“Immaculate Cat” by Thomas Piekarski

“Immaculate Cat” by Thomas Piekarski

Should Earth’s bowels burst one day in a pyroclastic cataclysm, innards thrust far out through space to be dispersed amid all the quarks, fields, quasars, never again to be heard by sentient ears, then Mars may groan terribly, knowing it could be next. People by then might exist in one odd form or another, possessors of past and future. Parked beside a plum orchard I contemplated how it would feel to be sitting on a stoop at night looking up at a million circling stars at precisely the time that huge explosion transpires. The day young, the sky turquoise, sun slowly melting.

Immersed in a state of vitality did I stroll a bit, whereupon observed a most immaculate cat hunched on a curb some forty feet from me. Stopped in my tracks by this cat, for I had never seen among hundreds any so imperially beautiful with its crystalline eyes and entrancing coat, a pale orange and white that shimmered like the finest Chinese silk. It sauntered forth as if I were some old friend returned to catch up on events. Maybe we come from the same stock, tree bark or fly abdomen, now cast as man and cat, consigned to common consciousness, always the sum of the whole, resonances by which memory is transmitted. Our astrological bond surely come by means of little understood concepts such as genetic mutation and mitosis, morphic telepathy and perfect love.

“Extant” by A. Whittenberg

shame on you for eating flesh the protein of your friends (at least, you didn’t eat your sister) but come on -- what were you thinking? to maintain survival excuses everything except when it doesn’t shame after your plane crashed into the Andes Mountains after the impact, the crush of metal, the raging fire drowned by the snow more bad luck the avalanche, the avalanches being lost, being broken and you can’t eat the rugby balls and the plane food is gone the hunger, the relentless cold, the hunger, the screams, where was the utility? civilization sent search parties that couldn’t find you shame nourishment was only a 60 mile walk away or at least the goat herders you had to find your own cure you saved yourself shame