Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 9:40 A.M. MST} The Abomination Gains Strength

It was from Solon that great Plato learned of the eventual end times. In turn Plato taught the Doomsday mythos to his student Xenocrates, who taught it to his student Crantor, who taught it to Proclus, and thus was the advent of the thing-baby prophesied before synthetic polymers ever existed.

Minute traces of human saliva still cling to it, our inflated idol. Wearing a war paint of chocolate and lipstick muck, it rallies its forces of polystyrene and polypropylene in the waters of Los Angeles Harbor. As foreseen by the visions of the ancients, reinforcements will arrive steadily from the north, from the Yukon River and Prince William Sound.

And what had been a trickle of Styrofoam packing peanuts, adrift in the tributaries of Puget Sound, the Skagit and Nooksack rivers, these are present to welcome the thing-baby to the Pacific Ocean. More constant and numerous than the salmon and steelhead, these plastic emissaries will converge off the temperate coast of Long Beach to await the birth of the thing-baby. Far exceeding the birds of any flock or the fish of any school, these objects are baked by the sun and degrading to become a rich soup of plastic corpuscles. These nurdles. These mermaid tears. Fluoropolymers and malamine-formaldehyde. They create a simmering broth not unlike the murk isolated within the skin of the thing-baby.

Thusly do the unresolved fragments of the past linger, according to Plato, and in that manner do they coalesce to create the future. And off the shores of Long Beach one infinitesimal speck of plastic comes into contact with the thing-baby and remains, stuck. And a second fleck of plastic cleaves itself unto the graven image until the infant idol is coated in a layer of such specks. And that first layer accumulates a second layer, and the thing-baby begins to accrete layer upon layer, and to grow. And the larger the whole of it grows, the more specks it draws, becoming a fledgling. Becoming a thing-child.

And in that manner, Plato foretold that plastic will be fed plastic. A skin accrues atop its skin. Fed an ample diet of juice boxes and disposable diapers, the ordinary grows to become an abomination.