It was that the next evolution of those who were unmarked rendered them unto animals, partiformed creatures, mutagen beasts, who were once inarguably Men & Women mutated then mutilated by their fellow mutants and by the mutilation, too, that is the passage of unsanctified time, therianthropes to the Gods who had forsaken them as the Gods had once been forsaken themselves; how they were burdened beasts without conscience, asses without soul and that this — with the covenant sundered and the death of the chosen and their rainbow choked by the pollutant clouds and the stars of the sky burnt out and the sands of the sea winded up and away to dust the furthest reaches of the primeval void — this was, it’s been said, only the possible, a small allowance or potentiality, just one way of the many infinite ways in which the world might’ve evolved, essentially hidden, Apocryphal; in the end, which was only yesterday, little more than a misnomer misnamed.
Because this is what Was…how the world would create God as God had created the world, and then how humanity would create itself anew in the image of God in which it was originally created on the sixth day of In the beginning, upon which — now that it’s returned to us forever in the heart of the seventh — the nascent late sun would never dare set for fear of desecrating such Sabbath:
A world in which menschs, as if the season of spring lived within them, sprouted willowy sidelocks, and affixed knobby knotted strands to the fringes of their garments and covered their heads to assert modesty between their thoughts and the heavens that judge; their womenfolk went modestly garbed in dark raiment at the lengths of the ankle and elbow, and they, too, covered their heads and hair but in kerchiefs and wigs, which would tempt without revealing, which would promise without the flirt that fulfills. And maybe — a few scholars argue — this modesty’s to be attributed to the cut of the cold, yet another mode of insulation, remove, as the snow’d begun falling everywhere from Siberia where the snow had always fallen to the unprepared shorelines of what was then the Sodom of Florida, all along the Atlantic littoral from Newport’s Touro to Tampa piling up to the knee, to the waist then the neck depending on which blessing or prayer, whether one was bowing or kneeling, and even in parts known up to the seat of the head, which was covered in hats over yarmulkes above caftans below that would gust like dark ghosts in the wind. Eastern Parkway arose out of the skyline of Brooklyn as a ray of lighted ice, and everywhere had become if not the Pale of Settlement then only a slowbeaten fare away on the subway, which had gone out of service.
Though it wasn’t just the outside of our world that would become changed, not only the apparent, our world of appearances profane and profaning — we were to be changed from the insides, too, our stomachs, our hearts and minds, to be healed from our innards on out. All ate everything on their laden tables and in great measure and with an abundance of lust that left them warmed and wasted at the end of the day, with downy moustaches of oil and fingers that left on the finest of linen a script of interpretive grease. All ate everything, that is, save that that had become forbidden, which substance was shellfish, including the bearded oyster, the hoofed clam, and pork, which is the son of the pig, in addition to any meat whether red or white if ever served with milk or any dairy, and other sundry recipes of nature and woman they would memorize only in order to avoid and so avert the wrath of their intestines and God, Who to have been the image in which mensch was created must have Himself intestines, too, as our clouds are the black of His waste. Treyf products went out of stock, their manufacturers quietly disappeared, went underground, out of business, their bills got forwarded to dummy addresses and lockless P.O. Boxes, held at the office, general delivery, poste restante, then the foods themselves disappeared, were shamed, eventually starved themselves out to their deaths: their internal processes sped up, they wasted away, into nothingness shrinkwrapped, entire refrigerators with magnetized photos floating atop the surface of the deep and slipping, sliding around the moist face of the freezer, also, that judges above or alongside the model depending, sucked themselves into rot; appliances that’d been defiled even while under warranty withered and shrunk, then disappeared into the corners of the ceiling of the kitchen and became nothing more than mere stains on the rug in the den. And then their kinder, O their kinder — they sat at these laden tables of theirs and studied in the mornings then in the afternoons they attended yeshiva at which they were quick with an answer, even quicker with a question…like, Rabbi, what to study again at home and at table set unto the glimmering dawn of evening with the time of its prayer? which they prayed alongside their fathers with fervor and an understanding surpassed only by knowledge, such ardor of souls, then exhausted from their efforts how they’d bring with them the succor of their prayer into bed at night as if a gift of light to the moon, going to sleep as they were told to, when they were told to, without protest or fuss, to dream dreams that were actually themselves prayers that prayed for the sanctification of eternal tomorrows. Sanctiloquently. And everywhere was like this except the state known as Palestein, the firstborn nation of the world, conceived on the night before the first night of creation in the love between God and His bride, Who was God. Lo it was to be a resort state, yea an Eden of decadence, verily a garden of splurge — Paradise Herself for those who would gnash for a weekend or so at the plastic, inflatable tree of the secular and its many hundreds of neonnippled, fructified breasts; sustaining retirees, sunworshippers, and the anonymizing excess of tourists ingathered from repression the world over, who would number in the millions like the stars amid an atmosphere of darkening gloss: as there snow was unacknowledged if not outright forbidden by decree of the skies, and each of its thousands of luxury hotels hosting their millions of deluxe hotelrooms, all suites kitchensinked with jacuzzi, were kept tidy and well lit and ventilated, too, and were daily turned down with a sweet left at the head of the pillow fluffed for the delectation of our sunstruck, sleepsensual pilgrims returned from their days at the sea and its shore whose sand was as pale as the dead though the water, much warmer.