The Big Bang

F3 cycle 28
Prompt: RANDOM FIRST SENTENCE – Following these rules, find your first sentence: grab the book closest to you right now. Open to pg. 70. Choose the 7th sentence. (Book: 'Teamwork is an Individual Skill')
Genre: Open, though Hardboiled, noir, crime action would be nice.
Word Count: Under 700 words (wordcount: 602 words)
Deadline: Thursday, April 28, 2011 4:30 pm EST

A perspective is neither an attempt to argue nor an attempt to resolve a position. It just is. You see the world through the distorting filter of your own biases, illusions, and misconceptions. Your life is a series of lies you tell yourself to shield your fragile psyche from the overwhelming truth that your life, and those of the teeming billions overrunning the planet in a breakneck race into oblivion, will amount to nothing and the universe will not mourn the passing of a being so insignificant and fleeting. And the universe knows from insignificant and fleeting. If it had the means to articulate to you the life forms it has seen emerge triumphant from some terrestrial sludge pit only to shuffle off into celestial twilight in the cosmic blink of an eye...well, it would be a long list. But the universe cannot speak to you. Not in ways you will understand. But through all those small coincidences and creeping déjà vu, something is surely sending a message.

These are the thoughts that occupy the mind of a man who has spent his insignificant and fleeting lifetime watching for the signs. He sees them now, everywhere. There is no escaping them. And the endless babble of people, all around him. There is no escaping that, either. Each individual a maelstrom of thought and feeling - convinced that they, themselves alone, hold the fabric of everything that is together by their mere existence. The watcher scoffs and derides them. They are blind, seeing nothing. He sees everything. And he waits.

In a tidy, sparsely furnished house with a well kept yard that could be in any neighborhood almost anywhere at all, there sits a book. Overly large, with a hand-tooled leather binding worn soft and supple by repeated contact and pages that over time have been removed and reordered and added to, this book is called The Book of All Things. The writing on the pages is precise, if slightly cramped, in an old fashioned script that no one ever learns anymore. This is a chronicle of the signs. The watcher keeps the chronicle. And he waits.

In the news, a report of a catastrophic earthquake. Floods. Drought. These are noted in The Book of All Things. Time ticks by. Out in the street, in this neighborhood that could be almost anywhere at all, buses and garbage trucks rumble past. The hiss of sprinklers as neighbors express their vanity and aspirations of social status through landscaping begins, abates. Children play. The days pass. The watcher lives, breathes, is the book, as he is sure that events are aligning for the ultimate something. What that might be, the universe is not ready to make clear. He can’t quite interpret the signs. But he feels it must be getting closer. And so, he waits.

And then, one day, the watcher no longer watches. The chronicle sits, unattended. Family the man had not seen for some time and might have barely remembered he had, come and claim what may be taken of his meager possessions. They marvel at the book. Some express concern, cry “If we had only known!”, and then, absolved of their guilt, proceed to go about their insignificant and fleeting lives. The Book of All Things, the work of a lifetime, created at the urging of the pulse of the cosmos, sits in a dumpster, perceived as trash. The watcher cannot know any of this. He has become one with the fabric of the universe once again, free of all of biases, illusions and misconceptions. 

And somewhere, another watches the signs. And waits.