22nd Jan, ‘22.
Yes, my mom is a hostess.
No, my mom is not an oversized magical dog, like Nicholas says.
First and foremost, Nicholas is a nitwit.
Do dogs walk on magpie-like arms and legs? My mom does. And, when angry, with her hands she crushes rocks. Stress relief.
Do dogs have antlers? Nope. My mom does, when she is angry and there are neither crushable nor uncrushable rocks anymore.
Do dogs have eyes? Do they? Yes, they do. Does my mom? Nope. Nowp. Neeewp. But she still sees everything! She can look inside everyone. If she hears a lie? Young man, are you in trouble! Mom is not letting that slide!
Do dogs smell of vanilla-cherry pies? Dogs smell of dogs. Mom smells of mom. And unless you rub a pie into a dog, or a dog into a mom, it’s hard to confuse the two.
Do dogs fold themselves? How many times can you fold a dog? My mom has a white-haired, serpentine torso of infinite length. Infinitely folded inside itself. Mom explained infinity very well, but I couldn’t understand a word. But it means very, very long! It is only by her choice that she is ten steps long.
When I hug her, I hear words of uncommon sense appearing in my mind. Often in languages I don’t understand. Mom says it’s okay. Only some insane people do. So crazy!
I am Kimka, by the way. My mom made me out of curiosity and a fluffy towel because she felt very alone.
***
26th May, ‘26.
Mom says what I do now will determine who I will become in the future.
Guess what I’m doing now?
I walk through the park.
I pick up trash.
I put the picked-up trash in the picked-up trash receptacle.
I make unenthusiastic noises.
“Under the bench. You missed a sweet wrapper under the bench, Kimka,” whispered the wet rocky road under my feet.
“Hey, Uittu, you wanna hear some poetry?” I asked, and proceeded to wail, like a fire engine, in the cold, thick fog:
“The crystal drops of morning dew
Shall be the witness of the moment!
The moment sealed was my fate.
Fate, to become a janitor.
Because today, on the twenty-sixth of May!
One nasty city park has decided it would be a great idea to abuse a poor teenager by making them collect plastic bags, broken glass, and cigarette butts instead of letting them sleep.”
The ground softly chuckled. “I love it! Poetry needs people like you, Kimka. And it needs you with instilled diligence. Persist in persistence.”
Whatever.
Mom told me about the place she was recruited from, the Earth.
On Earth, one rule is the tyrant, the dictator, the unworthy monarch of the Good.
“To each, his own.”
In the Canyon, true holds the exact opposite.
“To own, his each.”
Dogs get to choose their owners.
Houses get to choose their tenants.
Gods get to choose humans to define themselves through.
A garbage bag gets to choose to rip itself in half and release its intestines, littering the pavement with junk I labored two hours to collect. God damn it!
“Kimka. Glass, sharps, and broken bottles go directly to metal containers. Not paper bags,” murmured the air.
Fine. I made myself fail. The universe need not help.
The thing is, the gods are absurdly picky about the humans they move into.
Half a million people live in the Canyon.
Three are worthy to be hosts.
Meaning, gods had to become roommates.
Mom has imagined into an existence a device. She called it a gMRI. It revealed that her guts are now a medieval Europe. Gods divided her internal organs into feudal kingdoms, formed hierarchies and began violating known laws. Natural laws. Such optional laws as, for example, second law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy and, oh, the law of causality, as if our life wasn’t insane enough.
As a side note, there is an entity that lives in her left buttock.
It’s evenly matched against the almost identical entity of the right buttock.
Naturally, there are some hostilities.
She’s calling what’s in between of two buttocks a “Po Land”.
I have no idea what that is.
Come on, you stupid cup, stop slipping! Become grabbed already!
Mom doesn’t believe in gods. She says it’s just an unattentive, uninspired, and unimaginative explanation for the phenomena that people don’t have enough unstupidity to grasp.
She is dead certain. Even now. When probably hundreds of them have moved into her and changed her into an omnipotent mythical chimera. She keeps saying something else is going on.
By the way.
“Hey, Uittu. Are you even alive? I mean…” I trailed off. Awkward. Think first. Speak after.
A soft chuckle again. “Are you, Kimka?” rustled the leaves.
***
31 Dec, ‘31.
I finally regained enough composure and willed my stubborn body from my bed.
I pleaded my predicament. To the table, bookshelves, and the general sense of disorder that felt palpable in my room.
Who else would even listen?
The undone geometry homework?
I abhor geometry, and I assure you, the feeling is mutual. The damn thing would just inquire as to why GIVEN a shoelace and a door handle I did not yet PROVE my SIMILARITY to Sergei Yesenin. I hope Pythagoras was as miserable as he made me.
Sigh.
Mom loves geometry.
When she was my age, she went to Moscow University to learn more about it. Can you imagine that?
Even more. Her backup plan on rejection was to move to a village. And spend 19 hours a day doing geometry. Why sleep eight hours if you are wasting three of them not doing any proofs?
She wrote hundreds of papers on differential geometry. About five people in the whole world cared about her work. Her h-index was comparable to that of a university janitor, but she didn’t care.
Some people had potential, then squandered it. I, on the other hand, never had even that. Or a “divine spark.” Or any habit of creating something other than mistakes, regrets, and the liquid stool that is my poetry.
***
Nobody knows how old the damn Canyon is;
Nobody knows how long the damn Canyon is;
Nobody knows how deep the damn Canyon is.
Or rather, we have an embarrassing abundance of mutually exclusive answers. Decades? Thousands of years? We have our own language the rare newcomers have to learn. The underground water reservoirs last a few decades after we tap into them, so we have to build forward.
I walk to the windows.
I can see both walls.
To the left, the Shadow wall. It looks rough, jagged, as if made out of flat surfaces. The color of the regolith is pitch-black, no matter the light.
To the right, the Sun wall. It looks smooth, curved, as if made out of bubble foam. It lights ablaze, like a myriad of lightbulbs, precisely at 8 a.m. Precisely at 8 p.m., it goes dark.
Far up ahead, the farms. They bring crops and turn untraversable sludge into moist dirt.
Behind us, history. Condemned buildings. Buildings too far from the center, too expensive to upkeep, and too logistically inconvenient.
Above us, the sky. The sky is covered by an impermeable fog. Cerulean blue is not seen. It is never seen.
On my table, the map. Commercial, residential, industrial areas; squeezed in a strip a dozen miles across, like tobacco in a cigarette.
Behind me, a voice.
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” spoke the pedantic voice with perfect diction.
I was alone in the room. The voice was coming as if from inside the bookshelf. A thorough rummaging produced a book I can’t remember having in my collection. A dusty perpetrator by the name of “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” by Oscar Wilde. It looked like it hadn’t been opened even once.
A book that wishes to be read.
“Not today, Mr. Book. Not today,” I said. However, I put the book on the bedside table. It feels wrong to give something with a dream a glint of hope and then squash it.
Utopia, dreams, and hopes…
The evidence we have on our hands seems to suggest…
The Canyon was engineered. And it was engineered with one specific purpose.
Utopia gets to have its dreamers.
And it would seem…
Nicholas says that the colossal contraption broke, leaving us with no justification for our existence.
First and foremost, Nicholas is a nihilist.
I say, this is because we keep building forward, not up.