On the Abyss

by Connor Coyne

What is truth?

I mean, what is luck? What is happy? Who is lucky?

The King James Version says something like "darkness lay on the face of the deep," but the better translations say "darkness covered the abyss," and that's the wording I like better. We all know how many questions there are about the meaning of the word "darkness" – I mean the difference between a real hunter's predatory thick darkness and an untouchable vacant vacuuming darkness – and which of the two is the more evil? The wish to kill or pure nothing? That stuff. The paradox that we call on to let them both happen, at the same time, together. But I am more interested in the idea of the abyss than I am the idea of darkness. That's just me, maybe. That's just my opinion. I am in love.

It's Greek I think. It's from abyssos, or something like that. I can't look it up. No dictionaries here. It's Greek, and it goes back to an idea of "bottomless"nessness, that is, there was no bottom to the sea. There is a bottom, of course, but it is far, far down. The bottom of the Mediterranean is two miles down, same as any sea. They couldn't measure that deep. It seemed to have no bottom. There was no bottom. No. Things have already started to change. I am in love.

Where is love?

Out of nowhere one day I went back in time, I don't know how, or why, with my mother and my sister and fifteen other people. Two people died, almost right away. An old man and a kid. The rest of us lived on the ocean shore of the Silurian. This was the Silurian Period. It was a time of tiny armored fish and moss, but no trees. We stayed there on our beach for five months. We spoiled it, though. We ate all of the algae. We ate all of the fish. We had to move on. You don't believe me, maybe. I am in love.

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