The Molecules of George’s Dance
George sat smoking on his time machine for hours
and when he was fully caveman he marvelled at all
the things he’d previously only glanced at. The forest
was no longer just a forest, it was made up of trees,
each tree had thousands of leaves, and a trunk and
branches and there were ants, bugs, birds, squirrels
crawling and living all over them. The ground was
no longer just a forest floor for there were leaves in
all states of decomposition, rocks and boulders,
most with moss and sand and dirt and bugs, always
bugs, and ground squirrels. The ocean was no longer
just an ocean, there were shells and sand and rocks
and fish and crabs and lobsters, and the water could
be droplets or it could be part of the whole ocean
but still it was the same moving, living water. And the
sun was up in the sky but he knew it wasn’t really in
the sky it was ninety-three million miles away but
still it was right there in the sky so hot and bright and
yellow. He stared at the sun and when his eyes hurt
too much he smoked a few more hours on his time
machine and when it was dark he marvelled at how
even though the sun was gone it wasn’t really gone,
it was just the earth had turned and left him with a
secret. He knew everything was the same as it was
but it was different somehow. Somehow the the lack
of sunlight made everything darker but still they
were the same things. He got up to walk about to
marvel at the darkness of all the things he had seen
in the light. He threw his arms up to feel the moist
air and the moths and mosquitos and night beetles
moving in the air and he felt all of these as well as
tree branches and leaves. And everything was moving.
Dancing, he thought. Everything was dancing and he
knew that it sounded pretentious because his last
name was Dance but he also knew that he had heard
that before. The Dance of Life. He was experiencing
the Dance of Life and he threw himself into it. But he
stumbled in the darkness, in the colorless darkness,
and as he fell he marvelled at the few mosquitos or
moths that brushed his face. And when he hit the
ground he marvelled at how hard the ground was,
even though he knew that all matter had vast
distances between each atom relative to the size of
the atom and there is very little actual matter there
or in his head, and he marvelled at how hard the
stones were and how one had weathered into a
coarse array of crystals that ripped his skin. As he
lay there and breathed he felt a little bit of the
smoke of the time machine leave him with each
exhalation and soon he was no longer caveman, he
was fully modern man again and his head hurt. But he
could still marvel at the world about him. After a
journey like that how could he not remember how
marvellous it was? So George lay there in full
marvellation and watched as the bugs and animals
approached him. He knew they weren’t marvelling at
him but he liked to think they were and he marvelled
back at them. A coyote or two came and tugged at his
arms and legs and they didn’t marvel at his clothing
because it prevented them from eating more of him,
at first, anyway. He marvelled at how the colorful
flies and beetles came from miles away and knew
exactly were to find him because some of his very
molecules had already wafted into the air. He
marvelled at his yellow secret and how even without
the smoke of his time machine, time was still playing
tricks on him. The sun seemed to rise and set
erratically but he knew it hadn’t changed, that the
earth was still rotating once almost exactly every
twenty-four hours, that it was just that he was dead
and dancing back into molecules, molecules that
became a part of the beetles and the coyotes and
the earth and the air.