Young Writers Society

On March 23rd 2008, Hilliard Cole meets the infinite wisdom that is God, and is shown the true nature of time, which is spherical in shape. He is allowed a brief moment of eternity to explore this medium unhindered, and does so as though it were a model globe, setting it spinning and placing himself as a finger would in a random place in space and time. As the world around him begins to tear itself apart and reform into something new and wondrous, he feels something akin to motion sickness, but of the relative variety. There is no difference to him now, between a millisecond, and a millennium.

When he finally comes to a stop it is 1963, in a lower middle class home in a small town in Vermont. He is a rather large speck of dust lodged in the eye of a bawling seven-year-old child. He tries his best to hold his footing against the onslaught of innocent tears but is eventually dislodged. He hurtles towards the ground encased in a single tear and falls for a thousand years. When he finally lands he sets the globe spinning again, and places his finger in yet another random location. He is rattled and confused as his relativity sickness begins to increase.

Now he is a two-month-old fetus in the womb of an impoverished Venezuelan woman in the year 2012. He feels the presence of a cold metal rod as it disturbs his surrounding fluids, feeling it’s way for him. It finds him and slowly pierces the rubbery undeveloped flesh of his chest. As life quickly and painlessly leaves his body he thinks to himself, what a shame, I could have grown up to be a doctor or a lawyer. He is discarded in a field of grass and throughout the following winter he decomposes and becomes fertilizer for the spring flowers. A wandering goat devours these flowers and turns him into feces. The entire process takes less than a second and is surprisingly beautiful at this speed.

He sets the globe spinning once more and puts his finger down, but this time his finger pierces the globe and he is hurtled to the beginning of time. He is a tiny and extremely dense piece of matter, comprised of only the most elementary particles. Suddenly he explodes into an accelerating universe, spawning countless beings of sentience within and of himself. He endures every subjective experience ever wrought from stardust, both individually and collectively, in a simultaneous manner. He continues to explode outward into infinity until the remainder of his matter has converted into energy and expends itself, fading into the background static of oblivion. This process takes an eternity, but he does not mind.