Enter the Aardvark

Jessica Anthony

Contents (3)

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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First ebook edition: March 2020

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Title page illustration by Louis Jones

ISBN 978-0-316-53613-4

E3-20201123-DA-NF-ORI
E3-20200302-DA-NF-ORI

To Thomas Shearman Anthony
and Susan Terrell Anthony

One of the inevitablest private miseries is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and psalmody from the universal human throat; drowning for the moment all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the same.

—Thomas Carlyle, 1850

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—a whirling mass of vapors is unhinged, shooting through outer space for an infinity until it collides with an ellipsis which does not let go, and after another infinity, the vapors boil into fire clouds, trapped by gravity, turning and returning until the boiling clouds, accepting fate, cool into a single mantle which cracks open in places, and here comes the lava, expanding, but there are also places where the expanding lava cannot escape and so it (the lava) pushes itself against itself and ta-da: mountains, new vapor rises up through the surface of the mantle, hitting the air, and it is all at once water, big water, and this big water hits the hot lava, steam shoots up, pluming, and it’s these watery plumes rising and falling ad nauseam that birth the oceans, and within the oceans are vast trenches paralleled by islands, which are cool rock formations from the hot lava varietals sludging obscenely over the mantle, itself now a whole globe of unmappable graywacke and chert, and the sun shines upon these waters until, in the shallowest banks, atolls and shelves, tumbling in the warm current, here come the flagellates, the plankton and phytoplankton, all tense, innumerous, ticking and rolling the floor-bottom, which is coated in algae and lampshells and pouchy glass sponges until here come the copepods, krill and medusae, the crab larvae, the pteropods, salps and heteropods, and the worms—my god, the arrow worms, something must be done about the freaking arrow worms—so enter the squirrelfish, enter the mantis shrimp, the flat/lantern/hatchet fish, enter the miniature squid, and some grow tails, and all have shells and mouths, they swallow everything, fattening into fish, and these plumpy fish grow long, swimmy, they shake the oceans into a state, and some of these fish hanging out at the edges of some of these pools are bumping their snouts into the earth, they want to dry off, go upland, and Lo, here begins the Great Creep, and will you look at them there ectothermic tetrapod vertebrates go!