Untitled Samantha 2037 story.

She'd awoke into the crisp, late-morning sun descending upon his staling body, quiet with the taste of those 130-plus years. She touched his dumb, haired chest, telling her chest to be quiet. Language & gestures tickling through Samantha's becoming-ancient body. 

That form ready for breath. Eyesight. That form quiet in its cave of infinite thoughtfulness. 

She thought of the Underworld. She thought of scrambling, achieving, being. Samantha put her hand upon him, Sisyphus finally gone. 

When she let herself stand to her feet, Samantha's thoughts echoed to the waking-day. Tired form of a retired century drawing into some wildly misbegotten day. Nearly mid-century day. 

The trees & flowers & leaves & of that wild spoke to Samantha as she scanned the landscape for somewhere to bury Sisyphus, his stale corpse laying in its stale shadow against the light of chance. 

She thought of Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. She thought of words in the womb and the wall beyond it. 

She decided to bury him where he was, fingers moving/clawing into the dirt, dirt spraying into some indecipherable composition of itself, Samantha...digging. 

When Samantha roll/pushed his ancient corpse into that cave of eternal quiet & absence, she felt a sudden pang. Samantha's heart began to count the remaining hours... Dumbdrunk shadows of echoes and memories delivered Samantha assurance beyond proper recognition. 

She thought of how things were always, perpetually ending. How they returned as surely, if only in other, newer forms. She thought of form itself, the same, seemingly inanswerable questions of where material came forth from the electric darkness of space. Scientists of a determinedly higher caliber draw new symbols, icons, letters to invent some heuristic mirror illustrating the mystery of their chance to the mystery of another. Gods of graceful design hazarded, burdened with the tests of imperfection. As immigrants, as Mischa & Laura had been immigrants from other places, as we are all distant and not-so-distant cousins of the first Ethiopians: Samantha understood the scientists as perhaps a biological & self-aware Mother Gaia might review all the waking creatures of Earth: With loving belief, and careful reverence. 

Living thru the '60s, watching the Youth Fire on television and in the actual streets. Sorrow for the ones who didn't live to see it. Odd how joy can illuminate the depths of sadness, as well. And, of course, Civil Rights had always been a struggle. Something so obvious & decent, surely Narcissism, Entitlement, Moronic Rationalizations would find a way in. 

Soon enough, the 1970s would be coming & going as fast and the wild, abundant, all-consuming darkness of the 1980s would, could only end in the fever and naked fire of the 1990s. She remembered leaving this place as she was returning to it, now. What is nostalgia when all you want is the world? 

For the next so many months, no more than a year, she would live here and it would be enough and it would welcome her as a home. Samantha knew nothing of this place that seemed so familiar. 

****

Land of discarded food, land of discarded weapons. 
Empty metal containers looking for money, looking 
 for empty metal containers. 

Gunpowder like loose batteries. The wind tickled 
 against 
her primitive/ancient ear with the grace 

 of a child's anticipation. Samantha kissed 

herself on the mouth, heart singing its own name 

 into infinity. Samantha, quiet 

as a tree, sure as water. 

That world of violence enabled by industrialization 

lay past a conquerable yet inevitable horizon 

 punctured by the terrifying intention of its purpose. 

Its shadow nestled in order 

fluid definite impermanent 

ephemeral heuristic creation -- 

divided, sufferingly--between its energy 

and its chaos. 

She was not dissimilar from someone awaiting a certain 

morning. Her last morning in the World: around 

 A Hundred Thirty-something years old. She 

felt the shadow of something she could never identify the true 

name of move palpably/decidedly in her intestines. There are 

many gods. They all answer to d/Death. 

Yes. She would lay down here. Catch food as appropriate, 

wait for the night to welcome you, thoroughly. Warm 

holographic principle of undisguised disguise. That which 

defilement cannot reach. At last. 

**** 

Figure of tragic heroinism, creature of 

simple, yet incomparable delight. Samantha moved 

into the wild color of nature, the world, some world, 

or worlds, of the decades, century, previous, 

collapsing into the abyss of an immeasurable to-

morrow. Her skin was precious, yet resilient. It 

felt cold to shiver; never move; never reach; never 

stand nor pause nor relent from standing. 

She'd been promised death from the start. It 

was coming. Death from the taste of any day. Calm. 

Terrible. Bitter. Old. Familiar. Changing. New. Death 

from the inside. Lights gone. All lights gone. 

Yesterday your longest, so far. Then, a silence that 

is the only sound. 

Samantha cherished the thoughts & feelings 

that would die with her. 

**** 

She came to a place of some accidental hospitality. Air, 

moment, immediacy brushing through the soft hairs 

inside your ears. The seconds of the day, had, and would, 

move...with a modest and quiet insight...all con-

commitant to her sacred, individual belief. Most of 

the terrain was virtually devoid of motion of any form, 

no sign save excuses & disclaimers to correctly assign their 

presence, nor purpose. She felt a lonely, and cripplingly 

isolating sense of perfect freedom. Her heart zoomed 

with an overpowering, and yet rejuvenating light. The 

very last gamble of interference: gone. 

The very last gamble of enemies' 2nd chances: gone. 

She moved into the strangeness of the world without 

her. 

This life summarized in stale disagreements concerning ephemeral 

horseshit won't do. From fire & mud we leapt 

up from the ancient nothingness of now-shapeless 

stars. She would die with grace as Laura had died 

with grace. As Mischa before them died with grace. 

From the mud of chance to the mud of darkness. 

Where time knows it cannot stop stretching. 

**** 

Mischa 

Mischa had seen the world unravel in the anarchic. violent, greedy, paranoid and darkly ambiguous events of an almost/seemingly irreconcilably divided Europe in the political throes of Revolution & Tradition throughout the 1930s. Twenty-three years old, wife, mother of 4-year-old Laura. 

She wanted for precious little, and was promptly denied it. Fascism pulsed with a demure narcissistic composure as her neighbors lately, men, women, all--either were or were readily mistaken for one of this seeming, becoming horde: dignified brutes disqualifying any staying-power of logic by forcefully re-imagining the shape of all possibility of logic...as though animals, in their absolute lowest states, were only too capable of the most severe cruelty if it came beneath a banner of greater good and this unnervingly peculiar truthspeak of individual strength and collective will. When she looked at Laura, her heart, and related muscles, seized with an idiotic kind of terror. She'd sped from adolescence to motherhood with a kind of proficiency that really no longer exists. 

???? 

**** 

Samantha 

She was lonely for his absence of companionship, nor would she pursue serious efforts to replace the gift & the burden of him with another. She neither hid nor was injured much from fear. She knew the word 'stoicism' but rarely spoke it and never with regard to herself. The tranquil confidence of a thousand mice dreaming the dreams of a thousand mice flexed with keen intention in the smallness of Samantha's ribs. Miniature, persistent, thirst and the desire to satisfy thirst in equal measure. 

There was mystery, yet of little consequence. Any day now was worth at least 10 yrs. previous but they taught you nothing and indeed more had been forgotten, misremembered, lost from the time before her humble stroll toward death than she could sincerely hope to relearn or recapture, remember, regain, now. Our lives are long, but I'm not sure I'd renounce even the worst for the fact of it being a day at all. What stories did the dinosaurs tell each other when they were bored & lonely at night? Or do dogs and deer and bear, now? Little fear of terrorism, racism, peer-pressure, social media. She thought of, thought on...schedules but little if anything to maintain them. Her minutes and hours were divided and decided by things either of absolute need and/or serendipitous whimsicality. Order & chaos without relent or the least confusion. The thoughts of a tree-dwelling animal watching you you wondering about the thoughts of a tree-dwelling animal. 

It's hard to hold on to life, sometimes. And even harder to let it go. 

**** 

She thought she saw gods of other worlds, perhaps, mis-turned from the paths of their respective pilgrimages, or, perhaps, it was simply that gods of all worlds are in the habit of making pilgrimages that are otherwise ordinarily dismissed. Gods from beggared kingdoms now scarcely as impressive or intimidating as the shadows of those once venerable empires. Costumes, now, of characters in a story that will also eventually be forgotten. She thought of Gilgamesh & Enkidu with little, if any, effort and if this was ironic or not she couldn't discern and that ambiguity wouldn't toxify or undermine the thoughts that came after it. If his cruelty toward his people was meant to be punished for its vain wrath, surely that cruelty was re-suffered in the moment of Enkidu's final peril at the gouge of the ancestral bull: death makes no truly lasting pardons, only extensions, delays, bureaucratic errors. Samantha, of course, didn't chase after secrets of immortal life, as the king of course had, the warm gravity of life seemed to pour like water vapor, unthreatening, utterly bereft of disguise and she did little to discourage it from this gestaltic exchange. Where each god was meant to go was, ultimately, if with virtually unbearable fragility, in the wisdom of that god and where they sought & direction in the worlds before them. She followed her eyes, the gliding, trembling, rattling greed & agility of nature, of antivisan after antivisan shuffling in the thoughts of themselves and others. 

****