brides and grooms uncoupled like shunting trains, tins of sardines exploded, releasing their wiggling shoals; dinosaur bones whizzed like missiles out of museums back to the badlands, and bullets flew sizzling into their guns. Glass beads popped off gowns and moccasins and fell on Italy in a hail of dangerous colour, as white people disappeared over the Atlantic in a whoosh of pollution, vainly clutching their power tools, car keys, and lawn mowers which dove like metal fish back into the mines; black people too, recapturing syncopation; all flowers were suctioned budwise into their stems. The Native peoples made speedy clearance work of cowboys and longhorns, but then took off westward instead, chanting goodbye to ancestral plains, which were reclaimed by shaggy mastodons and the precursors of horses and everywhere the children shrank and began to drop teeth and grow hair. III. Well, there were suddenly a lot more flamingos before they in their turn became eggs, while people’s bodies reverted through their own flesh genealogies like stepping stones, man woman man, container into contained, shedding language and gathering themselves in, skein after skein of protoplasm until there was only one of them, alone at the first naming; but the streetwise animals, forewarned and having learned the diverse meanings of the word dominion, did not show up, and Adam, inarticulate, deprived of his arsenal of proper nouns, returned to mud and mud itself became lava and lava the uncooled earth and the uncooled earth a swirl of white-hot energy, and the energy jammed itself into its own potential, and swirled like fluorescent bathwater down a non-existent wormhole. IV. I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals. I could say: Don’t offend the bear, don’t tell bad jokes about him, have compassion on his bear heart; I could say, Think twice before you speak. I could say, Don’t take the name of anything in vain. But it’s far too late for that, because you can’t read this, because you can’t remember the word for read, because you are dizzy with aphasia, because the page darkens and ripples because it is liquid and unbroken, because God has bitten his own tongue and the first bright word of creation hovers in the formless void unspoken THREE NOVELS I WON’T WRITE SOON
1. Worm Zero In this novel all the worms die. That would include the nematodes. Also anything wormlike in shape, though it may not be a worm proper. Should grubs be included? Should maggots? I’ll know better once I get thoroughly into this thing.
Worms, anyway. Those in the earth, and those in the water. Those inside fish. Those inside dogs. Those inside people, such as pinworms, roundworms, and tapeworms. They die, each and every one. It’s not all downside.
Or it’s not all downside at first. But quite soon—because the earthworms are now defunct, and that’s important—the soil is no longer circulating in the usual fashion. Worm dung is no longer extruded at the surface, wormholes no longer allow rain to penetrate. Valuable nutrients remain sealed in layers of subsoil. Formerly productive fields turn to granite. Crops become stunted and then won’t grow at all. Famine gets going.
Who shall we follow in the course of this doleful story? I vote for Chris and Amanda. They are a nice young
