Catastrophe Jones

She stands before the house, holding the gold-rimmed urn. The sacred vessel was the only one of its kind, blessed by her family to be unending, to be bottomless, to be everfull. She stands before the house and feels the weight of it, the cold of it, the sweat of it beading up and sliding against her fingertips, dripping against the sandy earth between her sandaled feet. She stands before the house that holds him and his seed. She stands before the house and thinks of his conniving eyes, his grasping hands and the endlessly hungry mouths he brought out of her, the pale, dull eyes that did not know and did not care for mother, of her body but not her flesh. She stands before the house, cradling the vessel like the child that should have been, the child of dark, wet, knowing eyes, the child cut out of her by his grasping hands. She stands before the house, withholding salvation, and watches it burn.

Star-seared flesh crawls over the cityscape; all the inhabitants of the atmodrome have evolved photovoltaic cells inside their skin — no one there needs to eat anymore.  All they do is bake, laying out like ancient lizards on rocks, regenerating the neurons that die off in the hypothermic evenings, waking up long enough to get from wherever they fell asleep to the next bit of warm ground until they find the mating territories, where prime couples rut until moonrise chills the nightscape and leaves them too sluggish for another go-round.

Fuck flying cars; this future is way better.

Grown of hickory, hewn of ivory, cast of bronze, painted and decorated in lavish silks and minerals.  Maybe just slapped together of mud and vine, made of straw and ash and water. It mattered not — all that mattered was the quicksilver in her throat, the breath in her lungs, the fire kindled in her breast.

Clockworks spiraled in her, click-ticking away moments and eons, and her flesh flaked off where joints grew too stiff or were made imperfectly.

And yet, the electric  life of her would not be denied.