Always – plasticbagger
December 31, 2025
Palms tremble, dispersing arrowy pollen into a gust. Rooted deep, the tree shrinks to the size of a seed. A wall of stone and dirt rises before it. Signals of danger dart up its bark. Each frond is shocked bare. Sunlight is eclipsed. Two hind legs slip off the edge of swelling land. A brute topples through the air into the tree. Its shoulder hump turns thick branches into twigs. Landing on top of its large hairy head the brute’s tusks pierce its skull. Any sound of its final slump is drowned by the deafening noise of an island suspending itself over the world with four scaly, sediment-coated legs. A wrinkled, beaked head wiggles out of the floating isle. Clumps of earth crash down, burying both the brute and the tree. The Intractable hisses, sending a shiver through all survivors.
When night falls, The Intractable becomes a silhouette against stars and the moon, whose craters appear closer than ever. To The Intractable, the sound of all life is an ambient drone. Its sleep was full of the same buzz, punctuated by flashes of novelty, moments in a dream where reality clawed through. A warm burst of guttural shrieks before returning to deep silence; which slowly broke again, at points so close to waking sensation The Intractable could sense itself crawling out of sleep. Yet, what pushed it awake was simply not being able to keep its eyes closed for any longer. Pebbles the size of mountains pour out of The Intractable’s slitted nostrils. Decongested, The Intractable inhales. Flocks of birds have their wings snapped backward and are sucked into its nose. Their claws have nothing to cling onto while swirling into a fiery core. The outside world is one mass of vegetation. Surrounded on all sides by choppy sea. With no other voice loud enough to be distinct, The Intractable takes its first steps out of the hole it’ll leave behind.
The bottoms of The Intractable’s round feet are pronged with spiked callouses. With each step, they dig in, leaving behind massive voids hidden in The Intractable’s shadow. Hooves scatter in the dark, hitting ancient roots on their way down a pit of other warm bodies. Those chasms fill fast. Predators drop on top of prey and survive long enough to gnaw on last bits of weakness. A muscular arm strains every fiber to pull itself back to the eclipsed surface, only to be bashed by an ivory skull. Spirals of water rise. The Intractable moves forward, the only direction its instinct guides it. A leviathan is pulled into a rising whirlpool and given its first glimpse of the world above. It flops out onto land and learns to suffocate. The spirals collapse from their own weight, spilling into pits, resurfacing mass graves. Survivors latch on, wrapping their tails around carcasses drifting through currents. A sharp jaw is filled with muddy water. Insects burst out of their cocoons, their faces half an embryonic pus.
Any creature capable of reaching the top of The Intractable tries. Tiny pincers scale up. Claws dig in. Reaching the top of its island shell, their bodies ease. If they don’t look off the ledge, it appears as if the world in front of them hasn’t changed. A sunny refuge. Leaves grind under gunk-filled molars. Wings flap, unable to soar to the previous heights due to The Intractable’s pull, but taking flight nonetheless. With its thick ears peering out of thorny bushes, a native burrower hears unfamiliar snarls. It tries to escape without being seen, but its torso is squeezed between two coarse paws. Teeth dig in. Mud-smeared tentacles cling to the sides of The Intractable’s feet. The Intractable steps into water, unfazed by woven nets of algae. The sea shakes with unknown pressures. Gills are torn off faces. A fin slams barnacles, destroying black inked depictions of eight armed figures.
Secretions fuse suction cups. A harness of tentacles forms around The Intractable’s head, swinging it back and forth, creating a dust storm as muck is shaken off its snout, revealing a diamond beak. Light is siphoned through its beak, splintering into monochrome bands that shimmer over the bodies and wreckage. Mucilaginous heads wrinkle. A unified thought travels through the chain of command. The pack heaves, trying to steer The Intractable. With one pull, it breaks free. Some plummet to their deaths; others climb up its shell and are stalked by prowlers. The bravest take a plunge inside The Intractable, spreading their gelatinous bodies wide enough to parachute into its belly. Magma churns through shifting chasms of rock. Within a glimpse, bubbles form on their bodies and they burst into plumes of steam. Lava oozes out from the sides of the floating island, running down The Intractable’s legs, sizzling and splattering. Embers whisk up. A blade of grass catches fire. Then another. And another.
In a few ignited steps, The Intractable turns everything below to a puddle of mud. A rumble from its core shakes its shell. The Intractable bends its head, widening its jaw to take a large bite of the world. Valves on the sides of its mouth suck up the stew of mammals and flora and oceans and forests and lakes and rivers and tundras and deserts. The Intractable rips off another chunk of surface, spilling amber liquid, which it slurps up with its long tongue. Skin is torn off the bone of any creature still hiding in lit trees. The planet splits in two. A massive force envelops The Intractable, snuffing flames and cleansing all burnt shrubs off its body. Squirming through space, the reptilian devours every crumb before realizing it has nothing to grasp onto.
The sun opens for an embrace. the intractable oozes magma. Each hot droplet is big enough to fill a river in that place it once slept. They cool in the vacuum and compress into balls that orbit around their former host. Its scales grow gray and stiffen. With a tired moan it softens its movements, allowing the draw of the sun to guide it. This imminent glow is brighter than any light it’d ever seen. To protect its eyes from the sting, the intractable tucks its head inside. Its limbs retreat too. The lava spheres cling to its shell, forming a rocky outer coat welded shut by a million whipping flames.
Inside the sun, the intractable’s shell hardens, squeezing tighter into its vulnerable flesh. The outside sounds like flowing water. In the waves the intractable hears what could be a hiss back. It wants to give chase. Pushing the weight of its tucked leg to the side of its shell, trying to careen it in one direction, only makes that hiss sound louder from the other. After a few tries, the intractable runs out of strength and stops fighting. Warmth makes its eyes heavy. Only for it to be suddenly snuffed out. the intractable’s outer shell, now a polished, spherical orb, is spit out into empty space.
Caressing its own hollowness, the intractable floats. Staying still and staring straight until awareness disappears, an impulse all animals share. There is no sound. All that grounds it in consciousness is an almost imperceptible pulse permeating throughout its body. Without knowing, the intractable glides over the rings of a gas giant. Hovers past the sparkling remnants of dead stars. A cluster of asteroids collide and nudge it back to a sense of agency, but they are demolished to tiny clusters on impact, with the intractable’s path being slightly, yet now inevitably, shifted into the mouth of a black hole.
There, the intractable is split into cubes. They float in a grid along a spiral of energy draining into itself. Images are reflected off each square. the intractable is aware of all of them and each of them at once. Workers scaling beams of half-erect towers. A spray of eggs being released into water. The insides of meat-walled ships. A microbe vibrating before spitting apart. Frail wrists and labored gasps. These are visions the intractable doesn’t have words to describe nor the capacity to understand, but what it can intuit is a primal importance, peace, and acceptance. This feeling binds it back together into one spherical shape when it reaches the point of a most perfect vacuum, where even the darkness of its shell becomes more voracious and, for a blink, its bond to life is broken.
What follows is a moment that lingers after the end. Against a backdrop of nothingness, the intractable looks as though it is not in motion. Swaddled inside its polished shell, confined to a newer, deeper sleep, it floats for so long time becomes granular. However, its trajectory has been slowly losing traction. Finally the orb stops, submitting to a crown of purple flames and aligning to circle around it. An asteroid carrying sugars flies past the intractable. A missed opportunity bound to hit eventually.