December 8th, 2024
Okay, so maybe this isn't a short story in the narrative sense. It's more of a tiny little exploration of an idea and setting. But I thought it was neat. The animal lovers among you may have already gleaned this from the title, but the setting of this piece is a captive colony of Porcellio scaber isopods. I myself have a pet P. scaber colony, and they are fascinating little guys.
Some of the ideas in this piece were sorta inspired by this post from Tumblr user Sewerfight. It kinda made me think.
My mother is older than the world. I think that if you are young, there is a temptation not to believe this sort of thing from one’s elders. That the world has always been, and will always be. But I know it to be true. The conviction in her antennae as she signed the words to me could not come from anywhere else but fact.
There was once a great primordial vastness. A terrible everything, where death came down at tremendous speed from the skies, and the food of the earth could deform one’s shell with its unwholesomeness. A place where at times the brightness of the sky could sap away at the very moisture of one’s gills to steal one’s breath. Lives were short, then. If a friend was not in the reach of your antennae, then you could not rest peacefully without wondering if they were already dead.
She does not remember how the world was made, only that she was scared to go. There had been nothing like it ever before. I think to be one of the taken was to be like one of those snatched by swooping death until you realised where you were. Until you realised you were safe, and that you would never be in danger again.
Danger. It has only ever existed in theory to me. I cannot begin to imagine what it felt like.
From the everything, came our precious very little at all. The darkness. The cold, dank moisture. The blessed confines of the earth. Sometimes I look up at the sky, or at the edges of the world, and imagine what it must’ve felt like to be unable to see an end to it. The idea of all of it makes me feel dizzy.
There may be other worlds. Though I haven’t seen them myself, I err of the side of belief, if only because I find the idea appealing. There is a person who said that they once climbed through a hole in the sky, and walked across the top of it to find them. There are three others, they claim. The worlds are the same but the people are different; one kind smooth in the places we are rough, another kind translucent like a race of eternal newborns, and a third who are placid giants with spots along their backs. I imagine what I might say to them sometimes, if I met. What they might say to me. I imagine the worlds lined up so neatly up against one another. I imagine the worldmaker admiring them.
The worldmaker is a mystery to us, mostly. It comes regularly to lift up the sky and gift us with food or water or the removal of our wastes. It does move, as if it were some kind of exceptionally large, strange person. But it communicates nothing of any meaning socially so the consensus is that it is a type of especially convenient weather.
Amongst the taken, the people like my mother, it is believed that the worldmaker loves us. That to give the necessary sustenance to sustain life is an act of love, like the love of the dead when they leave behind their bodies for us to eat. Amongst the generations born in the world, the ones who has never known danger, there is a lot more scepticism.
As I said before, when something has always been there from your point of view, then there is a temptation to think that it always has and always will be. That if the worldmaker really loved us, then it would be amongst us all the times. It would stop the bandit who steals away the food flake you were carrying back to your crevice, or shoo away the nuisance who pesters you while you are taking off the tired old plates from your shell.
This may be my mother’s signs ghosting across my antennae, but I think that safety from the swooping death and the drying effects of the endless sky are enough.
I think that this may be my strangest notion, but sometimes I imagine the worldmaker as something other than a natural force. The great primordial everything did not wholly cease to exist when the world was made; it just ceased to exist for us. The worldmaker is still of that terrible place. To make the world as a place without suffering (or worlds, perhaps?), then the worldmaker could find some release from suffering within itself.
I don’t know.
Anyway. Sometimes when the sky opens up a big piece of carrot falls down. I like carrot.