– 1 –

Emily walks past a cow. It’s got a crown. She nods. It moos.

Emily speaks with a snake for a little while.

At the edge of the chaos she kills a fine feathered coat-beast and she puts on a fine feathered coat.

She walks to the waste, with its great sticky trees, and she scuffs the dirt with her toes: here a down arrow. Here a left arrow. Here an up arrow, and here a right.

She sets up a stone, that’s all you need, you don’t need a PlayStation if you’ve learned the dance.

She turns the staring skull to face away.

And this is how the world begins: when the last bit of fear in Emily settles, and the feathers of her coat; and she closes her eyes, and opens them, pure and clean; and she grinds a power button into the dirt, and she presses it, with the horny calloused tip of her right big toe.

Lightning flashes. Thunder rumbles. The world powers on like a PlayStation fan.

“You could die here,” whispers a silver snake. “They could fall on you. The world could bury you alive.”

There’s no turning back now, warns a passing crow.

And the jaguars go around and around the Earth, in the cold and the airless awfulness of space; and even in this last moment of that pain they do not know that an Emily has come.

<< Epilogue

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