from the page to somewhere else. Somewhere else beyond the ominous meaning, the fate of whoever wrote it.  Water drip-drip-drips  from the faucet. Trying to fill that uncomfortable, hungry silence. Something thumps  in the attic, wood creaking before abating back into the quiet.  There are things in the house. There is nothing in the house.  Empty picture frames that you can feel unseen smiles from. If you’d run your hands across the walls there would be the essence of dust from a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tall Grass Kingdoms

We stay up late. Walk through the tall grass, let it’s fingertips anoint us in quiet summer rites. The disembodied orchestra rings out from everywhere, crickets creaking and frogs tolling and bats chittering; the voices of coronation, our adoring audience.  Sweep hands outward to our sides, catching waves of iridescence. Fireflies everywhere, indomitable omnipresent, and between them and the star-crowded sky above it’s like we float out in a mystical cosmos. All alight. All ablaze.  Home is somewhere far away, beyond us. Lost and forgotten like schedules, like good habits. We’re runaways, self exiles hungry for adventure. We share words, drawn so close by that impossible summertime magnetism.  But at the end of the night, standing up in the tall grass, home is just over there, over the hill and the fireflies are a dim trickle. Inviting stars turned cold, unblinking. We share fragile smiles— the last we’ll exchange.
Post a Comment
Read more

Review

 “It’s you this time.”  Look at everyone. All the staring faces. So many wide, watching eyes trying to mask their terror. The macabre interest hidden just behind is all to obvious— because you’ve done the same thing when the Calls came. It was you a few days ago, watching the Selection, feeling the strange thrill spasm through you. Fear from the potential, arousal from the promise, and all of it mixed by relief when someone else was chosen. You too had been part of the many quiet whispers and loaded, meaningful wordless looks. Thinking. Who would it be this time? Who? Why? Why were they chosen?   Someone coughs and all your thinking implodes. That was then . This is now. It’s you. The stares, the quiet whispers and exchanged glances; a solar system of human emotion all about what you will undertake. You lower your gaze to the Phone.  That’s just what it is. A Phone. Sharp, elegant glistening black. It should be worn, scuffed from all that usage, it’s paint changed fr...
Post a Comment
Read more