"Mustard"

     It was still the dawn of time. The sky was stilly muddy with unwrit beginnings and the smeary sperm of angels, archangels, demi-angels, sub-angels, etc. Cold spires of ice scratched the sky with God's calligraphic goodbye.

     Time bled on, slow, turgid, stubborn.

    

     The sky screamed as a lawnmower built of clouds tore across it. Lacerations in the blue canvas revealed gleaming night. Stars like eyes of vengeance stared through and down.

     Elsewhere, near Galactic Center, the Oracle of All Meat began to cry tears of blood--heavy, thick, black blood, the seed of a fallen race.

     Hands of clay stitched together by filaments of stardust shaped with unearthly care the first edenlike breast. Although pure sand--silica and other distillates of time--the breast seemed almost to throb with inner life. The sandskin almost held the tint of true flesh. Almost, but not quite.

     Somewhere on a campus of higher learning on the twilit edge of a pure sand sea they say the last plastic bottle to survive the blitz is on display in a lucite case, under guards and lights and sensors--

     Just squint, you can read the label, or what's left of it.

Finis.