The Creation – Clark Williams

March 5, 2019

Without paying attention, I placed the final boulder on the creation. It felt like it happened so fast, when it fact it had taken a little over four centuries. I still hadn’t finished my cup of lemonade. I had grown some extra appendages that would have to be removed–mostly arms, a leg here and there, and some of those little wiggly things. I tossed them into my owner’s beak and she ate them gladly. She was a type of bird.

“What do you like best about the creation?” I asked her.

“Besides the snack at the end?” she joked. We had a good laugh. I noticed my feet, their muscles glistened with sweat. I hadn’t realized how hard I’d been working. “Isn’t it feeding time?” I asked my owner.

“Yes,” she said, extending a flaming olive tree towards me. I ate it with a spoon.

Satisfied, I gave my owner a tour of the creation. “On the summer solstice, you’ll see the sun shining through this crack,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “Do I have to wait so long?”

“It isn’t so long from now,” I replied, running my hands through my curls. “It’s three days from now.” In the meantime I made my master a necklace of a thousand alpacas. When the solstice came, the sunlight made my body warm and beautiful. There were already fingers and toes poking out from my thighs, my groin, and my belly. I yelled the yell of life at the sun for what seemed like a very long time, yet day never turned to night. When I stopped yelling, a tingly lightheadedness came over me. I turned to my master to see her wings folded across her chest. “I thought you would never stop,” she said. I failed her. That was over sixty million years ago now. I still miss her every day.