There's a certain moment that occurs both before and after the fall. Here is the before:
A boy lives on the earth, and the earth knows his name. It hurries in the wind and breezes past the ears of people who have watched him for years, their thoughts thickened by the blood trapped in those letters. He knows he's just a memory to the world, a statue rusted by rain. Pyramids. Stones and sculpture.
There's a Game, and he's made it to the very end. Something like this has never happened before; there are worlds and galaxies where he died long ago, and for some reason he's decided to live here. He can't think of why. Perhaps there is no reason. He breathes, if only because it's all he's ever known.
A lapse of numbed minutes trace by him, frozen in place until it's night. The soles of his shoes are gone, his heels dragging in the sticks until cut and red. He can't wince at the pain. There is not enough feeling. Not enough breath.
The mountains are far behind him. His spear is somewhere else. He hasn't had any water and his stomach has been hungry for so long that it's not screaming anymore, his chest an empty cage, ribs a cell with crumbling walls. Deterioration masks his face and hands, shallow and grey and sodden as skeletons in their graves. What used to be an ocean is now a crater; hollow, but not once forgetting what it was like to be full.
He sits among the stones, resting his head on a tree. The smell of sap reminds him of honey and wine, a sweetness and bitterness in this forest of brine. He tastes the remnants of a past rain, and he watches the moon cast the world into a blanket of soft white, blue, and black. Asleep and awake, the boy sways until he stops thinking. There are no more mountains. There's no more sand. No more fire and nothing left of him.
It's the middle of the night when he realizes it's time to die.
In the before, there is fight. Willpower. We scream to release the pain and cry to outlast everything else. We stand on the rocks and look out at the horizon. I stare directly at the sun and laugh when it forgets to blind me, and when you hold your breath I am there to hear it fall. Before life, there is nothing; before nothing, there is life.
And before Benthic dies, he lives. And how he's lived up high in the mountains! How he's yearned, and wished, and grinned whenever the time has come. How he's gone swimming in the rivers. Eaten berries from the bush. How he's played the Game until the Game has ended, and whispered in the ear of a man that once whispered back.
Here is the before: a boy in one universe falls in love with a god, and the god asks him to follow him into the dark.
The echo of a cannon rings out across the earth, and the boy smiles because he thinks it's for him. He stares at the sky and waits to become a star. He's patient with the gods, but his hand twitches in anticipation, wanting the touch of man once again and wanting to see what it's like in the other universes. It's time. And the boy shuts his eyes to make sure the world knows he's okay.
He waits to die. He waits to fall. But still, he breathes.
There's a certain moment that occurs both before and after the fall. Here is the after:
A man buries his feet in the sand. His eyes are closed, breath a little fast. He's been running since the beginning of time, but he's slowing down now. But he's tired. Oh, how things catch up with you.
The sky is burning without the sun, stars so far apart from one another that their glisten is lonely. Forlorn, and almost desperate. A yellow glow lands on the man's forehead, but it disappears just as fast. Things catch up. Things run. We live, and then we die.
Salt lays freshly on his skin, tinted red with freckles wrinkled by age. His lips have been chapped all day and his neck aches from sleep—from looking up at the mountains in his dreams. His hands still feel the heat. His chest still feels the beat of a blacksmith, forging a sword into the skull of a man. There was skin and bone in the marshes, a finger tracing my spine, a boy and a boy forgetting that it's no longer real. The man in the sand hasn't forgotten about the hills. Hasn't forgotten their glare. Their sweat. He thinks of that warrior from Two, and suddenly his heart awakens in every universe.
Now, there's just him and the shoreline; a boy from the Game; a boy lost in the trees as his screams uproot the crows perched in the pines. In his nightmares, there's a god, and every evening he comes to kiss your neck until morning.
He opens his eyes. Unburies his feet. A wave splashes over his ankles.
After: it's been many years since he lived through the cannons. His name sits among a list of others, fading slowly every year as more children are added one by one, by twenty-four. The clouds keep them coming and the sea keeps them away, the district of fisheries learning battle more easily than that of grain, of mines. We live to accept what we've become, if only because it's so hard to be something else.
Long ago, the boy loved his mother, but she's been away for quite a while now. She's spent enough time gone that her eyes don't glow in his head anymore, and he can't think of her voice without imagining that it once made him swell like the current. It doesn't do that today. The earth has forgotten her. It's lost her teeth, her cheeks, her wrists. How long did her hair rest past her shoulders? Did it gleam in the sun? When she swam, how deep did her breaths go, and did she open her eyes when she reached the seafloor?
The man's mother was ocean and pond. His lover was mountain and rocks. All that's left for him is the sand by the water. All that's left are the pieces in the wind, cut too small to outlast time.
He sits out of reach of the tide. Puts his shirt back on, lets the wind dry his skin. This is the only universe that he's alive. The only universe he wants to erase. Here is the after: a man was once a boy, lost in love with god, and when god asks forgiveness the man leaves him to wilt in the mountains. Says the fall is not worth the rest. I don't want to breathe if it's going to hurt. I don't want to love if there are things I'll need to hate. I don't want you if you're going to die.
There's a certain moment that occurs both before and after the fall. But the man is left in the between, suspended in the sky, mid-air and mid-flight. Between the ocean and the castles, between what's bright and what's not. He breathes until it burns and watches the sun become the moon. Oh, how the stars don't seem to glimmer when you get up close; they learn to reveal what they've always been. Lost in the asteroids. Wandering among the planets.
Here, he sees it all. He can love his mother and love that boy, win the Game and drift asleep underwater. He cries because he wants to and screams because it's okay. A man braces himself for time to end, a wonderful and desolate thing.
Here is the before, the between, and the after: a man lives in love with a god. The god dies, and the man can't follow him. There is nothing else after that. There is no one here. We sleep in the sand and we dream of the mountains.
We wait to die. We wait to fall. There's nothing else for us to do.
There is nothing. But still, man breathes.