by Patrick Călinescu
A spot of light showed in the sky pressing against what mere instants ago had barely been the faint contour of a feeble cloud. Through the luminous entrance to the eternally atmospherically observant world tossing beneath it, a shaft, seemingly of nothing, began its descent from the invisible regions of celestial height from which it had perhaps come. Though materially substantial, it vibrated like a usual vibration which, typically, is impossible to see. It tore the air through which it was thudding down with such animal force, that an unassuming flock of wild geese, whose flight southwards happened to be intersecting this aerial bulldozer, nearly crashed into it. When these two finally came within inevitable contact of each other, a sudden little wind emerged from their fast-dissolving midst and put a new reasonably unbreakable distance between them at the expense of just a few unimportant ruffled feathers.
This collision had no sooner by good chaotic management been averted than the mysterious plunging device, fairly tipped at the top, continued to cut through the atmospheric composition of the skies at a rate that seemed to have been accelerating considerably if calculated from whatever speed it might initially have had.
On its way down, the elemental ray of light met nothing else but other otherwise inconsequentially unimportant rays of light. These latter ones were terrestrial in origin-thus without any real velocious impetus. They however had managed, by the time they had reached the surface of the planet, to beautify it by an extra metric ton or so of stowaway glimmers and shimmers-thus gravely and bravely braking just before they hit the ground with the force of an unlimited supply of yet undistorted rainbows.
One would think that on touching down this ethereal bulldozer would instantaneously cease to be whatever it had hitherto been. Wrong. When it landed in what surely was an impossible to count number of fractal-shaped, shrapnel-born explosions of photonic consistency, the original spot of light accumulated, not dissipated, into a variety of lost dots of little luminosity exclusively for the sake of the narratorial eye’s disinterest in the vraisemblable.
In fact, neither fusion nor fission can actually explain what happened to it. The basically unmappable piece of land, into which this ever continuing tunnel of light banged both constructively and destructively, was, too, fairly tipped at the top-the top of which having been naturally tipped by aeons of mountainous growth into a most splendid, and unrugged, and unbluntable, colossally towering summit, whose stabbing, maximal unflattedness had only lately been snapped clean off.
But this elemental impact produced neither the rocky stub of some erstwhile cordillera, nor the dead end of a once undarkable mob of pure photons. No. This collision, so disproportionate to earthly scale, meant what in nature no type of smashing can do: the accurate preservation of smashed and smashee, no matter which one is which, in a state of integrity undisturbed even during their climactic rendezvous.
There is however undisputed difficulty in keeping both parties, whichever they may be, both completely atomized by devastation and in a condition that literally reeks of virginal indifference to everything there is. Such a compromise cannot belong to the being of the universe. It is thus hard to meet. Only some surreal thing would be strong enough to make it happen.
As the light, while still in its original spot shape, was beginning piercing through the atmosphere of the planet, at least one of its ramming particles left the post where it had been pounding on the doors of heavens, and assumed the role of the mind of the entire scintillating machinery-for it avidly needed something with which to think the naturally unthinkable.