Agma alighted on a bromeliad. Tepid afternoon sunlight dappled the crimson flower. Agma’s wings were yellow with an orange tint around deep black contours. Agma liked to speckle the scenery with her colors. Yellow wings on vibrant crimson bromeliad petals. Yellow on the pale, rose-gray bark of the maple tree. Yellow against a chilled, blue winter sky.
It was fun to be here and there. Hello, she thought. Hello, tiny dogwood leaves. Hello, colorful water stones by the creek. Hello, skunk hiding in the spring beauty patch.
For fun, she made a mental list of words she enjoyed today: Hue. Imbue. Distill. Chrysalis. Chrysanthemum. Ameliorate. Inhabit. Devote. Placid. Nestling. Ebb. Boorish. Shattered. She sang to herself wistfully, “I wish I had a river so long, I would teach my feet to fly.”
She alighted on an inviting rock formation, a jutting pyramidal mass of aggregated mineraloid matter amidst a soft-rolling sea of grass. Yellow on mineral brown, walnut and raw umber.
She thought about joy. What it means to feel joy. How much joy was too much? Was it healthy to feel an immense amount of joy for prolonged periods of time? Must we always have an equal balance of joy and sorrow in our lives? If one learns to embrace sorrow, and welcome it with open arms and a smile, will it continue to be sorrow or transform into a beautiful indefinable emotion, more akin to watching rain falling on the ocean than actual melancholy? Can we truly know ourselves until we’re faced with a storm the likes of which we’ve never encountered? Is it better to know ourselves or to live in self-satisfied delusion? Is there such a thing as a self? If I’m in continuous transformation, Agma thought, and other beings perceive me, and I care about how other beings perceive me, and I create different selves for each being I encounter, then who is the true me? Is it an amalgam of all the different faces I’ve worn, or is the individual self a convenient illusion? Are we a collection of selves in the same way we are a collection of molecules? If so, which selves—if any—are in control? Is this body a vehicle with infinite steering wheels? Is every self a pilot, guiding the body in the direction of its particular desires and hopes at the moment they are revealed?
She came upon a field of lavender. She swam in delight among the gentle sway of the flowers. She loved lavender like she loved the moon, and watching her shadow flickering beneath her in the crisp purple glow of the night. As a being of yellow and orange, she felt complemented by cool hues. She and the color blue were lovers, and the moonlight was the music that serenaded their romance. Lavender is intoxicating and her wings seemed to beat on their own. She dipped and she twirled. Paused and fluttered. I am the lavender field. I am the feeling of wellbeing in the shade of the apricot tree. I am citrusy pink. I am a fit of joy. Lavender made Agma euphoric. She wanted to enjoy every moment of this place. Quickly enough, she was done. Alighted on a petal, finished with her dance, she carefully exercised opening and closing her wings to let the feverish exhilaration pass.
Inside of Agma there was a large circular hall made of stone. Countless pillars held up the grand, polished ceiling and in the corners between them the shadows trembled with the voices of men gathered in the center of the hall. In the center of the hall there was a congregation; a circular stone table in the shape of a ring, around which sat two dozen gray-faced men wearing long, tattered robes. They all had tired eyes and consternation in their shoulders.
Every day, they argued, though in this hall the light never changed, so the passing of time was undiscovered to them. It was sparsely lit, but the sources of light seemed always to be hidden behind the pillars, no matter where you stood. These men, who called themselves the Findar, never stood up, never did anything but sit in their chairs, with their arms rested on the table in front of them, and argue.
The topic of their great, unending quarrel was always the same: The impending doom they all faced, and how to avoid it. When Agma beat her wings in the outside world, the stone walls of the great hall shook as if under the stress of a dozen concomitant earthquakes. Although they had held fast for as long as the Findar could remember, it was their understanding that eventually not even the soundest of fortresses could sustain such unrelenting structural disturbance. This sanctum would inevitably collapse onto their powerless congregation.
To prevent this, they shouted at each other different plans to force the cessation of these great disturbances. They formed investigative committees, which made great presentations out of mostly insufficient findings. They participated in structured debates. They thought, they wrote, they spoke, they shouted and they voted.
They had scoured every inch of the walls and floor and found no openings or cracks of any kind. In fact, there was no visible sign of damage to the internal structure of the room, which many times prompted a meek, outlier suggestion that the group give up altogether. These ideas were always unappreciated and quickly discarded. It never took long before the cacophonous rumbling of Agma’s wing beating, amplified by the circular nature of the hall, sent them all into a fit of exasperated bickering once more.
Although they had not yet come up with a solution for their predicament in all the time they had existed, they shared the sentiment of not wanting to die buried and suffocated, and felt compelled to continue their great argument in the hopes that one day their results were changed.
Since they could not come up with a solution, they had developed the habit of pausing their debating every so often to pray. One of them would request a moment of prayer, and everyone would consent. They became silent and closed their eyes. Inside their minds they prayed. Their prayers had different wording, but mostly sounded like this: “Please, stop the shaking.” None of them had a specific entity they were praying to, although one could argue the deity they were namelessly calling upon was, in fact, Agma.
Agma had no idea these men lived inside her and whether or not she was able to sense that she was being prayed to is very difficult to discern. Agma continued her casual flitting, flipping and twirling and enjoyed her life. She was always on the lookout for a pretty Hydrangea.
The Findars tried everything they could think of. They banged their fists against the walls, albeit not too aggressively for fear of causing the very disaster they sought to avoid. They sang a low-pitched hum in unison, hoping for some effect. They stamped their feet on the ground together, creating a loud rumbling that was meant as a message to the outside world. Mostly, they argued. They argued about what might be causing the disturbances. They sometimes assumed (correctly) that the world outside was full of giants, and wondered why the giants were beating on the walls of their home. They discussed the possibility that they had all gone insane, and that the roaring was a shared auditory hallucination. They argued about who should be the judges in their orchestrated debates. They argued about anything they could, and they always paused for prayer.
The Findar who repeatedly invoked the hallucination theory was called Findar. Findar did not bring this idea forth out of mere exhaustion of more probable scenarios; he truly believed this was their situation. He believed the group was experiencing a sort of mass hysteria which led them to jointly experience a fictional, never-ending demise that would never cease.
He wondered about time, or rather its lack of existence inside this vault. He wondered about the world outside, and how they could exist in here without any sort of exchange with the outside world except for the earthquakes. His conclusion was that they must have once belonged to a different universe, one in which the passage of time was noticeable, tangible, and their minds had somehow been suspended from this universe, and placed into an artificial situation.
In his understanding, this reality was impossible, and it was rather pointless to even dwell on. There must have been an error at some point during a sequential history of events that created an unprogrammed closed loop: this hall. That was probably why their table was shaped like a ring; it was an effect of the glitch. He believed at some point this table had stretched out forever; beyond the stone hall, beyond this dimly-lit gray encasing that was their entire world.
He spent hours in silence, sitting at his spot while the others considered today’s topics of deliberation, thinking about other worlds. He imagined a table that ran in a straight line, that curved in spirals, or turned in ninety degree angles. The imaginary table rested on materials other than stone, and was surrounded by colorful pillars of all sizes and shapes. Sometimes there were no pillars at all. He imagined people sitting on both sides of the table, looking into each other’s eyes. People wholly unlike himself and the Findars. People with green skin and yellow eyes. People with long blue hair who had led lives that ran from one point to the next, full of change, full of stories.
In the few times that Findar had received an audience from the others to speak about these ideas they were unanimously discredited and discarded. He realized the others could not hold the concept of a different reality in their minds. All they knew was this room and this thunder.
So, he became the most silent of them; introspective, always a dreamy cloud covering his eyes. He piped up only when their lucubrations became so convoluted as to require sharp vivication. It’s all just a dream. It must be. There’s no logic to our existence. This must be a shared hallucination, a hologram or a simulation. A synaptic malfunction, accidental or otherwise.
They had accepted his role in sobering the group. His prompts were invariably met with eye-rolls and guffaws, but when he spoke the group reconvened. He’s right, our lucubrations had indeed become fanciful and ridiculous, let us be serious now. Let us pray.
One day, Agma was delighted that she had made a new friend. A young rapscallion canine chased her playfully around a meadow for a quarter of an hour around piles of fallen golden brown leaves of autumn. This puppy took absolute care to enact an adventurous chase full of claws and jaws, without actually touching or harming Agma in any way. Their rambunction and play were contagious and Agma was out of breath when they finally parted ways. As she alighted on the vines of a wild grape tree, she wondered if this puppy was still thinking of her too.
That is when Agma stopped. Her wings stopped beating. Her legs were frozen in place. Her eyes stopped moving and her thoughts and feelings ceased completely. Although her body was still there, a motionless golden flower shape on the greenery beholden, she was gone.
Inside the stony hall, the Findar were praying. This had been a particularly deep and meditative prayer and several of them were achieving levels of concentration they had never known themselves able to. It took them some time to realize what had happened; the stillness which had arrived.
As the realization crept slowly from one to the other, they all began to panic. Most of them tentatively let themselves postulate that their praying had worked, that they had done it. They had realized their lives’ work. The few that didn’t believe this was possible (including Findar) did not allow themselves to open their eyes and stop praying. They did not want to be held responsible in case the disturbance should return. They all remained perfectly still, with eyes closed, and continued their meditation.
Agma’s wings beat no longer. Practically, this meant that this particular meadow she had inhabited for the past few days was now without. Without a slight, imperceptible breeze. Without one nectar drinker and with one fewer menu item for birds, lizards, dragonflies, frogs and spiders of the area. The lack of that slight breeze caused a minuscule change in the air patterns of that region.
A tiny amount of warm air replaced the spot where a little bit of cold, butterfly-wing air was going to be. This warm air pushed against another formation of cool air that was not expecting its presence. All over the skies, tiny pockets of air were shifting to accommodate this irregularity, and it began to rain in several locations where it would not have, had Agma’s wings still been aflutter.
The abrupt appearance of rain at this time in autumn caused a short lived burst of life from seeds and plants in the area that had either began to go dormant or had not had access to water in the right conditions during the summer. Because of this artificial springtime, a pack of coyotes decided to relocate to this area, to make a meal of the rodents and other small animals that had suddenly reappeared.
The displacement of animals caused by the cessation of Agma’s life never ended. As some found shelter where they did not expect to, others were forced to move out, or were consumed en masse. Even though there was a widespread desire for equilibrium of the environments and their inhabitants, the mysterious interruption of Agma’s life force could not be undone. The pockets of air could not be pushed back, the autumnal rain could not be reversed and the animal migration had permanent effects.
The entire global ecosystem collapsed. The air was filled with methane and 96% of living species were lost. A handful of pioneer organisms were left over, with the fate of all life resting on their ability for survival. Since they were mostly lichen and algae specimens, they were used to this kind of pressure. After a dozen million years, one could say they had done a pretty good job of recolonizing what had become a pretty barren planet.