03 Apr 2026: What's Inside You

Ms. Yardley held that vacant look for a moment. I could feel the draft and it made the hair on my neck stand up. I wasn’t dressed for this mountain air; I didn’t think it would matter much longer. She began slowly, as if every word carried immense weight, “The feeling is elemental. Each chemical element is exactly what it is. There is no adulteration. Gold is gold; Silicon is silicon; Carbon is carbon. They aren’t alloyed with anything else, and they cannot be broken down without getting into particle physics. They are…”

She got that vacant look again. I could swear she saw something miles away through the pine board walls. Something awesome and terrible that made her blood run cold and her mind empty out. I didn’t want to see it, but I knew she was about to show me. I listened carefully to the cypress creaking in the wind outside. I imagined that it was footsteps on the deck around the shack. She looked at me with a peculiar smile and wide eyes, “They are prime! Not just me. Everyone— everything else. Carbon, Iron, Blood. It felt like there was no fault, no blame, no judgement. When oxygen attaches to iron causing it to rust—Do we moralize? The whole world cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is.” She turned to the wall and picked up a well-worn axe leaning there.

I blurted out the question, “What is it?”

“What?” She asked.

I composed myself and pleaded, “Like you said, the Whole World. What is the Whole World?”

She responded, “Cascade.”

In the distance a siren dopplered nearer. Ms. Yardley hugged the axe to her chest. Her face grew pale, and her eyes darted frantically in their orbits. I felt the sweat clinging to my skin, and I listened to the starlings, and the cypress, and the first little pitter-patters of rain. Then, the siren waned. Then softer and softer. Then, it was gone. She gave a gentle chuckle, and let her shoulders drop. The axe rose up over her head as she faced me. I wrestled against my bindings to no avail.

And as the axe fell, I contemplated it’s trajectory, and I remembered scraping my knees as a child. Rollerskates. I remembered the blood. Seeing blood for the first time. I cried. I asked my mom what it was. She responded, “It’s what’s inside you.”