What can happen in a second
Tick-
An elk bugles into the misty Yellowstone dawn, piercing the sacred matutinal silence. His breath leaves him in billowing whorls of steam, nebulous crispations that rise hotly and evaporate quickly in the icechipped air. To his left, the twenty-five cows of his harem are nestled peacefully in the meadow beside the black ribbon of the Lamar river, their dun backs drab before the golden ranks of aspen that garnish the hills like a prospector’s dream. His huge antlers gleam in the mellow pink light, a pair of fifteen-pointed falchions stretching halfway down his back. He is prepared to do battle at a moment’s notice with any of the rivals that may lurk in those flaming woods waiting to poach his brides.
An osprey is about to shatter the glassy waters of Lake Nockamixon. She had been wheeling around the Pennsylvania skies on long sable wings for over an hour, her fierce, sunflower eyes scrutinizing every inch of the tranquil lake for the shimmering hide of an unlucky fish. Finally she’d found one, a largemouth bass come too near the thin window between the worlds of water and sky. She stooped into a powerdive, creamy legs thrust forward, talons eagerly reaching out to break the keel of the bass. Coaldust wings folded over her back like the hands of a penitent, her body an inverse arrowhead moments away from snatching her prize in a frothing cauldron of water and feather and scale.
Drunk as a skunk at two in the afternoon, Javier Gonzalez rims the curb and his sedan bounces over it at seventy-miles an hour. He has five DUI’s under his belt already, and is fresh off serving thirty days for battery- barfight with some gavacho who was too clingy with his girl; it was only a little pinch on the ass! Gonzalez’s left eye was still sore, still stained deep purple, but he barely notices in his stupor. He doesn’t bother stomping the brake pedal. For a moment all four wheels are airborne, and the vehicle is on an unstoppable trajectory towards a six-year old girl. Addison Fisher. She’s just begun to lick her ice cream come. Mint chocolate chip, cold and fresh on her tongue. She’d walked over to the corner to wait patiently while her mother paid the cashier. They were walking to the movie theater to see a new princess movie. She hears a shriek of metal and rubber, and her eyes briefly catch the harsh, highbeam light of twin suns growing in intensity.
Robert Wright’s lips are planted firmly on Enola McCall’s, their tongues sparring in each other’s mouths, desperately trying to melt into each other. They’re on a bench in Fairmount Park, the Philadelphia skyline scintillating under the noon sun but neither of them notice. Each the other’s whole universe, as though their love were all that had ever been and would ever be. She groped at him like an animal, running her hands over his cannonball shoulders, his broad chest, the knotted muscles of his arms, as if to assure herself that he was real, that he was really hers. He in turn held her by the back of her neck in his right hand, running his fingers through the messy raven thicket of her hair, while his left was planted on the small of her back, sliding down to squeeze her buttocks which was wrapped in tight denim like a belated Christmas present. Neither cared or even noticed when a cyclist zoomed past, when a pair of joggers looked over at them in embarrassed disdain. They were going to be married, and in that moment nothing else mattered in all the world.
Somewhere off the Pillars of Creation, a small, insignificant corner of the nebula undergoes a transformation. It was a simple equation, gravity pulling swirls of hydrogen together over the course of untold aeons. Atoms clotting like the platelets of a bleeding vein, heating up and tugging each other closer and closer in a molecular ballet, clustering into a massive spinning vortex over the course of half a billion years. The center cannot hold- the crushing weight of gravity condenses it into a white hot furnace under pressure beyond belief. The hydrogen atoms begin to fuse into their whimsical sister helium. At the ball’s core, jets of plasma rocket out of either pole light years into space, then cease in an instant as nuclear fusion begins in earnest. A new sun takes its place in the stelliferous nursery.
-tock.
In the interest of improving my writing, I dug an old book out of my closet titled “642 Things To Write About”, which was given to me as a birthday present by my uncle some years ago. It’s exactly what it sounds like- six-hundred and forty-two writing prompts. It’s a neat book; apparently it was written in a single day with contributions from several dozen writers. I intend to write something for every single one of these prompts, perhaps not as a daily exercise, but not irregular either.
This is the first entry, written after the first prompt in the book- “What can happen in a second.”