When the crystal form emerges from the ash, the miner rejoices and drops his pickaxe unceremoniously to free his hands for barely restrained excavation – clawing, wiping, fingernail-cracking rock picking – until the rare earth is but soft loam underfoot and the gem is worked free to be cradled in sooty palms aloft to capture the halogen lamplight and refract the fricative photons across the subterranean tunnel in an array so beautiful all miners in any semblance of proximity hold their breaths and contracted forms in place for a moment to gaze upon the magic that sustains them.
When the first hour of night passes and the moon begins its baleful rise over the seas, the women tremble in the depths with a collective moan and release – oral folds quivering, golden clovers contracting, tentacles curling at the tips – and the ovum sink from the hundreds of bells, sashaying with the current until the one in many meets the white cat hair left behind by a solitary man now leagues away who pauses his swooping rhythm through his aqueous realm with a faint notion, a twinge of communication through the depths that his seed has found a home, and planted inside, the ova enveloping its mate, begins the pain of brooding into the humblest hydroid who knows nothing but to follow its mimetic instructions, adding reproduction upon reproduction until it is not one form in the vast emptiness of motion, but a colony of selves, branching outward, blearily making sense of light and sustenance until the tips of its thin arms grow heavy with thought and, in the second truly catastrophic pain of its awareness, the points snap off and swim freely away, the hydromedusae.
D.S. Chun is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles exploring memory, chaos, and social equality.
