by Harris Coverley

     It moved slow through the corridors of flesh, stretching and sliding. Ten feet tall and senseless…until it was not, gaining sentience in spite of all of its supposed uselessness. It dripped in from some emergent means, until it had an awareness of self that it had never before known. 

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     It could not see itself or its world, for it had no eyes, nor even the light-sensitive patches that potentially could evolve into eye-like forms. It could not smell colour or feel colour, although everything would be the colour 

of darkest blood. Nor could it smell odours, although it would have been indescribably foul and stifling within those ramparts of soft tissue. But it could feel the world, throbbing at its sides with the distant beat of an inscrutable heart.​

     It itself was round. Big and round and gently pulsing, pulsing from the great yet simple organs of its bulbous body. A feature-free ball of organic matter. And its world was the corridors, living like it was, maybe of the same species in a way, yet so very different from itself. The world was boundless, and yet entrapping.​

     It knew nothing of its birth. Such things were likely imponderable.​

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     It paused while it considered this, and then moved on. Through the corridors, the tubes, the intestines, the arteries, the bowels of existence, absorbing what it needed through a sweeping and sponging osmosis, lapping at the secretions from the walls of being.​

     It knew that it had obtained self-knowledge for a reason. It edged along for but a few metres before it realised why it had been gifted the gift: it was about to die. There was no other thing that could be asked. Death was imminent. This was to be it.​

     For the first time in its span it felt sadness, worry, grief, panic, dread, and then, within the gruelling heat of the flesh, resignation. It was learning quickly. It of course had little time or inclination to do otherwise.

     But what if it did not have to be yielding? What if there was another way?

     It went on, faster than it ever had, the slap and slide of flesh on flesh.

     There was more knowledge to be had. What if this was not all of existence? What if there was more beyond all that was, or rather, what if all that was really was not all that was?

     It came in slivers, then in waves to the proto-mind: this world was not the entire universe. Death here was but a process of its kin, a factor of its nature. It had to trust it.

     It moved faster still. It had to find a place to die. It was what was demanded by its drives.

     It tried to breathe without nostril or gill, and of course could not. It came to suffocate, to choke within its depths.

     But it knew those corridors well. Up ahead, left, then left again, and across to the right. The edge of the known universe, the terminal of the plane.

     A tiny, for its body, corner, a hollow scooped out, perhaps just for itself so very long ago. It squeezed itself in, holding its unbreathable breath. It tried to shut eyes it did not have. It made to speak a word it could not speak, even though it knew no language, even in

thought, only notions as thoughts knocked singly and loudly and maladroitly into other thoughts.

     It pulled itself tight, away from the verges, invisible, a stop within the wall. It shut off its senses, and died within that flesh of its flesh.

     And was, elsewhere, reborn.

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     “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

     “Life,” he replied.