prompt: contempuous, title: one-way street in misc. flash fiction

Played in reverse, Eve pushes a bite up out her throat, wedding it to fruit, lifts it to the knowledge tree’s outreaching branch, watches as it latches to the limb and recedes back into the bud then is usurped into wooden flesh entirely, sealing a covenant between the holy and we mere miniscule profanities for eternity, inviolable by either God or man, paradise forever.

Played in reverse, Prospero stands over rocky cliffs after the passing storm, only to have a great mass of grimoires, staves and wands vomited up from the ocean’s depths into his waiting arms because the age of science has died and only the rise of magics eldritch can guide us to a future less as if a broken ship inside a tempest tossed.

Played in reverse, a bullet flies out of John Lennon’s skull back into the gun of some paranoiac contemptuous bastard, John erases his autograph off a copy of an album, hands it to a shattered spirit who then backs away nervously, fading off into his own missing history.

In reverse, Moses leaves tablets on the mountain for his angry Lord then wanders into wasteland, step by sandaled backpedaling step. In reverse, Trails of Tears return peoples to their homelands instead, boxcar trains remit folks from concentration camps back to the apartments and cottages where they belong. In reverse, Christ drags planks back through that cityscape for His adoptive father to maybe make a really nice chair.

In reverse, we all get to go home.

And yet played in reverse, the lessons all go unlearned, accomplishment undone, knowledge lost, the value of the families and cherished places sponged away in our un-reckoning. In reversal, we can go home again but in doing so, we lose the experiences that would make us want to go back. All other grasses look impossibly green again, perspectives lost in the zero-sum of mayfly life’s causality.

Played in reverse, a salt pillar miraculously becomes Lot’s Wife but even newly humanized, she never gets a name other than “Lot’s Wife”. Our past looks so much better than this now, let alone the scary future because we think we at least know exactly what it was. But yesterday’s as much a mystery as tomorrow, if we are being honest, we are equally occluded in the limitations of our personal perspectives.

Where we come from is as much fantasy as where we’re going, only difference being the clarity with which we envision that fantasy. We think we know what the past looked like, so we want to retreat into the false safety of its surety.

None of this can play in reverse, though, entropy so much more powerful than our desiring, we can either fight it and suffer more in our dreams of return or go into whatever might come next with a sense of awe and hope. What the hell, right? It’s not like we get a choice either way.

So, let’s just go forward together and see what happens.