Read The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) for Free Online Page B

she was still thinking about it when they passed through New Orleans.
    And she thinks about it now anytime she feels overwhelmed, which is quite often. Surrounded by Blocks, each of them withered and grey, like herself, she takes a deep breath and remembers how great the expanse of carved earth had been, that simple droplets of water, combined together into streams and rivers and lakes, could cut the earth away into something more beautiful than anything man could ever make with his two hands and his great intellect. These visions of the canyon allow her to remember that whatever is upsetting her, whatever seems like it’s too much for one person to handle, pales in comparison to the forces all around her. Her ordeal is nothing compared to what has happened across the earth for millions of years. After all, these final moments are only a grain of dust in the timespan it took for those canyons to be formed.
    Most often, the Grand Canyon comes back to her as she makes her way through the many rows of Blocks. Whenever she feels too old to reposition a body, or when her knees start to ache, she thinks of those bloodshot rocks, those burgundy canyons, and her hands stop their shaking. She even remembered it as the forklift carried Elaine’s body to the incinerator. As Elaine’s hair dangled off the forklift’s arm, Morgan thought back to how the sunset had competed with the earth for which could be a brighter color of red until everything in front of her looked like Mars, a place too amazingly beautiful to be real.
    She thought of the Grand Canyon yesterday as it rained straight through from morning until night, and, looking out at all the rows of people depending on her, she thinks of it again now.
    “If you liked the Grand Canyon,” Aristotle, her world traveler Block, says, “you would love Mount Kilimanjaro.”
    “I wish I could have gotten a chance to see it,” she says. Usually, she hates it when people tell her what she would like and what she wouldn’t like, but when Aristotle says these things, she knows he is probably right and takes his word for it.
    Aristotle is one of her favorite Blocks. Unlike her, he was lucky enough to backpack through every continent (except for Antarctica) and got to see all the places Morgan only read about. He saw Big Ben in London, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Pantheon in Rome. But more than those tourist attractions, he attended soccer matches in England and Brazil, got swallowed up in the crowd’s enthusiasm. He ate chocolate frog legs in a back-alley Parisian café and spider legs in Australia. And, in the middle of the night, he was able to sneak under the gates to the Coliseum and walk in the areas cordoned off to visitors. Every part of the world unlocked itself for him. He is the envy of every other Block in the shelter because of all the things he has managed to see.
    “There are some truly amazing places in this world,” he tells her.
    “Yes, there are.”
    As she moves to the next bed—her rounds don’t stop just because she wants to reminisce—she thinks of what the Grand Canyon must have looked like millions of years earlier when it was part of a sea.
    Maybe life can be measured by the first thing that takes your breath away, and by the last time you remember what that feeling was like.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
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    She doesn’t let herself check for a response from Los Angeles until the next day’s chores are done. This means taking care of all of the Blocks. Rather than getting accustomed to the task at hand, it quickly wears her down.
    At least there isn’t one for every year I’ve been alive, she thinks .
    “How are Blocks different from Congress?” Cindy says. Without waiting for a response, Morgan’s comedian adds, “One can’t do anything for themselves and has nothing to contribute to society, and the other has you to take care of them!”
    “Come on, Cindy.”
    “Hey, a lot of comedians get funnier with age,” Cindy says, her lips