The Uterine Reckoning

This text has seven short pages (each one is its own chapter) and a four-part postscript written by a third-party reviewer. It is a challenge to the reader: Can you make it through this entire text - in one sitting (or standing) - with your linguistically-programmed beliefs intact? Or will you start thinking something new for the first time in ages?

Chapter One: The Blink of God

In the beginning, there was a gaze. Not a stern, omnipotent watchfulness, but the wide-eyed wonder of a child - the curiosity of God. The Earth turned beneath this gaze, lush and trembling with laughter. The rivers unraveled in silver ribbons, the beasts roamed, and the trees whispered to one another in tongues no human ear could name.

But then, the monkeys.

They were clever creatures, these monkeys, their knuckles still muddied from the soil. They cracked bones for marrow and traced patterns in the dust. At first, their stories were harmless - mere echoes of the wind and the wolves, the shadows that flickered beyond the fire’s glow. Their tongues moved not for deceit, but for play.

Yet, soon, the stories grew sharper. They bent the world into words and, in doing so, claimed dominion over it. Names became cages. The sun was no longer a pulsing god-eye; it was the sun. The rivers no longer sang; they were merely the rivers. And the monkeys, entranced by their own invention of names, mistook all their words for the world itself.

God blinked.

It was not a blink of anger, nor even of disappointment. It was the blink of something weary - a flicker of divine indifference. The act of watching had become unbearable. For the stories the monkeys told no longer carried the rhythms of the Earth. They spoke instead of invisible kings, of fathers who formed worlds from dust without mothers. They built towers from symbols and declared themselves creators.

God blinked, and in that instant, the gaze was gone.

Without it, the world remained. The rivers flowed. The trees whispered. The beasts howled their nocturnes to an absent sky. Only the monkeys noticed the void, though they dared not name it. They built temples to distract themselves. They carved commandments into stone, each word sealing the absence more tightly.

But there were some who remembered. The mothers. The daughters. The ones whose hands held the slick weight of newborns and whose bodies pulsed with the rhythms of the moon. They did not seek the absent gaze, for they had never needed it. Their knowing was not written - it was blood, milk, and breath. They whispered stories not to control, but to carry forth the truth of the body.

And so, even as the monkeys raised their towers of paper and stone, the Earth remembered. The uterus remembered.

God did not return. Not yet.

But the gaze waited, somewhere beyond the stories.