The Birth

I wrote this piece last year for a 'micro-short' story competition, with a word limit of 300 words (I think.) For whatever reason they never got back to me, perhaps an email mess-up on my part. 

edit: more recently, this story was printed in the "Bangin' Lemz" zine, along the theme of 'the birth,' along with a poem entitled 'Foetal. Infantile.' 

The Birth

Crawling from planet to planet, so huge that its great haunches kick these spheres out of their gravitational prisons, hurtling them through space until caught by a greater star, throwing the planet around itself infinitesimally; barely noticed by the hulking creature. Sometimes there is the bubbling of evolution in the placid lakes, sometimes the cusp of a civilisation. All discarded by the immortal beast. He had visited these planets once before, barely a fledgling. They presented no promise, not to the in-built preconceptions reeling in the daemon’s many brains.

            The pulsing mass of sensors on the creatures head rotates, receiving and computing radiations and vibrations, chemicals caught on solar winds. It smelt, tasted, heard and saw everything. It witnessed suns crack open and die, unloading hearts in a tragic finale spanning thousands of years. It saw planets grapple into formation, asteroids closing together, some just making it, others gaining too much weight, or not enough. The qualifications are random, undetermined.

            One of the beast’s many sets of wings would propel it, its great arms outstretched for clumps of rock and dust. Its muscles were humongous, its organs monstrous, pumping dark fluids through continent-wide veins, its brains pulsing with instinctual thoughts.

            In one hand it clutches a small moon, with a species nigh on the brink of developing light-sensing cells in their amoebic bodies, so close to breakthrough. The mighty beast decides that this small moon is not worth it; it has failed. It crushes the rock, dust and particles spiralling out carelessly into the orbit of a nearby planet. The beast continues on its journey.

            Its goal comes into view; the green and blue planet. It seemed most promising in those fertile years hence. The beast stills for a moment, its outlandish organs throbbing and pumping in the deeps of space.

            It caresses the planet; observes the crags and falls of its geography, tastes its mineral rich waters. Eventually satisfied, the beast rises, stirred by internal twinges and workings; with twitching limbs it ensnares the planet, and something hatches from its chest, bursting; a strange blue fluid flowing outward, almost a gas; it fills the sky, entrenches the sea and litters the dirt. Soon it has seeped through, dissolved into the very core of the globe.

            The beast seeps off into the dark of space, observing the planet for a time before turning to a planet on the outer cusp of the universe that it had fertilised aeons past.

It will return when its children have grown.