Chapter 1 

I thought it was extraordinary that I could breathe the Earth in a manner of speaking. I was in this vast space and yet I smelled her through and through. I smelled the naturalness from the ice through the molten flows, even the bitter nickel at the core. The overwhelming Earth’s scent, taken together at one time, mixed with sweetness, liquidity, cold air, scales, skins, fruits of every description made me think, for a moment that there were several Earths, parallel and not quite connected but from the same source. One born from the other, who knows. It was a brief sort of hallucination. And I had learned the art of hallucination down on the surface when I walked it like everyone else. I felt like singing, “Oh beautiful thing, a rose among the dead, wherever I go I will never forget; I may even come back to visit from time to time.”

Down on the surface people had always taken for granted the pictures of Earth from astronauts and cameras of every description. Few realized that at the moment they saw those pictures they had moved into another epoch. They had left home for the first time. They then did the dance of leaving and returning until exhausted the game was no longer fun. But we were off the surface for a time and broke her gravitational pull and mulled around a bit to get a taste of the future. The horror of it was that so many began to see the Earth as evil, as the bad home they had escaped and resented being captured on it and lost all interest in doing anything but stomping on it and trying to kill it.

David Eide
January 24, 2014