An Excerpt From "The Very First Summer of Rebecca Emmons," a novel by Anthony Rosania.
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
- Stephen Jay Gould
The formerly pernicious girl was to be squandered no longer, for she had been finally re-born--hail glory!-- that afternoon. It had begun on the summery main street of her town.
It was only after she was thrust into a world broken into shattered, glowing crystals that she saw; in the kaleidoscope shards it seemed her whole body was capable of now. A delegation, a resignation, in her, - seizure warnings perhaps - that she had never had before, not in her entire eighteen years of life.
This new, winnowing fear, separating two distinct Rebeccas, like grain from chaff, and left a scar, a wound of unaccustomed-to red blush. It was this anomalous, sudden femininity that she had pushed down into her ankle socks, oddly, as though a girl of much younger years. She was disaffected; the world before her seemed to be floating, misty, surreal. Her bones were made of myriad, confusing, interlaced helices, her mind imagined, and into them, this power, this sexuality - whatever - was squirreled away in there, all very whispery, all very quiet.
But then there was nothing of value, and she felt good to know that. If she had a fit, if her mind went into electric-wire spasms, what of it? She felt good to feel something artificial in her.
Does this mean, then, that reality can not exist, since time can not be frozen? Is every experience a recording of an instant that has passed? I write this sentence NOW and you're reading it NOW. Both are NOW, but unless you're looking over my shoulder, time has passed. Perhaps a day, perhaps a year... and yet, it's still very much NOW.
Hers was a palpable feeling, almost. One of entitlement. It was warm, invading, like consuming brushes of sunfire smiled down on her as she stood -wavering just a little bit, she was sure- in front of the Woolworth Five and Dime Store. There, the feeling existed, with it's yellow-orange sunglass glow in this terrible muggy heat. In this moment, she would not bet a penny on existence for anyone but herself.
And odds were, after all, that she could be covered with sunshine in this Saturday afternoon of July and, though people passed her by, no one could see her at all. They never had before. Not really.
The clumsy chemistry of her had made her something of a Pollyanna, a fake being. But now that was over. Something had ended. Everything had ended. She wished she could take a deep breath, to show how brave she was. But she did not dare. The bone-helix in her was far too fragile.
There was the next step, something never-ending about her. It manifested inside her shiny, sweaty body; that she was finally, and at long last, mortal. And her mortality could be used as a weapon. Reality was a dream to her. Reality always had been. And reality had asserted itself into her dream kingdom.
She could accept anything that way, couldn't she?
