The Crater
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photo by matthew devries from pexels
Four hundred million years ago. The early Devonian era. Tentacled faced nautiloids hunt the natal waters. The climate begins to moisten, surface temperatures drop. For once, land flora thrives. Invertebrates begin to wriggle their way onto land. Life oozes out of the oceans to cover the barren rocks.
It is into this waking world that a meteor falls, plunging into what was then a primordial sea. It passes through the waters and the soil deposits, shattering the Precambrian shield with such force that the meteor is instantly vaporized. The heat causes the formation of myriad melt rocks and glass. Fleshy, glistening feldspar and jeweled quartz, among other silicates, are formed from the energy of the impact into the autochthonous gneiss of the bedrock.
The crater shimmers: an empty, lidless eye staring back at the sky which birthed it.
Time becomes liquid, ebbing and flowing with its own inscrutable whim. The meteor is trailing fire. Dinosaurs are howling. An immense, black scaffolding of synthetic polymer reaches upwards, piercing the stratosphere. Humanity ascends into the clouds like a line of shoppers on a crowded escalator. A man in heavy plaid surveys the forest from an ancient fire-tower, pointing passed the unseen exodus to a thick column of smoke curling from the old growth. A car pulls up to the lip of the crater. The meteor is striking the earth and then reversing into the sky. A couple alights from the vehicle. Humanity is leaving the planet behind. A dromaeosaur dies in the dust. Elsewhen, the forest is burning.
“I saw her,” says the young woman, leaning against the car. She lights a cigarette and stares out at the crater. Bushy pines wave in the distance. The faint scent of wood smoke is on the breeze. “My aunt Mimi. Right after I found out.”
The young man is peering over the edge at the raw earth below. He says nothing, waits for her to continue.
“I was in the café. I looked up and saw this woman with long hair in a bright yellow sheath dress. Like from the sixties. She was smiling in my direction. I looked around to see if there was anyone else there she could be looking at, but I was alone. When I turned back towards her, she was gone.”
The young man, for a moment, thinks he hears the roaring of flames, but it is only the wind soughing through the needles and leaves around them.
“It wasn’t until the funeral that I saw the picture. Sat on top of her coffin – it was of her when she was a teacher, young. Her hair was so long and beautiful. She was wearing a yellow dress.”
The young man feels a numbing sadness trickle down his spine. How can I be depressed out here, he thinks, among this silence, this empty beauty. He looks towards the sky, yearns to climb up and away from the ground, as the crater shrinks to a dot below him. Leave the world behind. Maybe, or maybe not, she’ll come too.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she says, joining him at the crater’s edge. “But I think time is like a recording device. Sometimes the old tapes overdub this one. She was the same age as me in that picture.”
“Maybe this is the old tape,” he says, gesturing at the landscape, but meaning the two of them. She smokes in silence.
The crater is filled, emptied. The trees dance with the wind and wither with the flames. Deer smoulder in the rubble, an ichthyosaur boils in the sea. The car arrives, the car departs. The tape plays on.
Matt Smith
Matt Smith is a writer and musician from somewhere in eastern Ontario. He enjoys the shadows of things more than the things themselves, loud music, quiet music, children’s artwork, crime, stone tapes and sigils. He writes in order to hallucinate.
