Rocks

None of us even knew God had been dying this whole time until we got the news He was dead. A flash mob forced an old Jew to climb a tree and chirp like a bird. I was inside, tinkering with a machine I’d built for testing the concept that rocks communicate with each other. Despite a series of less than successful field trials, I wasn’t ready to say yet whether it was the machine or the concept that was flawed. I removed the outer casing, replaced the circuit board. A choir on the classical music station was singing something John Milton wrote when he was going blind.

 

 A Short Musical Interlude

The piano was already burning on the white sand beach when the virtuoso sat down to play. On the boardwalk, couples of all classes and ages began to twirl to the music. Even the undercover angels watching from a discreet distance tapped their feet. Just then an olive drab van accessorized like a mobile gas chamber screeched into the parking lot. As if that were some sort of signal, the universe suddenly disclosed itself – one stray black shoe lying at a precipitous angle at the edge of a mass grave.