Liquid Gold - Andrew Berardini The sun weighted with the heaviest of metals sinks into the furthest west, heaving downward into the jagged mountains, piercing hot skin that leaks a most precious blood into the air. Liquid gold. Such heavy metals are not so easily made any alchemist can tell you, transmutations take subtle knowledge never discovered, a philosopher’s stone, a Midas touch. The air bends with light. A glitter ripples through the sky turning base clouds into rich monsters with bodies that undulate and writhe, growing beyond the edges of vision, clumping into a thousand arms, a hydra of unbreakable necks smeared with a descent of colors, growling down the spectrum as the easy shades get caught in the monster's flesh, gilding them, encrusting them with a galaxy of precious jewels. Molten, they mutate with folds and bursts, filled with nuclear tidings and incandescent plasma. Fleshy fold over fleshy fold, this avalanche of unkempt lust frightens and enraptures all who witness it. Cowering and emboldened, some see the searing power of the sunburst and hide in their huts and bungalows, apartments and castles, whilst others feel the flame lick the flecks of gold in their eyes and a fearsome heat fires them into desire beyond measure. They lick the air, they claw uselessly at the sky. They dam the golden rivers and stone by stone dismantle the mountains, wet in their veins with gold. Rumor spreads and the land fills with strangers, armies of madmen, bellies knotted with insatiable hunger, minds thinned by the hardship of their own ambitions. Barely clinging to their bodies, their souls need the heft of the gold to keep from misting into a breeze. Most of the ravenous die in graves that they dug themselves deep in the earth, only a prospector's claim to mark their final resting places. Suicides and murders only clear beds to make room for more. Prophets and cardsharps, bankers and businessmen follow the flood, haunting, cajoling, promising with gold-flecked words all manner of prosperity to anyone desperate to believe. The land’s picked clean like fire ants over a corpse leaving nothing but the bones and few fat, fleshy winners easily stripped by suits and saviors. The survivors all drown looking for gold in the bottom of bottles. Alchemy cannot transmute base minerals into gold, but dreams can. The gold floods simmered and churned into night black pools of viscous petroleum, into verdant valley fields with rich alluvial soil, big bellied 747s screaming across the sky plump with sauced globe-trotters and businessmen, a million miles of thinnest film that marks every dream in light with its fragile chemistry, into silicon sliced thin as molecules and shot through with codes and control. Each iteration booms and spurts and sputters, always with a golden shimmer that unlocks a desire beyond desire. The gold standards disappear into ghostly fiat, but the heavy yellow glistens on. Worn as jewelry, the gold bears itself silently never do its bearers realize their ropes and bangles of gold were always chains to the element, enslaved to its perceived value and demands for ever more, the burn of powers beyond their control, soft and heavy and destructive as sunfire. Blinded by its bright magic, everyone who dreams of gold disappears into the heat of it's hunger. Watch dreams dance on amber waves of grain or an angled sun ripple across water, watch them stream from the sky and shiver across a screen. |