where the beads went (an alt.future)
when the bead-bearer fished out the mala from its pouch in his backpack, the first thing he registered was an unusual absence: of string tension. then the feel, and sound, of several red beads clattering onto the sidewalk. it happened so quickly he saw only 2 of them at his feet, which he picked up and, cradling the broken garland in his other palm, placed them there, and then into the safety of his pocket.
this is the counterfactual future of the 5 beads he later at home found were missing from the 108-node strand...
1 | ⊡ | earth | रूप
It fell to the ground and started rolling towards the intersection at Lombard. The bearer had been unlucky in this, that the block on Polk he was on when he took out the mala was on a slope. The bead bounced and skittered quickly on along the sidewalk, angling towards the roadway and then its progress was stopped as it finally cascaded onto the small square of earth underneath a slim tree, inhabiting the space along with pebbles, leaf litter, and tiny bits of urban trash. Momentarily, a substantial St. Bernard, dragging its owner along on its leash, came by to sniff at the premises... promptly stepping on the bead and squashing it into and under the dirt where it would lie unseen, unfound, until the heat death of the universe.
2 | ¬ | water | वेदना
Suddenly unencumbered, the bead arced briefly through air then quickly across the sidewalk, skittering over the kerb and onto the street where they started rolling parallel to the sidewalk and then down a grated opening into the storm drain. As it had been drizzling slightly off and on in the afternoon, there was flowing water down there. After floating downstream along the drain for some blocks the bead reached a catchment and, over unaccounted time, found themselves seeping out of a small drainpipe under the sand at Aquatic Park. In an evening at high tide the sand released them and they became part of the Bay's green-gray waters.
3 | © | fire | संज्ञा
Much to her surprise, she finally rolled to a stop... inside a discarded brown paper bag on the sidewalk a block down from where she fell. She felt the bag moving a bit from the buffeting breeze; then, some time later felt it being picked up by some good Samaritan or sanitation worker or litter-picking volunteer... and deposited in a trash bin but she couldn't see which one it was. Turns out it was a black one (the one for non-recyclable, non-compostable trash). Satisfied, she knew where she would end up: in an industrial furnace, becoming fire, generating electricity and heat for the city she once wandered with the bead-keeper.
4 | π | air | संस्कार
It was surely the redness of the bead that caught the raven's sharp eye, he thought, as he flew swiftly through the air above Polk street firmly lodged in the bird's redoubtable beak — though on the flight he wondered briefly if he'd be swallowed). He was not. He found himself in a nest on a roofline several storeys above the street. But wouldn't be there for long. Another raven stole him, then another, and he found himself on the top of a tree above the highest hill in the city. Then that day of strongest winds arrived and, somehow, a powerful updraft took him and others of his tiny kind into the jetstream and even higher, part of the permanent and subtle turbulence of air, wind, sky.
5 | ˆ | æther | विज्ञान
It must have been for many blocks hither and yon that I traveled, via gravity or the unbeknownst kick of human foot. Uncounted time passed like this. Then, one late afternoon lodgment in a discarded sandwich on a oath and, that night, a coyote found us, swallowing the bread, turkey bits, and me in one hungry gulp. Later that evening, he'd be struck by a car somewhere in the Presidio. The coyote would crawl, limp, and finally die in El Pollin gulch there, near the spring's thickly-brushed headwaters where no creature would find him. We would decay along with the canid — into ground, groundwater, magma, even sky. All our composite molecules and atoms belonging to all the elements at once. Fitting, suitable, abiding.
Unlikely? Yeah, sure. Possible? Of course.
::chuckle::
[ At the corner of Van Ness and Bay, late last night... ]
