CHAPTER ONE

2,016 AD - Bye

The immediate feeling of losing a limb is somehow

different than I imagined. There really isn’t any pain, just a

numbness that starts to feel like a most urgent sense of loss.

You have to reassure yourself that this is in fact happening.

Remove an arm or a leg all at once and I might have been

dismayed. But there’s something oddly satisfying about watching

yourself disintegrate.

It starts with pins and needles on the surface of the

fingertips, but not the sort that bother me at all. It tickles,

just for a moment before steadily disappearing along with each

erased nerve ending. I wiggled my fingers before my eyes to

marvel at their gradual absence until the last edges of my palm

fizzled away.

A shock ran right along the funny bone. Elsewhere I

noticed how it rose up my shins as if I were wading into water.

noticed how it rose up my shins as if I were wading into water.

My knees were taking longer to fade. In the complexity of those

old joints I was quite privileged to realize that the incident

was consuming my tissue at a remarkably consistent pace; the

cartilage, the ligaments, the muscles, and the bone all right

where they should be.

Without extremities I must have looked ridiculous.

There was time enough still to pity my vanity. I was only human

after all, and what now remained of me was genuinely pristine

despite my quadriplegic break down. Things were simpler back

then too, I was undeterred in my dispersal.

Then it hit me in the glands and I was soaked with a

dreadful despair which was far too organic to escape from. I was

discontinued! What wretched hopelessness coiled and writhed up

into my bowels had rendered me completely invalid; as it traced

every bend and curve like a fuse. Was nothing too vital to keep?

How could I possibly lament? It had climbed down my shoulders

and stolen my breath!

My heart beat in frantic protest, flinching too and

froe, desperately punching for any direction out of that ruinous

chest of mine. But it was attached, pounding, imprisoned between

dissolving ribs which were soon to buckle and collapse. With

blood roaring in my ears, I fought against the compulsion to

sigh. That would have been the end of me. Any sign of resistance

would have unequivocally failed. So I set my eyes free with wild

abandon.

With nowhere else to go, they chose to surrender,

rolling back into my head. And the last of me vanished without a

quiver; the very same way that the edges of a paper can burn

without a flame.

The first revelation was that I was somehow still

conscious yet disconnected from my brain. Nothing to fix about

that, it was positively liberating. As human beings, we confine

ourselves to our pathologies and are strung along by our

appetites. Yet, I had finally managed to break these old

shackles of my existence.

That was until I fell; tumbling backwards and up. As

if a tsunami came rushing from unfathomable depths below,

sweeping along with it the debris that was my soul.

I was reoriented by a face. Not the one I’d worn

these previous ninety-three years. It was my father’s visage

which now loomed increasingly before me.

Perhaps it was the notion of familiarity, but I knew

that an entire lifetime of remembrance lay dormant within,

cloudy with such great and dignified purpose. If I had only one

index finger to reach it, I would have inherited his wisdom

through a cosmic blast of perpetual magnitude.

Instead, I found myself to drift farther away; the

entity rotating into a corner and out of sight. That bastion of

secrets lost to time.

Then, to my bewilderment, it was my grandfather who

came into view. Yet more blasphemous is the nature in which he

waned. Growing younger. Reducing to an age I had never seen.

This was no memory.

Grandfather arced beyond my view as father rotated

into place, now much more youthful than before. He was boyish,

and although an air of innocence followed in his wake I felt my

own tremendous sense of regret, as if I were never to return; as

if I had scarcely ever been born at all.

An epiphany struck me upon the occurrence of a third

presence. -A stranger; yet kin. The forehead, the ears were not

unlike my own. And as he sunk away, another took his place -my

father’s withering, infantile essence. It saddened me to know

that he, like myself, no longer had the chance to be.

My gaze returned to see not one but now three -

diagonally aligned by consecutive age, and cascading out as

another three replaced them. I soared within that spiral column,

each wave multiplying until there were dozens all at once.

Interwoven from father to son like ephemeral bricks, fleeting,

by both age and generation; forming an hourglass through which I

spun, and all sands passed through me alone- now that these were

the spirits of my patrilineal ancestors and among them there

were kings.

Bearing most gravely upon me was the age at which

they emerged. Their life expectancies shortening with doomful

velocity. This journey must end now! -Before its tapered

annihilation. Yet I plunge through this silo with no aid to

break my fall.

Had I tried?

From within the eye of that storm, I extended myself,

reaching to touch the edge. Upon contact, I was yanked, slapped

against a wall of surface tension. So potent was the centrifugal

force that it crushed me flat; arms overhead, face turned,

eyelid compressed against my iris. This vortex had been nothing

more than an illusion as it spun away dizzily without me. Like a

storm retreats into heaven.

Light seeped into that iris through a pin hole,

bleeding parts of a world into blurry existence. My knees were

damp. I was caught by the Earth, detritus clutched between my

fingers as I succumbed to vertigo. I felt strong hands grip my

arms around the largest muscles, lugging the weight of my body

upright as I slumped with inability.

Where am I?

“Enti, Enti, get up, come on, you have to run,” a

voice offered me encouragement in a tone and language I had

never heard before. The words were guttural but hushed, almost a

whisper but too hoarse; as if there was a secret that should be

obvious without a hint.

“It’s getting away,” another voice urged in the same

“Leave him. His name can be Sleeping Stone,” two of

the hands released and I felt myself sag, becoming a sole burden

as the sound of feet pattered away.

“Your name is Falling Leaf,” a voice cursed and I was

cast to the ground, crumpling to my hands and knees.

I can’t move. I want to go so badly!

Something childlike inside me yearned. Part of me

seemed broken; the mind, not the muscles. I could sense those

kicking madly. I had wanted to call out, but my tongue flopped

stupidly in my mouth -a feeble, undulating groan. They were

already gone. Then another came upon me and put a large hand on

my back.

“Enti, get up, there is no excuse. You must keep

moving,” this voice was softer than the others, as if it had

been tempered with wisdom ages ago.

The noise of a final, rushing pair of feet stopped

beside me and a much stronger and deeper voice spoke directly

into my heart.

“It is his name sake and he has fallen? If he does

not stand, he has chosen to die.”

And he too was gone.

“Enti, I will stay with you. Where are you injured?”

the tempered voice consoled me.