Notes

It was dawn.

The dawn of man or the dying breath of a savage salvation; the sixth extinction, or just the last day of your life. Not taking too long to think, the kids in the crawlspaces emerged into the mournful morning. Measuring skulls and comparing scars as they lurched like crabs in a macabre parade, led by legless acrobats and three armed boys; a random occurance or a patterned plan. Their voices rang in hollow harmony, a godless symphony to the Late Great Planet Earth, and other places. Brothers and sisters wept to see their fantasies alive and writhing in the gutters; mothers and fathers hid their eyes in shame at the sight of their only children tearing at each other like wolves in the street, savage and unequal, nightmares made real. The only thing they shared were tears--but the message was clear: rocks have their dreams, and the Earth changes.

No rainbow could prevent the coming torrent, and no sorrow could prevent the coming flood. People slowly emerged into a changed world, and found themselves changed as a result. No streetlights, no houselights, and there was a silence, intense and absolute. The Non-folk of a former time watched the world from its lone mountaintop in a land of shadows and hidden trails, lost rivers and unknown lakes. Their swords were dulled and the swamps were too thick for armor. They forgot the past, letting it melt away like a dream and watched their wishes made flesh. Their offspring mutated into fish and frogs, fossils and ferns, that have grown up to find all the gods dead, all wars fought, and all faiths in man shaken. But now who will survive in America?

It was not so very long ago: before the three-eyed fish and the mermaid girls, before the Mona Lisa, the Eiffel Tower and Sputnik, before Dachau's ovens lit the lingering night of the human mind in ghastly pallor. Happily hybrid humans living in total timeless turmoil; there were no obvious heros and there is no somewhere else. Whispers ciculated about a mysterious 'Third Man,' a lost relative--a primate carnivor. Hoping to rediscover the origin of species, new tribes have gathered in forsaken joints hidden deep in the subterranean forest. They offer not verse but revolt, and their flesh is a poem that ponders perjury. But still the Apeman watchs them, knowing that one day they too would share his fate: master's of the Earth, digging through dirt.

Endless coasts are now washed by the waves of one great ocean where the ancient things sing and squirm their silly mantra, "the whole world is a shell." Fishermen sailed to shore to bear witness as their habitat gurgled and spat out pirate myths of a surfing test at the bottom of the sea. All the flags to which we once pledged our allegiance have rotted and joined the earth, the trees, the seeds and city streets. And after the lights went out, we saw the roads all paved in moss.

As the Adaptor chose her end, a choked silence greeted her final question, "Will you stop and breath with me?" When the barricades went up she was shot from both sides, but as the day trembles to a close, as night draws its blackened entrails over the eternal sea, the question remains: will you join her? Will you put you head on the chopping block?

It was dawn and the moon was out.

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