The Edges of Creation

by Luc Reid

No one was as surprised as the two gods themselves when their creations collided.

“My ocean!” cried Forian, whose creation entailed a series of archipelagos with unpredictable volcanos erupting in what would eventually be found to be a fiendishly complex but utterly predictable pattern, if the mathematics of his race of sentient amphibians ever reached that level.

“What are you doing to my wasteland?” called Hronakolnavololgok, the bronze-eyed, many-taloned creator whose awkward wooden people clawed a meager living from land anenome farming punctuated with bouts of lunatic warfare.

What indeed? The infinite ocean, no longer infinite with the smoking wastelands encroaching on it, poured out across what had been a landscape of unrelieved, sun-broiled rock. It was a disaster of cosmic proportions whichever way you looked at it, with what was meant to be infinite, unpassable, and bounding suddenly becoming interrupted, variegated, and full of possibility.

Forian and Hronakolnavololgok rushed furiously against one another, throwing angels, lightning bolts, pestilences, mountain ranges, black holes, and other annoyances at one another’s infinite, omnipotent selves. They were occupied with this for quite a while, actually, and since neither could be harmed but neither would ever run out of ways to try to harm the other, there was little to keep them in check.

Ages passed this way. When the two gods finally stopped clashing, glaring at one another across the vast firmament, it occurred to first one, then the other to look down at their respective creations, which had long since melded. Without godly protection, a measly few million years had reduced both efforts to airless expanses of dust.

Both gods instantly translated themselves to different spheres of existence in utter disgust.

Down on the surface, nothing moved … but if we were to look closely, we would be able to just make out the eroded shapes of grand monuments– first one or two, then dozens, then thousands–all erected in celebration of five hundred thousand years of glorious peace and cooperation between the amphibian people and the wood people in their accidentally verdant and bounteous world.

Laughing Buddha

by David

Sandy took Laughing Buddha to the beach. She loved the way the waves were always the same, but never the same. The strand was always the same, and never the same. Not like people, they were always different. Look at Laughing Buddha, for instance.

Sandy had lived with her parents in Nags Head her whole life. Except they weren’t really her parents, and it wasn’t really her whole life. She loved them, she really did, because they loved her. They told her so. And when Mama or Daddy had to take out the belt, and Sandy had to lie on her stomach for a couple of days afterwards, it was all done out of love.

That was why, when Sandy started to remember who she really was, she acted out of love. A seagull flew out the window of the cottage on stilts, not quite within sight of the water, but as close as they could afford. It was laughing, the way seagulls do, the way Mama did. Mama thought almost everything was funny, except when Sandy talked back, or broke things, or wouldn’t do what she was told.

And when Daddy came home from work, and asked where Mama was, and smiled, but made Sandy stand very still while he looked through Mama’s things, and said bad words, he became Laughing Buddha. Because Laughing Buddha looks like he’s laughing, but he isn’t. And he looks nice, but he isn’t. Which is why Sandy, acting out of love, took Laughing Buddha to the beach. They watched the stars come out as the sun sank behind them into the bay. Sandy told Laughing Buddha all about Mama, and the seagull, and who she really was, and the proper usage of belts, as the sky slowly turned. When she was done talking, Sandy left Laughing Buddha just below the line of seaweed and tiny bits of shell that marked the last high tide. It would be a spring tide tonight.

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