I:


In the beginning,
from the dark, gaseous unrest bloomed a single idea, known as "hope".
With this idea, the darkness spun circles in the night, peaceably forging gems carbonaceous and bright,
colluding rocky terra,
and sweeping across the ether, through eons on the wings of expectation.
There was no substance and no timbre.
Only the shining singularity.





II:

In the evening, between the rocky cold and the dry plains, a car would lumber through the only neighborhood within the thousand acres of the abandoned tessellated construct.
In the distance was always the Sand Montana, an illusion too far to ever be reached, though fools on foot had given their lives for it. Coated in shadow against the waning sun, it would forever be the edge beyond which nothing was known.
Slowly, over steel cables and wooden debris that littered the long gravel pathway, the car made its halt. A delivery of warm bread was set down in the middle of the road,

and the children peered out as it was colored by little neon lights flickering in the houses of midwinter.