Creation Myths

I wrote a bunch of creation myths this summer. In the absence of better things to post, here's one of them:

Creation Myths

I.

In the beginning, a heavy point spontaneously emerged in the middle of an infinite nothingness. All the steel in the world was not as heavy as the point. If you wet even an industrial strength paper towel and put the point in the middle of it, the point would plunge through without a moment’s pause. Even the man who won all the world’s world’s strongest man competitions three years running, and all his fellow competitors, could not budge the point with their otherworldly quadriceps muscles.

Then, just as spontaneously as it had come into existence, the point exploded, erupting outward in a widening spiral of matter, speeding toward the edge of the infinite nothingness whenceforth it came. It was so noisy. The spiral slowed at the outermost edges until it moved so imperceptibly that only several billion years of evolutionary ingenuity could produce instruments to measure it. The point became a disintegrated constellation of rocky outcroppings, dangerous gases, and hot fourth states of matter. The infinity of space was being filled with the diffusion of the heavy point, to the point where eventually a fine, weightless mist would cover every bit of space imaginable.

In some places, chemicals converged coincidentally and cells would wriggle and then, after a while, stop wriggling. In some of these places, cell wriggling was abortive. In other places, cells would continue to wriggle in increasingly complicated configurations. In one particular place, maybe in many, chemicals roiled in a thick stew, things crawled out of the stew, gave birth to some things that died and some things that survived outside the stew, and these things gave birth to things that gave birth to things that gave birth ad infinitum to paws, feet, wings, claws. Eventually, one of these things invented synthetic press-on nails that became incorporated into the convoluted mating system of a cluster of bipedal mammals.

Gunpowder was invented. Scientists conclusively determined the speed at which light moves in a vacuum. Constantine drew crosses on the shields of his soldiers and convinced the entire Roman Empire to stop their fanciful imaginations about one set of special fictional non-beings and to develop their fanciful imaginations about another special fictional non-being with a long beard and a beatific confidence in its voice.

The arms of the spiral swung wider and wider, and slower and slower, until it slowed to a stop. With nowhere else to go, the spiral began tucking into itself, like a figure skater accelerating into a spin, pulling in her arms until she is cutting tiny circles into the ice. Meteors smashed rocky outcroppings; hot fourth states of matter extinguished like wet wood campfires. The world’s strongest man drowned in a freshwater wave. Press-on nails burst into powder. Wriggling cells stopped wriggling. The universe spun like a top, then spun itself shut. It condensed into a hard heart, and then a congested nut, and finally, again, into a single heavy point. Everything became quiet. Again, there was an infinite nothingness and a heavy point.

Inside the point was Constantine, crushed into the shields of his soldiers, into the stone of the Milvian Bridge, into the plasma that lit his eyes with a vision of the Lord, into the darkened eyeglass lenses of a history student who had read Roman histories on an undergraduate campus poorly shaded by desiccated elms. Inside the heavy point, inside a half-drunk glass of communion wine, inside the cells of the pointer star, parts of Constantine killed time with everything else, waiting to rupture.