What If Planets Grew On Trees
What if planets grew on trees? Towering trunks made of time, a thousand histories yet to be lived, all creaking under the weight of the fruit blossoming in this celestial orchard. How long did God peruse this garden that had the stomach for infinite Edens before he found the perfect planets for our solar system? What mattered to Him most? The colour? The shape? The way they looked lined up in a sequence? It’s easy to envision Saturn seducing Him with her jewellery, the twinkling sounds it makes as she dances, and Jupiter was robust enough to make the universe look rich, as if it meant something. Pluto is more of a mystery. I’d wager it was pity that drove its inclusion, or perhaps there was something charming about its prematurity- a seed lost amongst a harvest. And now that they have been strung together like baubles on branches or bulbs in streetlamps, should we worry about God getting hungry? I imagine he would go for us first, as we give off a viridian sheen reminiscent of a freshly polished apple. He’d bite into us, hear the crunch of tectonic plates (an earthquake that couldn’t be truer to the name) and the sea would dribble down his chin and lace his beard with salt. He’d wipe this away with a hand that crosses lightyears between his waist and his face, before polishing us off and tossing the core into a holy dustbin, along with packaging for heavenly shaving foam and those Adam and Eve prototypes that came out with too many limbs. There, the planet’s remains would rot away and be swarmed by buzzing stars with paper-thin wings. It’s the smell of the magma seeping out of the corpse they’re attracted to; magma and the stench from teeth marks left in landfills. By Emma BradeFeatured image legacy
