Thrust: A Novel

When I leave them, I enter the great waterways as a carrier, untethered from time and space. Perhaps I was meant to be a sea creature after all, but some slippage, some cosmic rupture, sent me through my mother’s body and spat me out on land like a wave throwing rocks onto the shore. Leaving me something like a marine mammal, or a terrestrial fish, or some creature from a folktale.

I think some people slip time and enter a life wrongly — or, if not wrongly, at least formed differently, mismatched with the material conditions around them. I do not think any god with some odd intention put them where they are. I think that beings emerge and decompose endlessly, like cosmic or oceanic particles, so whoever we are and wherever we were emerges and dissolves endlessly, like all matter and energy.

The innocence of children is the most complex system on the planet. We’ve simply gotten the story wrong, and thus raised legions of wrongly dispatched beings. We pretended that “innocent” meant “without sin.” But that’s not what innocent children born into this world think. No one asks us what we think.

Once I killed a boy to save another. The killing was easy, compared to blind cruelty.

Once, in the river water as it moved toward the sea, I asked Bertrand if he believed in god. He said, “What do you mean by ‘god,’ girl?” I said, “Some divine creator or creators, not wanting to give special privilege to any religious cosmology.”

Bertrand said, “What if I told you there’s a magical teapot between Earth and Mars, a teapot revolving around the sun, and that all life on this planet emerged one day from that teapot, poured out like tea? And what if a whole group of kooks got together and decided to formalize the story of this invisible teapot and, worse, to develop their own set of rules and laws of behavior based on their theories of teapot logic?”

“That just sounds stupid,” I said. “There’s no magical teapot in the sky.”

“Exactly,” Bertrand said. “This god business is absurd. It’s a fiction untethered from matter and energy. It’s got you all mucked up out there. I fear for your species. I always have. You keep looking up or down and inventing all manner of nonsense when everything about existence is neither up nor down, but always in motion and rhythm, all existence connected in waves and cycles and circles. I don’t mean to be rude, but your species is… well, not the smartest shrimp in the sea.