He had reclined here, at his place of transmutation, on his broad back, alternately baking under the blistering sun and the uncaring moon in endless succession, for these past forty years. His toes had been wetted where they had been carved by hands now dead, forty times now, as the life giving river overflowed its banks to nourish the lands of his children’s children.

Finally, their betters came to anoint him, having decreed that his sacral form would be given life again, under the baking sun. In this way they honored his sacrifice, his willful swimming with the Crocodile on their lowly behalf…

The scaffolding creaked beneath him, a thousand ant-like pairs of hands hauling him aloft upon great lashed trunks of cedar shipped from the Mountains of the Demon…

The feeling of liberation from the all consuming rock from which he had been pried was ethereal in its uplifting way. The strong voices of the overseers, so stridently tiny from this great remove, could be heard directing his placement upon the barge. How he would have liked to see the world pass by as he floated to his final earthbound resting place, where he would stand sentinel for eternity. What a shame that his eyes would not be placed into their carven sockets until journey’s end…

One did not rise from deathless eternity like a mortal, with the blinking of an eye, but like a house, built deliberately from the extracted essence of the earth…

The indigo waters washed over him.

The deeper waters lowered him slowly, as if Lover’s feathered hands did lay him to rest.

The muddy river bottom greeted his hard back like Love had, when she had underwound him and accompanied him beyond…

“Oh, this poor bastard is fucked. Would you look at this shit, Doc.”

“Gabe, where the fuck is the neurologist…”

“You mean he’s not even one of ours? Gunny, get Rosenthal up here—ten minutes ago! Now, you freakin’ jarhead!”

A bright light seemed to open his eye, and open it, and open it, until it was too wide open to see.

He tried to speak and heard nothing but a rattle, then a coughing—he was drowning, apes were chattering, the tireless workmen of Lilliput strapped him Gulliver-like to their wretched beach and wondered witlessly about their laxity of success.

“Where am I?”

He did not hear his voice, indeed could not feel his mouth move. He could not breathe, was dying. A cool wind that tasted like a plastic cup drove through his throat to disappear somewhere below. He inhaled deeply, into a chest that did not seem to be there, with every intention of asking after his tiny tormentors…sleep came unnaturally.

His eye opened of its own accord. A strange pressure pinned his head to something soft even as something that tasted like plastic hugged his face and poured liquid-like air into his dry mouth.

“Bart, Bart, can you hear me Bean?”

It was the voice of his dear sister, June, his only living relation, and this was her month, a hell of a month for him to die.

Her haggard and tear-washed face came into view above him as a pair of female hands steadied her by her shoulders, preventing her from falling forward onto the tubular apparatus he had become.

“Bart, I know this is not what you would want, so I signed. They say you’ll save lives, like seven people—I love…”

She was drowned out by the pump that was forcing hair into his mouth—his forever dry cracking mouth, that had baked under the riverbank sun for ages…

The plastic wind lulled him to sleep with its dreary taste and steady cadence.

It was the silence that woke him, the silence that heralded the end of the plastic breath forced into his infernally dry mouth by the machine that had been his lover since they dragged him up from the river bottom…