“So tell us philosopher’s stone, what is the teleology of humanity?”
Jason blazed and fogged-up the library nook. He extended the joint towards the stone, who sat to his right—as was proper during times of war.
The philosopher’s stone pinched the tip of the scorpion joint and took a hit. “We just…we gotta—”
Smoke escaped in bursts with every syllable.
“—come together. Acquire knowledge. Power over this universe. And hope we can redesign it into something that doesn’t suck.”
“Woaaaah,” Matt said. “Why we though? Like, you ain’t even human, bro, you’re just a magical rock.”
The philosopher’s stone took another deep toke, and exuded a whole cloud of sweet Summer-Carolina Gold OG, enveloping the shelves with pure skunk.
“We are all guests of spaceship Earth, my dude. The universe would no sooner fuck you in the ass than me.”
The philosopher’s stone offered the joint to Matt, who took it without looking. “That’s pretty brutal, bro.”
The door to the library blew open. A group of crazed geophiles—their visages betraying an obvious ignorance of the importance of consent—fixed their eyes upon the stone.
It wept, for it knew the ways of the world.
— Bastian Espada
The procession marched along a smoldering maize field. The stubble was set ablaze in early March to get the soil ready for sowing. The townsfolk of Güémez—some eager for further intellectual stimulation, some not having anything better to do—had exited the temple and gone to see the man who sat on a rock.
As was often the case on Sundays, on that far edge of the field, the man found himself surrounded by a crowd eager to be amused by his ramblings—and the ensuing heckling.
“We do what we do ‘cause we are what we are. We are what we are ‘cause we do what we do,” he said.
Eager faces followed the crane-mounted camera as it swept above their heads. They extended their arms into the air as if wanting to touch the people on the other side of the television screen. Merry jazz flooded the studio as strobing lights lit the stage—at the center of which, a pair of men standing behind a kitchen counter smiled and waved at the noisy audience.
“Welcome everybody! Welcome back to your favorite cooking show,” the host—a man in his fifties wearing too much makeup—said. “You see who’s standing right next to me, don’t you?”
To boredom:
While staring at the ceiling,
Lost in mindless peering,
To me came the strangest idea:
The notion—
that reality is a tad bit too real.
— Bastian Espada
“What the hell are you doing, you stupid phone?” I ask.
The phone doesn’t answer.
It never does.
— Bastian Espada
“You mean once the war begins?” The man put his cigar down. “It’ll be the usual.”
His assistant pushed a stack of documents across the table. Their well-suited interlocutor skimmed through the papers and grinned.
The man smirked, then leaned forward. “The rich will hide, the young will die, and the poors will eat their boots. From our dead we’ll raise martyrs and saviors; from theirs, villains and traitors. Eventually, we’ll make all combatants into heroes. And once they’ve finished weeping…”
The man picked his cigar back up.
“We’ll fuck their widows.”
— Bastian Espada
“So that’s the schedule for the day. It rained a lot yesterday so we are bound to find plenty of ’em. Those of you that have never been mushroom hunting before, please remember to be extra careful. Do not eat any mushrooms that haven’t been deemed safe to eat by me or any of the other guides and do not engage with the mushrooms on your own. That’s all there is to it, have fun!”
The group cheered as they cocked their shotguns.
A few paces away Princess Peach—huddled behind a fallen log—observed the group. “I’ll distract them,” she said to her companions. “Go get Mario.”
— Bastian Espada
A group of sentient role-playing video game characters discussed the nature of their universe.
“Absolute rubbish!” the studious orc said. “If we truly lived inside an incomprehensibly large mana crystal, we would be seeing elemental flares annihilating each other at the micro-pixel scale.”
“Any mana crystal dense enough to contain an entire reality within it would have to be green! We should expect everything to be tinted green! And yet…” the wyvern scholar waved his hand through the air.
“One requires little else to dismiss the idea, than to point to the most obvious obstacle for the emergence of life in such a universe,” the half-elf, half-giantess professor said, “any living thing that managed to come into existence would be immediately afflicted by mana sickness, driving it to proactive self-destruction.”
The stubborn gnome frowned and pouted. “You lot just don’t have any imagination!” he said, pointing a finger at each of his detractors.
The studious orc wiped his glasses on the cuff of his robe, then sighed. “Enough, Romulus. You need to face the fact that there just isn’t any good evide—”
Timmy shut off his PC.
— Bastian Espada
I snuck upon a sleeping lion and bit the underside of its neck — all so that both it and I could come to understand how it feels.
It was a bad idea, a bad idea indeed.
— Bastian Espada
An elder fish once spoke of watery truths to many a young egg that on the eve did hatch:
“A worm whose jiggle does not entice,
That squirms but does not dance,
Whose spirit beckons not,
Steer clear! Clear at any cost,
For plenty a fish’s life ma—”
A net entrapped all living things in the general vicinity— and swept them up.
— Bastian Espada