The storm floated for a brief eternity, came to rest and sat like a gull upon the rolling sea. The wind within it clamored to escape and the sky turned blue and black and desolate. The rain began and there was a rumbling as if a ceiling of stone were about to fall. It was the rumination of a cruel tempest that had entered the world.

I wasn’t there but I know that it happened. The storm came into existence for no apparent reason as if summoned by someone or something that stood apart from the world and could see the world and reach it, touch it and impose its will upon it. It was obscure upon the water like a distant desert and was nowhere in particular or somewhere in between, a thousand miles from beach or shore, somewhere beyond the ocean’s precipice and time’s frayed edge. The storm descended upon the sea and, mad with rage, drew its sword and plunged it deep within its soul. Though the wound could not be seen, the sea and the air, conjoined in peace for the long course of time, were ripped apart irreparably. The ocean lay impaled and dying, shocked and senseless; it recoiled and began to purge its essence in streams that rose high overhead. It thrashed about as would any living thing, beset by anger, overcome by panic and unwilling to accept the immediacy of a sudden, dire fate.

The storm consolidated itself, varied its course and gained strength and speed as it fed upon the force and energy of all that it annihilated along its path. It lurched forward and back and shifted abruptly as if attempting to fulfill the dictate of some unfortunate prophecy until, ultimately, it exploded in horrific torrents of wind that surged across the world in various directions, leveling those edifices and mangling those things that man had built through the course of millennia. Those winds crushed the jetties and spits of land that jutted into the sea, wrenched trees and plants from coastal forests, strangled the long stems of plaintive grasses that danced insanely in a thousand meadows, displaced the beds of amalgamated rock and ice that rolled in glacial sheets at the frozen ends of the earth and disbursed the layers of sand and salt amassed within the beds of ancient lakes that had languished in reclusive silence since the time those lakes had emptied. The ponds and rivers and creeks of the world, the hidden rivulets, the ancient estuaries and the delicate marshes and bogs, threatened by strong and sudden shifts in the air, anticipated their respective fates and waited for salvation. The mountains of the earth, exposed and vulnerable, strained against the onslaught to retain their footing. Everything was leveled, everything was savaged and the few living things that did not die were torn from their homes and habitats and tossed into oblivion to find themselves, in time, situated in unfamiliar places. The life of everything, at once, was draining through the gaping wound.

Life had been decimated and the few extant living things that remained were hungry and disoriented. They crawled or swam or flew in senseless circles as the force of life continued to ebb. Life was dying and it seemed inevitable that the world would exist as if life had never lived: no one would know that life had once inhabited the world. And existence itself might have succumbed to the tumult and torment that rode the winds of death but for some insipid, little thing, a simple shred of life seemingly insignificant which was, through its insignificance, too small to tear apart, too simple to smother, too slight to hunt and destroy. This small thing avoided death through the shield and power borne of its own apparent unimportance.

Unsure and unsteady at first, it took on various forms until it found the perfect fit. It began, perhaps, as a dragonfly, violet or blue, hovering low and hesitant above the shore or may have churned the soil and edged through darkness as an earthworm or might have hid beneath the surface of a lake or bay, submerged and indifferent to the passage of time in the form of a garden eel or a barnacle or it may have slowly, scrupulously navigated the dim edges and unstable banks of the earth as a millipede but none of these formulations of life were quite right, none were sufficient as a vehicle through which life could exist and endure over the long course of time in the environment and condition of this new, precarious world.

There came a day, however, when life found itself transmuted and alive in a form that was perfect. It awoke upon the sand of a battered beach in the guise of a tiny, black-clawed crab. It was primitive but its simplicity was its strength: its size and design enabled it to move and maneuver, impervious to the violence around it. It was but a tiny crab, a tiny speck of life that was now the entirety of life in the world, a vestige of the whole but magnificent all the same, more than an aberration and no mere curiosity. It was too small to be destroyed and too strong in its conception to do anything but persevere.

On that day, the crab found cover between two great boulders that had been tossed along the shore by the marauding storm. It felt the sand slowly warm as the sun’s beams descended upon the precise spot upon which that fragile bit of life labored to live as if those beams had burst forth from the sun in pursuit of it. The crab sat immobile and it absorbed that heat. In time, it began to generate its own strength and felt strength and power gradually rise within its body. The hours passed, the rays of the sun began to recede and, as the shadows of the boulders grew long, the crab recognized the need to find a safer habitat. It abandoned its position and slowly inched its way among the rocks and sand, evasive and willful, miles beyond the circle of death that radiated out from the patch of sea within which it might have drowned only hours before. It clung to the rocks that had no stake or interest in death and had no awareness of what was now there or there no longer. As the power and rage of the storm reached its zenith and the waves and the rain in arrogant union suffocated the things that crossed within reach, it was this small being that held strong against the iniquity to which all else had succumbed.

Steady was the heartbeat of that snippet of life that beat within its shell. It shielded itself with its quick pincer claws and sheltered the life within it as if transporting a treasure. It ate and drank from the salts and water and remnants of the things that had died. It implicitly understood that it was the arrowhead of life, knew it essential to save itself and it drew upon the reservoir of resolve embedded in some unidentifiable place within the husk of its body to overcome fear and maintain focus. It would scurry for a moment and stop in a sudden, sit as motionless as a tree and lay in wait for the opportunity to move again. It danced upon furrows etched along the sand and it scuttled between shadows and it hid beneath the ground. The tunnels it bore served as routes of salvation from the terror and blight and chaos that attacked the air and, if it felt the coalescence of those forces descend, it simply waited until it was safe to move on. It would find cover among the crags of those rocks and in gullies carpeted with sand that separated one rock from another and beneath shells and weeds and sticks strewn upon the shore, inauspicious, dull and lifeless in themselves but comprising the only universe within which life could be preserved. That field of stone became a second Garden, a refuge of rock that would shield life from the malevolent gales that patrolled the earth in search of life to destroy: it was a sanctuary in which life could rest and refuse to die until, inevitably, it would be safe to venture out of that wasteland.

When it happened, I was miles away. In the moments before the storm, I was alone in a meadow prone upon a bed of soft grass. The sky above me was quiet, soft and lavender. There was a tree that rose straight out of that ground, alone and imposing upon the landscape. It stood close to me and was positioned in such a way as to suggest that it was allied to me and would protect me, if called upon, as would an older brother or a parent. Perhaps it was an oak or an elm but, regardless, it was so broad and substantial that I felt assured of its strength, secure in its presence and shielded by the long reach of its branches against the sky. Its leaves shook gently like small fish that flinch and shimmer beneath the surface of a glassy pond. The air was warm and delicate, the sun was still and the leaves gently rocked and the sweet smell of grass and the sway of the branches caused me to lower my head to the ground. My thoughts began to drift, and in that moment, I had no care in the world.

One moment passed and then another until I became numb to the passage of time but then, suddenly, I was numb no longer. The breeze gained momentum as it circled the tree and, captivated by its own power, gave license to a cruelty that lay dormant until that moment. It took the form of a malignant wind and it battered the branches of that tree for the sole purpose of breaking them. The wind twisted those branches and bent them in awkward, painful angles and drew them back and released them and those branches snapped in the air like whips. Every few moments, I would hear the wood tear and crackle like bone breaking between the jaws of a dog. Those branches were powerless to resist the force of the assault and the sound of the onslaught was overwhelming.

Though I couldn’t foretell the day or hour, I could see the panorama of everything that lay ahead as time passed. My vision was drawn steadily, in time, toward that horizon. I quickly roused myself as would a sailor of a long-forgotten era, at once peacefully asleep in his hammock within the depths of the rocking hull, suspended just above the thin floor that separated that sailor’s beating heart and the malevolent, rapacious sea. I was stirred from sleep: I was dragged out of a dream. I jumped up and balanced myself upon the grassy ground, unsteady in the wind but soon upright and alert like that sailor and I waited for something I couldn’t describe but somehow knew was coming and I remained undeterred despite my fear and sense of foreboding, standing as a sailor would, poised, awake and steady upon the shifting gundeck, watching, hearing, waiting.

As I waited, I saw everything. I felt an overriding urgency and I ran in some direction, though I can’t remember which, toward a place I can’t recall. I saw an endless procession of enormous waves and I spotted some wooden sticks that once comprised a boat and I watched them rise and fall atop the rolling swells and I saw a metal buoy bounce helplessly, tethered forever to the floor of the sea, constrained to stand vigil at the surface, condemned to withstand the onslaught of waves that came and battered it in rapid order. I could feel its panic as it rang in frantic sequence. It was then that I saw a tiny crab jump from its base into the chaos of those waters and I could see it swim, slow and resolute, toward the ground upon which I stand today.