Knowing the Gods, Knowing the Smalls

(neither of which matter)

There’s a garden, somewhere. The sky is yellow-grey, like sulfur, but you can’t see much of it because the bushes in the garden fill everything. They’re not tall, so much as everywhere, and there’s something particularly curious about the rose bushes. The leaves, petals, thorns – they’re all the same color, all the same texture. Thin, curling, friable, like dead steel. But the bushes are not dead, we know this from the color. A deep, blue purple, frosted with silver. Vibrant, screaming depth. The soil underneath the feet is dark, dark royal blue and when a step is made, ink pools and gathers over the tops of the toes. The more we notice the rose bushes, the more they are there. A fingertip, brushes against a sapphire petal, and leaves a bruise the color of the inky ground. A tear develops, and that is ink, too.

Walking through the roses, under the yellow sky, a sense of water. Water that can’t be seen, but ponds and lakes nonetheless, there to tell a story about all ponds and lakes. This is a story about the gods, and the not gods, but mostly it’s a story about things that aren’t human.

On deep summer days, the lakes turn green, and the green begins to smother the life in the water. This strange world operates, in some ways, the same as our own strange world. This is a call-to-arms from nitrogen, and phosphorus, and heat: the green ones explode into a thick mat of slime, preventing oxygen and sunlight from penetrating to the lower levels of the water. A veneer of dominion. The lake can no longer breathe, it doesn’t have lungs anymore, and the plants and the fish begin to die. It’s a catastrophe. These ascendants have not always been so troublesome, though. Prior to the rise of Sirius and the heralded dog days of summer, the green ones lived peacefully among their fellow lake-dwellers. Pollution, eutrophication, made them billionaires – set to strangle the rest of their community.