OUT OF TIME
An old woman stepped out of time
and became a child
and the child she became ran through the narrow
musty corridors of her mind.
In her flight,
she ran past memories overlaid with cobwebs,
past nightmares and bugbears,
her darting eyes laughing with freedom.
Sometimes she paused in mid-flight
to spin upon her heels
or fling herself violently
from one side of the corridor to the other,
slapping the cool stone walls
with the palms of her tiny hands
just to hear the delightful sound made
by the suction of flesh disengaging itself
from damp old stone.
The sound her shoes made
as she capered and skipped was equally delightful.
Her sneakers squeaked and squealed
on the polished floor
as she raced through the halls
of the old woman’s mind.
When she grew tired of running she stopped,
bent over with her hands on her slender knees,
and puffed and panted,
gasping theatrically
and heaving artificial sighs
in ruthless mockery of the old woman.
Time –
The halls in which she found herself were eerie.
They seemed to drip
with the moss
of ancient centuries.
The walls shone with the patina of antiquity
and through a haze of untold millennia
she could just barely detect the outlines of some
hallucinatory Pleistocene dream,
prehistoric
and macabre.
She pretended to be afraid,
though the spooky chamber
with its vault-like ceiling and primeval silence
aroused only curiosity and wonder
in the child’s bosom.
Secretly, of course,
she was neither afraid nor ignorant.
The phantoms that inhabited this uncanny realm
were her intimates,
deformed perhaps,
gnarled and hideous of countenance,
ghastly remnants of their former selves,
but no less known to her for that.
She had come to this place,
had stepped out of time,
to see them.
Nevertheless, the child enjoyed the pretense of fear
and affected it with every melodramatic flourish
she could muster.
She feigned a somber expression,
followed by a series of facial contortions and poses
designed to portray astonishment,
horror,
dejection,
decorum,
and solemnity,
all of which she fancied were appropriate reactions
to the morbidity of her present surroundings.
Finally, with studied gravity and dignity,
the child plunked herself down
upon the cold museum floor
to retie a loosened shoelace,
the warm living flesh of her bare legs
tingling with goosebumps.
Then, jumping to her feet,
yanking up her socks,
and smoothing down her dress,
she scampered deeper into the arcane recesses
of the living dead.
A greenish glow seemed to permeate the air,
a sickly phosphorescence.
It made the child’s skin feel clammy,
but it did not dampen her irreverent glee.
Onward she raced through the sepulchre
of long-forgotten dreams
until she came to the bones.
The massive architecture of death
loomed above her –
brontosaurus bones,
stegosaurus bones,
and, reigning over all the herbivorous monsters,
tyrannosaurus bones.
The child was nearly euphoric at the sight
of the dry and bleached skeletons
of the once living dinosaurs.
It was not the actual dinosaurs
that gave her such merriment,
not the image of the great brutes
lumbering through the pristine forests and marshes
of a young and virginal earth.
It was the bones themselves.
It was the delicate latticework
of the reassembled old bones
that caused her such impish pleasure.
She longed to climb up into T-Rex’s belly.
The child knew how naughty it would be
to even touch the bones,
much less to scale the dead reptile’s ribs
like a ladder
and so she resolved to climb into the belly
of the helpless old fossil without delay.
As she felt around Rex’s ankles
for a secure foothold
she thought she felt a tremble
but dismissed the thought immediately.
The weight of her little foot
could hardly have disturbed the exhibit.
Then she felt it again,
and before she knew what was happening
the relics came to life around her.
All at once the skeletons stretched their necks
and stamped their feet
as they awoke from eons of extinction.
The child could hardly believe her eyes.
She became giddy with excitement.
She clapped her hands and shrieked with laughter
as the bones came to life
and made their way clumsily toward the exit.
Naturally the child gave chase.
She galloped after the fleeing fossils,
reveling in the wanton power
of her lithe young body,
her flying hair,
her childish savagery.
With the relentless child in pursuit,
the bones hurled themselves
through the empty corridors,
made a sharp left at a life-size model of
Australopithecus,
and suddenly collapsed in a heap
in front of an elevator bank.
When the child caught up with her quarry,
she stared down at the pile and,
like the good sport that she was,
danced a victory dance
before settling down to play
with the poor old bones.
Water –
A swamp filled the room from one end to the other.
Of all the dioramas recreating the habitats
of earth’s myriad creatures,
the beasts of the land,
the fowl of the air,
the fish of the sea,
the child felt herself drawn to the swamp
with its marshy ambiguity,
its oozing putrid bogs
teeming with flat-faced frogs
and bloated toads.
She clamored over the velvet rope
that barred entry
to the enticing muck and mire
of this amorphous world.
Without hesitation, the child dipped her hand
into the murky stagnant water.
She sunk her arms in up to her elbows
and plunged her fingers
deep into the mud at the bottom
where she could feel dozens of slimy gastropods
wriggling around.
With the quick reflexes of a predator,
the child deftly grasped a particularly large
and revolting slug in her tight fist.
She then withdrew her arms,
glistening with algae,
and slowly squashed the vile thing into a
thick fetid pulp.
She was so delighted with her game
and with the loathsome lifeforms
that inhabited the swamp
that she waded in up to her knees,
letting the hem of her dress collect leeches
and foul-smelling bits of fungus.
She kicked and splashed
with squeals of fiendish joy
as she brought chaos into the microcosm,
disturbing the pale blind grotesqueries
that slithered in the mud
and churning up the cloudy swamp water.
Things that had been better left unseen
rose reluctantly to the surface,
most exposed for the first time to air and light.
The child watched as the gelatinous things
began to decay,
to shrivel and stink,
even before they were dead.
She really knew how to have fun.
Stone –
The gemstones shone
with a preternatural light
beneath the soft incandescent lamps.
The child’s greedy eyes were momentarily dazzled
by the bright colors that flared up all around her.
At first
she just ran wildly through the Hall of Gems,
intoxicated by the prismatic sorcery
of the shimmering sparkling stones,
the perfume of their colors,
and the kaleidoscopic notes they emitted
on a chromatic scale only the child could hear.
This was not the music of the spheres;
this was the music of the earth,
of the subterranean depths of the earth,
music composed in the terrestrial furnace
and left to cool for an epoch or two.
When at length the child’s frenzy began to subside,
she inspected the glass cases
which housed the lapidary spirits,
only to discover that they were securely locked.
With all the violence of a frustrated child,
she pounded on the glass,
her intent little face becoming rosy with wrath,
but to no avail.
It would not shatter.
She had to content herself
with pressing her nose against the glass
and steaming it up with her hot breath.
When a large area of the glass
became foggy enough
to draw upon with her finger,
the child traced a full circle,
inserted her arm through the imaginary aperture,
and seized a spectacular diamond.
It struggled only briefly in her grip,
but it glittered with such malevolence that the child,
though no angel herself,
became apprehensive.
A rainbow of vivid color,
a spectrum of blood-red brilliance,
sun-warmed yellow and orange,
living shades of green,
celestial blue,
and enraptured violet,
seemed to be fighting for its life
in the bowels of the inanimate creature
and in each facet of the gem
the child could see her own image
reflected back to her,
tiny mirror-images of herself,
homunculi
yearning to escape their crystalline prison.
Well, the child would not let them.
She returned the diamond to its case
and selected instead a smooth round obsidian,
feeling much safer with its opaque blackness.
There was a familiar mischief
in its goblin craftsmanship
and it was not too large to fit into her pocket.
Space –
The child stood before a computer-generated image
of a Martian landscape
with ochre sands and twin moons.
It was exotic and infernally beautiful.
Then,
even before her tender young lungs
had become acclimated to the thin atmosphere,
the planetarium’s state-of-the-art
virtual reality simulator
propelled her through a volley of asteroids
and into the outer reaches of the solar system
where sixteen ghostly satellites
attended their master,
an imperious miasma of technicolor
who kept his single large eye on his votaries.
And a little farther out into the void,
Saturn held his pulverized minions captive
in rings of cosmic dust.
In other visions,
nebulae swirled and galaxies exploded into light.
Stars went supernova
like tragic heroes dying on the stage,
the pomp and pageantry augmented
by The Dark Side of the Moon
in surround sound.
The child craned her neck as far back as she could.
Above her,
shooting stars flashed across the heavens,
piercing the Stygian blackness of space,
spiraling through the labyrinthine coils
of a universe of curved spacetime,
and finally vanishing into uroboric infinity.
The child suddenly felt very small indeed,
standing there,
alone,
light years away from the pretty blue earth.
She peered over her shoulder,
just a glance it was,
and saw the dawn of the cosmos,
the birth of something from nothing,
or almost nothing.
Then she looked forward,
out into the expanding universe.
Death lurked out there.
There was no question about it.
Yet the distance in between,
the space in between,
was filled with life.
Poised on the threshold of eternity,
the child faced forward.
She looked straight into the unknown,
into the future
– and leapt.