Iglesia ………………………….Episode Five

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(Last weeks episode)

She finished her flakes, did the dishes, and poured the rest of the coffee into her Teenage Mutant Ninja travel cup. She went to the wall safe and loaded up her belt and her bag and her boots with the tools of her trade. Since their surveillance of Tan’s henchmen was over, she was headed downtown to HQ to fill out paper work and wait for her next assignment. At least it was warm. She grabbed her shades and her car keys and headed out the plastic front door.

Ten million years ago, give or take, a Winnebago sized rock fell free from its orbit in the asteroid belt and started a new and exciting journey. Well. An exciting journey for a rock. Touring the Solar system as it pursued an explicitly non-meandering path, but still dancing, as much as a rock can dance, through cold black space in time and in tune to the siren square dance call of the Sun’s gravitas. Other rocks and such had gravity, the sun had gravitas, a bright doughty gravitas, considering how unexceptional a star it was, compared to all the other stars especially. As is true for all of us in life, the path of the Winnebago size rock to its ultimate destination was not straight or true.

It had once been part of a larger rock, until its path brought that rock into contact and conflict with another. Now apparently free to find its own path, it was still swayed and redirected by every other body it came close enough to relate to, their respective gravitational fields entwining and influencing each others movements and directions for the time that they were close enough together to be of any real importance to each other. The Winnebago sized rock met and danced with and communicated and influenced and was influenced by other rocks and asteroids and moons and planets, each encounter changing it subtly, each meeting changing both bodies orbits and destinations, if even an infinitesimal amount. Each and every small or large entity of whatever shape it came close to changed it permanently, effortlessly and irrevocably.

And….pulling back and looking from afar, one could see indeed how each and every one of the billions of rocks and asteroids and planets and moons affected each and every other one of the rocks and asteroids and planets and moons….all in their own gravity field, and all in each others gravity fields as well, so that even the movement of one rock way over here effected that other rock way over there, sooner or later. And all of them dancing together in a perfect (for rocks) sphere around our doughty Sun. All of them in a symphony of movement, with only a huge and fiercely and steadily burning ball of flaming white hot hydrogen as their conductor, apparently.

One day, the Winnebago sized rock had yet another encounter that changed its direction, just as had happened many, many times before, when it came to close to yet another moon. The Winnebago sized rock was very, very old after all, as old as anything…that matter, made at the beginning of time. It’s jaunty and refreshingly new direction put it on a course that then led it then eventually to collide with a football stadium sized rock…and now it was a Volkswagen sized rock. It didn’t notice, really. This new development in its circumstances eventually led it to fall into the gravity well of a big blue planet.

She checked her hair in the mirror and left the house, putting her bag down to lock the door ….she realized she had left he coffee on the counter.

The Volkswagen sized rock hit the atmosphere of the big blue planet and changed direction one last time….and it began to burn. And shrink. Ablation is a bitch.

She retrieved her coffee cup and went back outside and locked the door, picked up her bag and turned and headed to her car. She bent over and unplugged it and stood back up just in time for the now pinhead sized rock to pass at a slight but distinct angle through the her brain and heart and guts and bones and exit her body through the bottom of her right foot. It finally burned up in the earth below the sidewalk….thus ending its journey.

She died instantly and painlessly.

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(Tune in on Tuesday at Midnight for the next exciting episode!)