In the center of Old Town, where the ruins of Quevdo are located, there’s a top that’s been spinning for as long as anyone can remember. The question is this: how are any of us to know whether its movement will continue indefinitely on, or if it simply received such powerful initial force that it will only stop spinning once the last of us has passed?
My name is Juan Liber Brön. I am one of thirty-seven inhabitants in the town of New Quevdo. None of us speak the same language, though those who write all use the same script(1).
We are not all human, not in the old sense. What that word used to mean (what we gather it to mean from older documents) is not what it means now(2).
I’m in pain. All of us are(3). Most are dying. Slowly. Parts and pieces falling off at whatever interval suits them best. Here. There. Most try to keep hold of these tchotchkes as they do.
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1 The one you, my beautiful reader, are deciphering now.
2 There are drawings in some of the books we’ve found, drawings of old humans: two arms, two legs, a loving symmetry to their structure, one nose, tussles of tangled skin atop their skulls, knotted like string… Some of us resemble these drawings, if you look hard enough, but most don’t. I know for certain that only one has what you would call ‘toes.’ And even then just two.
3 The reason I write to you, dear reader, from the past, is that you are the only audience who exists. No one here understands my meaning, and though I’m considered an optimist amongst my people, even I acknowledge that we will be the last of creatures to crawl on this earth.
(We’ve found that after about a week you have enough for a meal.) And though we have no language—the reason for which must now be obvious(4)—the people of New Quevdo do not lack culture. (Even the dying revere tradition.)
So, when The Urge is felt, we gather up our fallen bits and cook them together over an open fire (for the broth we use our urine, the only liquid left acidic enough to soften our flesh); and while the meat boils, we thirty-seven gather ‘round the fire to hold ourselves as best we can. We sing and dance in a way no one from past times would recognize; but though most lost the ability to hear long ago, or never had it to begin with, in those moments we all feel(5) warmth. Nothing more. Our pain does not stop. It spins on like the top. But there, sitting around my fellow shards, eating them as I open my one eye cautiously to watch them eat me, I am almost able to bear the fact of my own existence.
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4 None of us any longer are constructed in a way similar enough to allow for common meaning. And our sensory organs, too, are always shifting. I myself have no nose or tongue. My eye works only sporadically. (I’ve gotten used to keeping it closed.) It is for this that even language in signs would be pointless, since the endless configuration of fingers and appendages on our haphazard torsos has refused every attempt at standardization.
5 I know this: though of course we cannot speak, this I know to be true)
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