WORK NOT STRICTLY DONE, BUT NO FURTHER ATTEMPTS WILL BE MADE

First Attempt.

Surprisingly, the sun rose at exactly the time expected. Needless to say, nobody was there to see it rise upon the desiccations of an empty world: streaked with feeble flickering tendrils that, once upon a time, old films suffered. Or dark stages with twitching asides.

The heat was so intense, it would have seemed strange to anyone witnessing this event how small the sun’s orb now appeared, as if the heat itself had shrunk it, rather than the angles of new-fangled incidence.

The streaks seemed like living creatures, waving now and then as tentacles rather than tendrils. Aliens were never plant-like, were they? Aliens were always human-like, even given the fiction of triffids that once plagued imaginations worldwide. But these streaks were not so much life-like as mathematical in the configurations they formed, as if a master mind lay behind the phenomenon. But of course nobody or nothing was there even to see this event, let alone be its master mind.

This first attempt at colonisation of the empty earth thus went unnoticed, fundamentally unrecognised, unrealised even by the colonisers themselves, given the assumption by colonised or coloniser of even the possibility of a concept of colonisation. Concepts needed conceiving, after all. Meanwhile, against the grain of any concept whatsoever, the colonisation of nothing by nobody or vice versa went unrecorded even by these words as well as unrecognised by those reading them.

The sun rose to grow even smaller against the sky’s agony. But it became even hotter, too, judging by the heat burning those not judging it. The deserts were in pain, deserted even by their 'desertness'. Non-being was the greatest pain of all; even inanimate things felt the pain of non-being. Non-being as pain was the most difficult concept of all. Once upon a time, of course, even deserts were part of a life-force, a bio-diversity, a sense of being.

The sun’s tendrils rose, too, besmirching the film that coated past with present, eventually spreading the silhouetted streaks towards a colonisation by contiguous stains.

The first attempt was attempting a last attempt at framing the sun’s theatrical swansong in silent feeble applause. Nothingness would soon swaddle everything come nightfall: so purely dark, the tendrils now simply unseen would then not even be unseen.

http://www.ligotti.net/mp3/Readings/Repository/Work Not Strictly Done - First Attempt.mp3

Above written and published today on this thread.

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