“In the beginning, there was no time, space, energy, or matter, there was perfection.” An offering of flash fiction that ponders the birth of the universe...
by: Frederick Foote
I believe that almost every culture has a creation story. This is a story or stories about how the universe began.
Christianity holds that the universe was created in six days, and God rested on the seventh.
The Big Bang Theory posits that the universe is 13.4 billion years old and was created by a spontaneous expansion of gases.
There is a Fulani (African) story that says the world was created from a drop of milk by Doondari (God).
I think there is a bit of knowledge, wisdom, and humor in most creation stories, as well as misdirection and mischief.
Misdirection and mischief are right up my alley, so here is my creation myth.
In the beginning, there was no time, space, energy, or matter, there was perfection. Perfection was the perfect harmony of all things to the degree that there was nothing. Everything canceled everything else out. Perfection was the absence of everything.
There was no cause-and-effect because there were no effects.
Nothing is the pre-life stage of everything.
Nothing is the birthplace of possibilities.
Among all the balances that held each other in check at the very lowest, smallest, tiniest level below atoms and neurons, quarks and leptons were clumsy.
Clumsy fell out of its rotation, orbit, or sync and became something that is not part of everything. This was awareness.
Every element immediately became aware.
Every element began to explore its relationship to other elements.
There was a primordial scream.
Reality came into being as chaos.
Chaos built the stage for the Big Bang.
Out of chaos came life, time, eternity, space, and matter. And all that follows from those combinations.
Chaos may destroy many things. But it is also the beginning and end of everything and the playground for the production of new things.
I believe I was clumsy, but I don’t think there was anything else I could ever be but clumsy.
You can laugh at me if you want, but I think if you look closely in the looking glass, into the telescope, that is a microscope, and the kaleidoscope, that is a life scope. You may find a little clumsy in you, too. And that makes you a co-creator of the universe.
Don’t look so glum. If we hadn’t been clumsy we wouldn’t even be here.
Frederick K. Foote, Jr. was born in Sacramento, California, and educated in Vienna, Virginia, and northern California. Since 2014 Frederick has published over three hundred stories, poems, and essays, including literary, science fiction, fables, and horror genres. Frederick has published three short story collections, For the Sake of Soul (2015), Crossroads Encounters (2016), and The Maroon Fables and Revelations (2020).
