It Begins
Outside the window of time, a collection of crayon-colored curs squints at the rising moon and opalescent stars.
Blue Dog sets her backbone in the sand and touches her nose to the sky, shaking off skin and pelt to let her specter slip through her ribs, while Red Dog, his eye full of pale rejuvenation, lets his blood-soaked jowls drip into the periwinkles.
They await Yellow Dog. Out of the hushed night she comes bearing her trunk of bones, a femur-fabricated Pandora’s box with no whiff of hope preordained.
Blue Dog, eyes leaving the sky, flickers a hot gaze across her comrades’ shivering haunches and star-gleam fur. Invisible hands of mud and black matter reach down to smear her crown with a token of candor.
“Welcome, dear mates, from your driftings of mist and gossamer. Praise the dawn of creation for coming at last! The circle is renewing, the day begins once again! The first time in a long time, in the first long time we’ve had.” Her eyes radiate like white dwarfs, solar binaries glittering in the darkness.
“The edges of this corporeality are threatening to break loose,” Red Dog warns, turning his head from side to side. “Open the box and begin the chain.”
Yellow Dog sits back on her hips and adjusts her flaxen toes around the smoothed box of bone. “Careful, comrades. We have no knowledge of its contents. What if it spills forth more water than the world could ever hold, and the seas flow past the clouds, suffocating the Earth in an eternal blue death?”
Her companions shiver.
“Maybe,” continues Red Dog, “inside burns an ancient flame that, if released, will feast upon the land like a ravenous dragon, leaving the Earth charred and barren.”
“What if it is a daemon of pestilence and rot,” whispers Blue Dog, “poisoning all living things until the planet shrivels and grows silent?”
“A giant cloud that blocks all sunlight,” Red growls.
“A frigid wind that turns the world to ice!” Yellow cries.
“The end to all creation!” Blue yelps.
Their voices join in cacophony—
“Monsters! Hatred! Evil! BAD BAD BAD!”
—hypothetical horrors streaming from their maws.
“But what…,” Yellow hesitates, ponders... “What if the box contains none of those things, and instead shelters the most pure, benevolent stardust of the universe?”
Red lifts his eyes to the sky. “A pillar of power, to eradicate horror from the galaxy?”
Blue twitches her ears. “A guardian of the cosmos?”
“We’ll never find out unless we open it,” barks Yellow. “Begin the chain. For you know as well as I do that it will start without us, one way or another.”
The three dogs move in close together, ribs gliding through skin, their physical forms starting to shimmer and fade. Bending heads, they gingerly open the lid with their noses.
“That’s all?” Blue and Yellow murmur quizzically, gazing down at a tiny hairless form sleeping inside the box. A human infant.
“Thank the stars,” Red exhales. “We have nothing to fear.”