This is a Universe by John Michael

I – Instantaneous Eternity Universe

There is a universe where humans never evolved to tell time, and everything happens all the time and all at once. Every person lives their entire lives for an instantaneous eternity. It’s like they’re binge watching their life stories while playing games on their phones. They miss out on the details, but they get the gist of it. Every once in a while they’ll notice new things: I never caught that joke before, about my kid’s meningitis. Or Haha, you can see the boom mic on the night I lost my virginity. Or Wait I thought he was… So then who… Ohhhh, okay. That makes way more sense, I always wondered why he did that. They are always wondering why who did what because they can’t separate cause and effect, but they never wait in line.

II – Static Infinity Universe

There is a universe where humans evolved to tell time too well, and everything happens all the time and all at once. In this universe, everyone looks like their lifetime, with a fertilized egg in back and wrinkled corpse in front. They look like worms loafing about a 10-dimensional polygon. It is their duty to self-actualize the universe by carving out its whole shape. It will take a very long time. It is static, but it goes on for infinity. Sometimes one of the human-worms will say to another how’d it go today, Tom? and Tom will respond Covered about one percent, Craig and Craig will say how much is one percent of infinity? and they’ll laugh and laugh. Luckily, they have a shortcut. For example, say you are in this universe. You will be going to work one day staring out the window of your car or train or whatever you ride to work and then you will be back in 7th grade getting beat up by Anthony. Except this time you fight back because you know you won’t get into Harvard even without any suspensions and Haley hears about how you held your own and starts IMing you after school. Unfortunately, this means that exact scenario will never actually happen and you will be returned to your commute as if nothing happened. They have never started and they will never finish and they will always need more babies.

III – Time Warehouse Universe

There is a universe where there is no time for humans to evolve to tell, and everything happens all the time and all at once. The universe is composed of universe-sized freeze frames stacked on top of each other like a vast, cosmic warehouse. Everything from the molecules to the planets to the galaxies are totally motionless and no force can possibly move them. Everyone is a statue who has never accomplished anything and where and in what moment of time they get stuck is decided by chaos and more than likely alcohol. There’s a lot of awkwardness in this universe because a husband will go in for a kiss with his wife and she’ll recoil and ask who he is and he’ll be like I’m your husband and she’ll be like I’m not your wife, you’re talking about her and point to herself in one of the stacks in the past or future. Actually she didn’t do that. She can’t move and her husband can’t kiss her. No one said anything or even breathed.

John Michael doesn’t have a Boston accent. He is a New England separatist, a Red Sox diviner, and a writer of prose. His work has appeared in NANO Fiction, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Pom Pom, among others. You can read more of his work at www.johnmichaeltxt.com