The prettiest hill in the land was where you’d find one sleeping. She came from the hills in the same way a songbird came from an egg. And yet no one planted her there. There was no frothy collision of a mother and father, nor was there the attendant plopping sound into the dug-away earth of their constellated shavings. A girliath was no fountaining consequence of one thing rubbing against another. She was made in the fashion of a planet or (more wonderful than) a cathedral: a gathering of the elements into a brooding immensity, throbbing to life sacredly amidst the turbulence of rock and water under pressure, amidst the rumbling guts of the world itself deep-down afire. Hers was a geological beginning. She was a fossil with no story to tell, no story of her own: yet contained in that dormant pulse were the stories of all that ever was, of all that lay down in the soil of her making and went to sleep forever. What fed the girliath’s unborn self was a rich yolk of the many dead all mixed up together, the shudder of their last moments: all the butterflies and running creatures and slow to the air pelicans and swamp hens, everything vegetable and flowering, and whatever it was of teeming midgetry that gets blown into the air from sneezing by all those gone-to-god grandmothers and fallen stars, she simmers solemnly to lifelikeness in their juices. Where was ever the reluctance to be involved in her creation? The slugules that crawled out of the ancient seas with the sheen of lightning upon them, did they not come, desirous and deliberate, in their search of the place where she’d one day be made? Was not the damp of that same, same long-ago sea, that which gave the hills their wash-away shape, compelled to salt her loins?Think of the chaos it took to feed our dear girliath. For generous, too, were the ghosts of certain firestorms and the gusts that bore them along with stray dinosaurs, for there it was on these slopes they howled their last, all violence and the great silences in afterglow, and here too the drifting of lost thoughts and abandoned desires coming to ground, all sounds made through the centuries, all the small things that clattered with old rain, all that had fallen and faded and winked out and broken apart was pooled there in a great mixture of nourishment. There was of course no cord, no sac of soup per se, but a soaking absorption into the stones that had arranged themselves, that had been jostled and cracked open and split lengthwise and fused together to make by glorious accident the operatic apely shape of the girliath. They were, these stones, long-time softened to make first her heart that may never beat, and her eyes that may never see.
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
