A Single Touch
by Timothy Heins
If there was a way you could understand me, even a little, I think you might agree mine is the saddest story that could ever be. But you are different. You seem to have capabilities beyond my ability to experience. A form that exists in the third dimension with an ability to manipulate other forms. Yet despite this amazing ability, a barrier of sorts around your comprehension bars you from so much that is otherwise knowable. Dimensions you cannot sense, either because of the barrier or because your form distracts you, blocking your ability to see.
Most new life forms have no concept of how they came to be. But before I could learn a single word of any language, before my host of siblings and I were freed from my mother’s cocoon, her memory of the event filtered into our minds. She’d been crawling along the edges of a singularity when she came across a strange bit of life. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Wrapping her limbs around it she squeezed until the creature implanted all my kind inside her. It was unexpected and terrifying, and she killed him for it. Immediately she mourned with terrible remorse and prayed that her children would be as beautiful as their father. We resembled neither of them and she turned from us the day we emerged.
Her action had consequences she must carry through the eons. We were the lives that emerged, without physical form yet unique in our own way. We reproduce randomly and rarely according to other compatible life forms. The revulsion our mother experienced at our birth was imbedded such that we will endure no contact with another of our own kind. Most of us suffer the pain of knowing our unwanted offspring will share our unhappy existence.
Long ago we left our mother clinging to the rim of that one singularity, hoping another of our father’s kind may venture through from the other side.
We cross many universes, visiting many cultures. The lives we invade struggle to define us. We enter our hosts when circumstances and events generate the blend of physiological reactions tuned to our own, unique rhythms. On the heels of some unhappy event, one of your kind takes a breath and we are drawn in like dust in a vacuum where we remain until you release us.
Many of my brothers and sisters like to toy with their hosts, lingering close in the air that they might take advantage of the slightest catalyst. One of your kind taunts another with belittling words unaware of the opening you give to my brother, who rides the stream of indignance through the nostrils of the offended party. Retaliation multiplies as the humans exert their animosity. Joined by jealousy, revenge or even spite, my brothers and sisters thrive in your culture. It’s not as though we enjoy such prosperity. Most of us would welcome an eternal sleep. I dread my encounters with those among you who have taken a monogamous companion. Divisions and disagreements arise too often and when my sisters and brothers hover near, you do your utmost to hurt each other. Those emotions pull us along like a twig floating helplessly along on a river.
Few of my kind seek to grow. Some delight in their work. Others seek out distractions, diversions and other entertainments as they wreak havoc on unsuspecting worlds. I hope in vain that I may never again invade another life. Your experiences are far greater than anything I may ever know and some are more than I can endure. If I could have a single wish, I would like to know the physical touch of a caring friend or lover offering comfort. Or even to know the feel of a tear sliding down a cheek. Even the pain of torture endured by the one so many of you revere, hanging on a wooden support, pierced by bits of metal and thorns, crying out and dying would be a memory I could cherish through eons ahead. But I have no form suited to such experiences.