“The Three Graces,” by Paul Tran

Read by the author.

Who could care about the probability of love when brought, like us, to thisworld under endless darkness? A great mountain engulfed

by a greater ocean, we formed, ever so slowly, from tectonic platescolliding, one mounting another, riding the way time rode

sunlight and moonlight across the icy surface of the water.We learned, with time, to view and invent this life from the depths

where beasts, now extinct, bellowed and belted their brutal songs.All that remains of them, and of that time, are the bones we buried, burnished

beneath beds of sandstone and limestone, made unknown and then knownwhen the waves and the darkness dried up. The wind whittled us

like a restless sculptor pacing around a slab of marble, imitatingGod with a hammer and chisel. In the Garden of the Gods, we endured

the erotics of erosion. Loss. Change. What we couldn’t changeand what we lost to time made us more fully ourselves

and full of ourselves. We fooled around and made a fool of God.We, in our faulted and faultless glamour, became a brand-new home

for the bighorn sheep and lions, the canyon wrens and white-throated swiftsswinging low below a cloudless sky. We drank the sky and threw up

acres of wild prairie grass, piñon juniper, and ponderosa pinefrom the remains of ancestral ranges and sand dunes. Maybe this was love

after all. We remained. We reinvented ourselves. We let the weaker parts of us goand decided, despite our egos and the tests of time, to test time and show

how miraculous it is to exist. To live beyond survival. To be alivetwice and thrice, and countless times to find one with and within another.

What are the chances of that? One in a thousand. One in a million. One in loveproves and is living proof that anything and everything is probable

through seasons counting on rain to come down like a downpour of stars.Seasons of Never This Again. Seasons of This Could Last Forever.